ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Below is a transcript of Action News Jax State and Local Government Reporter Jake Stofan’s one-on-one interview with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis during his Thursday visit to St. Augustine.
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JAKE STOFAN [00:00:00] All right. Well, Governor, first of all, thank you for taking the time to talk with us today. I wanted to start off by asking you your reaction to the House panel saying, you know, there’s a lot of smoke. We think there’s fire, but we’re all done.
GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS [00:00:12] Well, this whole thing’s been debunked. I mean, AHCA (Agency for Health Care Administration) put out a great letter, had the documentation. But as I made the point in our event, this is really more political to try to smear Hope Florida. And Hope Florida has done a lot of good for folks. We’re proud of the program, proud of the inspiration. You saw some of the stories of people out there that have really touched people in a very profound way. It saved the state one hundred million dollars. It’s gotten thirty thousand people off of means-tested welfare. That is a good thing.
JAKE STOFAN [00:00:38] You know, Chair Andrade has thrown out a lot of allegations. He says money laundering, wire fraud. I mean, do you have any genuine concern that there could be a criminal investigation into all that?
GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS [00:00:49] Totally irresponsible and ridiculous. It’s politically motivated. It’s been debunked, obviously, with what AHCA’s put out. But this is a program that’s done a lot of good for people. A lot of these members, they didn’t even know what Hope Florida was. They didn’t understand how it even operated. They didn’t know the difference between the DSO and the Hope Florida program that we use in our agencies. And so I think what this has done is it’s caused people. To have a little bit more interest in Hope Florida. And when they actually hear what it’s doing, a lot of people are excited about it.
JAKE STOFAN [00:01:23] What’s your message to taxpayers who say maybe this wasn’t illegal but I don’t like the way it looks the way that the money kind of flowed into this anti-amendment 3 campaign.
GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS [00:01:31] That’s not exactly what happened, let’s just be clear. This was something that was negotiated by AHCA, our agency, with this company and they identified $56 million that they agreed upon to be recouped. The $10 million private donation was over and above that. That’s what Acas said from the beginning. Some of the liberal journalists tried to say, and that’s exactly what happened here. And so what they did was entirely appropriated. Oh, by the way, even though it was a good agreement, most of that money goes to the I mean, it’s 60% of it goes to the federal government with how they’re doing it. So ACA did a good job, they negotiated a deal that represented Florida’s interest. There was no. Um you know with some of the accusations just not factually true um you know this foundation board that runs this charity you know some of the media were trying to say it’s my wife’s charity like she was not on the board she had no role in the governance of it they got it they processed grants applications and did money and you know what now that you’ve seen all the stuff there was almost no overhead in this they did a lot of money for things that are very important to serve the DCF population. Yes, fighting drugs, because if you look at more than 50% of the children who are in need do have drugs in the household. That’s a big problem. And so being able to help people in those situations is important. Helping the faith community, they’ve helped so many different people to be able to do that. So that’s a private organization that has supplemented DCF’s mission and Hope Florida’s mission, but it was being conflated by some of these guys.
JAKE STOFAN [00:03:04] So, Hope Florida is just one of many sort of bumps in the road, this session between you and the House and even the Senate, whether it’s appointments, the environment, the tax cuts. What is going on this year? It seems like, you know, throughout your entire tenure as governor, everybody’s kind of been in lockstep, and now all of a sudden, nobody’s on the same page.
GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS [00:03:22] Well, I think it’s just that the House leadership is revolting against the voters that sent him there. You know, they have this big Republican super majority. They didn’t have that before I was here. They got it in 2022 because we got a big mandate and we’re able to hold on to those seats. And so they did that by supporting an agenda that people really cared about. They’re not doing the people’s business in the Florida House of Representatives. Remember the immigration stuff that we have all our sheriffs involved. They’re doing great operations with the Trump administration. The House leadership opposed me when I call a special session. They said it was premature, you didn’t need it. We would not have gotten the immigration enforcement done if I had not done that, the House did not want to do it. They’ve also not adequately addressed the condo crisis. I called for this in January to be done in a special section. People are really struggling to be able to face these assessments, which are as a result of legislation that they passed a couple years ago. They haven’t been willing to do that. I called it for property tax relief. What did they do in the Florida House? They didn’t want to do property tax relief. They’re trying to do tax relief in sales tax that’s going to benefit a lot of tourists and non-Florida residents. I want the tax relief targeted to Florida residents. They’re even in the Florida House of Representatives trying to overturn some of the higher education reforms that we did so that our universities aren’t indoctrinating. We don’t have the woke agenda. They’re tying to kneecap those reforms. And here’s the thing. That is not what they campaigned on. And so they campaign does one thing, the House leadership’s agenda is different from what voters have expected. And I think what I’m starting to see around the state, particularly with Republicans, they start to see what this agenda is. And they’re like, that is what we signed up for. So I think the difference in this session is that just the House has decided to cater more to special interests than to do the people’s business. And that’s not what voters wanted to do. And as governor, I’m not just going to sit there and let them do that. I mean, we’re fighting all the bad initiatives that they’re pursuing to not let that happen. Obviously, we did do the immigration. We’ve got some other stuff that we’re going to be able to bring for a landing. But this was a choice that was made by the House leadership to revolt against the voters that sent them there. That’s not how you do business.
JAKE STOFAN [00:05:38] Do you think any of this could be the making of the Trump administration, who’s endorsed another candidate for governor?
GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS[00:05:44] Oh, absolutely not. Hell no. These guys are governing far to the left of where the Trump administration is going. These guys really representing the old Tallahassee swamp. I mean, this really what it is. The House, with their agenda, that’s the swamp fighting back. After six years of us dealing them defeat after defeat, you know, beating the Democrats, beating the left, beating a lot of these special interests, now they want to try to fight back. And I think they’ve misfired. I don’t think that their agenda is going to ultimately succeed. But you know we’ve been able to really lead the country on so many things and a lot of these members have voted for this stuff You know now all of a sudden they’re being led in a different direction So what I’ve told Floridians is contact your individual member of the Florida House of Representatives Tell them to stand with you and do your business and don’t just do what the leadership Tells you to do because I think a lot Of this is driven top down and I think they’ve really driven these guys off a cliff and the trial attorneys Here’s the thing. I mean We’ve worked very hard to do litigation reform in Florida. We’ve always been viewed as a litigation hellhole. You’ve done that. And so that was a couple years ago. This year so far, auto insurance rates are down 5% in Florida, they’re not down in other parts of the country. We obviously have a lot of challenges in Florida where driving isn’t great in the state and there’s a lot factors. But because of the litigation reform. Some of these companies now are offering a little bit better rates. They want to repeal that. They want repeal some of the things that have been done to help pull down healthcare costs, which is always a difficult thing. And here’s the thing, they didn’t run on any of this. So they get in there and then they’re trying to jam this stuff through. There’s been a lot of opposition from both the grassroots, a lot of small business community and whatnot. But I mean, if you didn’t know anything else about that house and you just saw what they were pushing. You know, you would think that they were all sponsored by Morgan & for . I mean, you might as well hand the bill, put the billboard on top of the Florida House of Representatives, because that’s what the agenda is. And I’ve said many times, if you run on that agenda and you win, you go up there and do it. Look, I may not like it, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. But that wasn’t what they told voters they were going to do. They told voters, they got elected under different pretenses, and now they’re pursuing an agenda that’s different.
JAKE STOFAN [00:07:59] Is there going to be enough ink in the veto pen this year?
GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS [00:08:02] Well, the thing is, I think a lot of what they’re trying to do in the House, I think is going to crash in the Senate. I do think there’s been a difference between the working relationship that we’ve maintained with the Florida Senate. I think that I don’t agree with them on everything, but we do work together to try to derive its solutions. I Do think that the leadership in the Senate wants to see, you know, good things happen for the state. They really do care about responding to constituents. And so that’s been different than I think the House, which is more about grievance, more about pettiness, and more about some of these interest groups. So there is a divide just in terms of how the legislative chambers have been operating. That’s why when you’re out here and meet talk, I don’t say legislature, I do say the House because I think that’s where we’re seeing a lot of what’s going on.
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JAKE STOFAN [00:08:49] Governor, anything else you want to add?
GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS [00:08:51] Well, look, we’ve got less than about a week, a little bit more than a week left in this legislative session. For me, you know, looking at having talked to Floridians, people want property tax relief, and ultimately that’s gonna need to go on the ballot. I understand that. But we need that in this state. We do need to give people relief from these draconian assessments and condos. Why would it be acceptable for people to get forced out of their condo because the government came in and said, all of a sudden, you have to do this assessment right now. You’ve got to give them flexibility into how you do it. It’s one thing to say transparency. It is another thing for government to dictate. So we want to be able to see that that get done. We also want to see medical freedom. Our medical freedom laws that I did during Covid are expiring. We need to make those protections permanent. Nobody in Florida should be discriminated against based on their choice of what vaccine to take or not. If you’re discriminated against, then you’re not in all this should be based on informed consent. And it’s not informed consent if you suffer negative repercussions because you make a certain choice and so we want to make sure people have informed consent. So we’re looking forward to being able to do that and then hopefully we get a budget that actually honors the priorities of the people of Florida. We have a lower budget this year than we did the year before. Our budget’s less than half of New York’s budget we have three million more people so no one’s been more fiscally responsible in the state of Florida but yet... The House budget’s defunding parts of highway patrol. They’ve defunded 87 positions, defund body armor. Is that what voters signed up for? I think they want to support law enforcement. They even tried to whack half a billion dollars out of Everglades restoration and water quality. That’s been a crown jewel of our administration and something that people from all walks of life and all political stripes have supported in the state of Florida. They’re even taking about a half a million dollars from very key road projects and airport projects by taking that out of the Highway Trust Fund and putting it into general revenue. They didn’t campaign on that, but that’s going to have a cascading effect on some of these projects not being done. So just some of the choices that they’re making in the House don’t make any sense. We’ve got a very good formula in Florida. We’ve delivered record tax relief. We’ve paid down record amounts of debt. We have the lowest number of state employees per capita. But yet, we’ve done big on education, big support for teacher salary increases, big support for Everglades and natural resources, big support for infrastructure and transportation, the things that Floridians really care about. So let’s get that done, build off what works. Don’t go in and try to sabotage Florida’s success.
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