Explaining the important and complex

Election-year worries cooled Florida legislators’ feuding

In the last 60 days, immigrants from Miami, Orlando and Tampa traveled overnight by bus with their children and elders and made passionate and personal appeals to lawmakers to reject a bill that would punish police for failing to arrest their family members. College professors broke their silence and decried a bill to allow guns on campus. And environmentalists joined with city officials across the state and demanded lawmakers not strip them of the ability to keep oil and gas fracking out of their communities.

New head of Florida prisons sees dire warning signs. ‘Status quo is not sustainable’

Florida's new secretary of the Department of Corrections has a sober warning: Florida prisons are on the brink of collapse. They cannot sustain the understaffed, inexperienced crew of corrections officers in command of a penal system stripped of educational programs and housed in crumbling facilities. As I explain, years of budget cuts and legislative indifference have led to this problem.

This secretive group is trying to create barriers to amending Florida’s Constitution

A secretive organization with the goal of thwarting amendments approved by voters after the 2020 election cycle has spent more than $800,000 on paid petition gatherers in the last four months, using funds from undisclosed sources and raising the specter of another high stakes fight over the future of energy regulation in Florida. The organization calls itself Keep Our Constitution Clean and says its purpose is to keep the state’s premier legal document uncluttered by special interest measures.

Recession still has Floridians reeling and anxious about election

With comprehensive research and graphics, we were the first to give readers a look into how uneven Florida's economic recovery really has been -- an issue that in 2017 became a central theme of the Florida Chamber of Commerce. With the help of data compiled by demographers at Florida International University, we put into context what economic insecurity meant for Floridians in the run-up to the 2016 election.
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