You Decide: Byron Donalds, In Depth

Well, please welcome Republican nominee for governor, Byron Donalds. Thank you, sir, for joining us. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate meeting you. Well, let's start with the issue of data centers. The law requiring data centers to bear their full utility cost applies to the major power suppliers. I don't see that it applies to the municipal utilities or the rural co-ops. So if they are approved by local governments, what at this point would stop data centers from going in some places where the consumer protections would not apply? Well, first of all, let's be very clear that first a local community has to approve one to be constructed. The state of Florida is not going to make those approvals. A local community, local governments do. Where you typically have these co-ops is in the same places where you have more rural local governments. And so that's something that the local cooperative and the local government would have to work out. In terms of the large utilities, they are regulated by the state of Florida. That's why state law is very clear that utility bills will not go up. When it comes to a data center, we're not going to allow those costs to be passed on. In conversations I've had with the co-ops, the co-ops have no interest in doing that because they understand, first of all, they're owned by the members of that segment of where the grid is, and so they have no plans at all to do that. But we will make sure that even if it's in a rural cooperative, it's not one of the big utilities, that utility bills don't go up for those citizens as well. Well, you just stressed that local governments should decide whether to allow data centers in their communities. But Florida's Republican-led state government has long preempted local governments from deciding whether to do a lot of different things and a range of issues. On data centers, though, you oppose state preemption. What's the difference? Because you're talking about a facility that's several million square feet. The state of Florida does not issue building permits. Local governments issue building permits. So when it comes to these issues, we think that communities should be able to decide if one gets constructed or not. And so we're going to stand by that. And by the way, the reason why, you know, I'm committed to making sure we protect local control is the author of the legislation is my running mate, Brian Avila. So it is now state law in Florida that if local governments say no data center. Then no data centers. I think it's also important to note, we now have 27 counties or municipalities that have either issued a moratorium. I think three have issued an outright ban. So this is something where local governments are going to make that decision. The other piece of this, and this is where my opponent says he wants a statewide moratorium because he says he wants to study it. Well, if he wants to be governor, he should actually read the law because the law is clear that a study was already commissioned by Governor DeSantis It's on data centers. That study comes back June 1 of 2027. We're going to be releasing those findings to the people of Florida and to all local governments so everybody is fully aware about the impacts associated with the data center in Florida. On the issue of transportation, our state keeps adding express lanes onto existing roads that are taxes already paid to build and maintain. And, of course, wealthier drivers can more easily pay those tolls. Do you support expanding that system, or do you believe that there's a better way to address congestion? I think the way we address congestion is that we do have to figure out ways to economically build the infrastructure we need. I mean, Florida is a great state. We're the best in America. One of the things that we do have to play catch up with is transportation infrastructure, because so many people chose Florida after COVID-19 that we're playing catch up. One of the ways it's been done is with express lanes, but I want to see us continue to expand the state's transportation budget. So we can build those roads so that all Floridians will be able to drive on them and not have to pay a fee to be on the roads. On the issue of the environment, for years we've covered the failed Cross Florida Barge Canal and the damage that it did to the Oklawaha River. And much of that river remains dammed off. It's restricting the river flow. It's submerging natural springs. Do you at this point support removal of the Kirkpatrick Dam and the restoration of the river? Well, I'll be very clear with you. I'm not as familiar with the Kirkpatrick Dam, but what I've seen when it comes to water quality is in my district down in Southwest Florida, we in Southwest Florida, really all of South Florida, I've been somebody who fully supported Everglades restoration, voted for it when I was in the state house and as a member of Congress, we're going to finish Everglades restoration in my time as governor. The reason I bring that up is because we want to take the lessons learned from that and apply that to all waterways in Florida. My team, we've released a coastal corridor plan. We want to make sure that everything from river basins down to the coral reefs and our major watersheds, that we have a universal strategy of how we protect these waterways, restore these waterways for the future of Florida. And I think in this campaign, a lot of people have talked about my views on economic growth. But I'm just here to tell you, there will not be economic growth in Florida without environmental protections. Our environment is critical to the future of our state. We're going to have a coastal corridor strategy to protect all these watersheds. We want to make sure that we put the necessary resources into them so that they are repaired, not just for today, but for the future. And on the broader environmental challenges facing our state, do you believe that human activity, and particularly the burning of fossil fuels, is contributing to climate change? And do you believe that climate change is making certain extreme weather events more severe? No, I don't. What I do believe, though, is that we need to be focused on how we make energy more affordable for people and we lower energy costs. I think, you know, part of the reason that we've seen higher energy costs, obviously the conflict going on in the Middle East, but it's also been energy policy coming out of Washington, D.C. that favored essentially climate change policy, which has raised utility costs all across the country. And we've seen those impacts in Florida. If you look at some of our major utilities, they've opted more for solar farms than they have for more natural gas. Why? Because that is what was subsidized out of Washington, D.C. And so do I think we need to make sure that we are resilient? Yes, of course. So whether that's putting in the necessary features around Florida to make sure communities are resilient, I think when it comes to an energy strategy, we need to be focused on the basics. That's nuclear power and natural gas. That's how you get cheap energy that people can afford. businesses can pay for so you have an economy and a way of life that people can continue to maintain here in Florida. Let's focus now on education. The legislature a couple years back ended the textbook stipend for Bright Futures academic scholars. Would you support bringing that back? Well, I think one of the reasons the legislature did that, this happened after my time in Tallahassee, but I think one of the ways they did that was to be able to keep the broader portion of Bright Futures in place that paid for education, college education for our high performing high school graduates. The truth is, it's not just an unlimited pot of money. We've been trying to make sure in Tallahassee that the most amount of students who qualify for Bright Futures get that towards their college tuition. Of course, we would try to study how to deal with textbooks, but first steps, the first thing first is making sure that a child's requisite grades and not to worry about tickets and find a deal with textbooks at a later day, but it first starts with making sure that you're paying for their tuition. More broadly, you want to boost Florida's work in space and science and engineering, which of course requires a boost in STEM-educated workforce, but Florida University engineering programs have graduated 10% fewer. Bachelor's degrees in engineering fields last year than they did four years ago, down 540 degrees. Why is that, and what would you do about it? Well, I actually talked to the chancellor of our university system about this. The goal we want to set is actually doubling the amount of engineers that we graduate from Florida's universities. And what he said to me is part of my education plan. He said, we would love to do it, but that means we need to have our children graduating high schools with higher level math skills. So under my administration, we are setting the goal of our children mastering math reading and writing by the time they graduate high school. This is about making sure that kids are mastering subject matter at each grade level. And you're not seeing a degradation in math skills in particular if you're talking about engineering, but reading and writing capabilities as well. Mastery of skill set is really going to be what separates people going into the future in the workforce. We want the children of Florida to be essentially the hottest, the most in-demand set of children anywhere on the planet, not just in America, anywhere on the planet. It starts with being focused on mastery of math reading and writing. That goal actually sets us up to address your concern about a slightly declining engineering graduation rate. When it comes to the universities, we want to make sure that the degrees that people are choosing in our university system, that they have economic value at the end of that of that degree search, because having a piece of paper graduating from college is a beautiful thing. I'm not trying to I'm trying to demean any degree. I have a college degree. My wife has a college degree. But we all know all college degrees are not the same. We want our children who do go to the university system to know that when they study through a major and they get that degree, that they're going to be rewarded with the requisite employment and income on the other side of those four years. Well, on that point, Florida does comparatively well in student achievement in elementary school, but then we lose ground in later grades. And we've seen it in the national assessments. What specifically is the problem, and then how do you address that? A couple of things. One, we do want to give some flexibility back to the school districts who are the way we do funding, pursuit of funding in Florida. I think it's time in a choice environment like we are in to make sure that everybody has the flexibility they need in order to provide the best educational environment for children. I think that's number one. It gives districts more flexibility too. This is why I said our goal is going to be mastery of core subject matter at every grade level. By the time our kids graduate high school, they're ready to take on the world. That will cover the 8th grade test, just like the 4th grade test we've seen in the NAEP scores. When it comes to reading, we want to make sure all of our teachers are trained in the science of reading. We want to make sure that phonics-based reading is the foundation. That helps our children read at any grade level, and that will also help them be able to do high-level math as well. And so those are going to be the concrete focuses of my administration. The third piece of that focus is going to be what we call personalized success plans. If parents choose to opt in, we want every child in our state to have a personalized success plan. So not only are we helping to chart the student's ability towards mastery, but also finding out what their natural strengths and giftings are, so that you can begin to give them an idea of what credentials and what courses to take, or if there's somebody who's really skilled and can go into our workforce. Making sure they get the apprenticeships or internships under our Launchpad initiative so they can hit the ground running, whether that's going directly into the workforce or going to our university system. What about teacher pay? Because according to the NEA, Florida's average teacher pay last year ranked 50th among the 50 states in D.C. Does that make it harder then to recruit and retain knowledgeable science and math teachers in the advanced grades? It makes it more challenging. We want to be able to invest more in education. The trade-off I'm willing to have with the school districts in Florida is we will give you more flexibility, but let's figure out all the ways we can pay teachers more. And I think that's the trade-off we need to be looking at. If we're in a full-choice environment like we are, I think making those additional investments in education is really important. And that's something that we want to be able to do. We want to be able to pay teachers more. The number one way we can do that is by providing flexibility in the way we have the categoricals. Right now, they're very stringent. We want to take a lot of those restraints off, give districts those flexibilities. That gives them the ability to go negotiate with teachers on how much they're going to be paid. I will stress, and I'm just going to walk through with you, we talked about water, we talked about education, transportation, all of these various things. There's many other issues that the state of Florida has in front of them. They do require additional tax dollars. The way we raise additional tax dollars is we have a thriving and growing economy. And that is why having the governor focus on the future economic growth of this state, actually, that's what yields more tax dollars in order to invest in education, in our environment, in our infrastructure, which are all things that improve the quality of life in Florida. And the quality of education. On that point, just... Before the pandemic, the American Institute of Physics found that Florida high school physics is in decline faster than any other place in the nation. And in the past school year, 20% of Florida's large public high schools did not even teach physics. In your mind, should every large public high school in Florida teach physics? And if yes, how would you make that happen? Well, honestly, I think this is something that districts have to decide, which high schools want to teach physics or not. I think this is also where school choice plays in. Most of the kids in our public school system are now operating in choice. They actually don't go to the high school they're zoned for. They go to a different high school. And so I think this is where the districts, you want to empower superintendents to make sure they have the right academic mix. You don't really want to dictate that from Tallahassee. You want districts to be making these decisions, which is why flexibility. And funding is so important. This is why we want to make sure that we do that, that we work with our districts to make sure we're having the biggest bang for our buck. And before you get to physics, you have to be able to do well in Algebra 2 and Algebra 1. And that's where having a goal of mastery in mathematics and in reading and in writing is so important. These are the things that we can accomplish. We want to make sure in K-12 education in particular, we're getting back to basics. We stay on basics. We make sure kids are learning at each grade level. And then when it comes to teacher pay, that's why I want to make sure the districts have as much flexibility as possible so they can make those decisions when they go negotiate with teachers. On the subject of vouchers of choice, critics of the universal vouchers claim that as taxpayers provide more money for private school tuition, that private schools have an incentive to raise their tuition prices, thereby absorbing much of that public support. And there is some research suggesting that that may be happening. Have you examined whether or not that's happening in Florida? And do you have a problem with it if it is? We've looked at that research, and I think that when you're dealing in a market system of education where parents have multiple abilities to choose where they take their child to go, I think you let the consumer be the beginning and the end of that decision. I think going back to the old way of the state making these purchasing decisions is how you get into a situation where a child's academic environment is not in the best interest of that child. And so whether a parent chooses a charter school, chooses a private school. I think from the state perspective, the outputs that primarily concern me, and that's concerned me as a parent, and these are the things that concern me as a governor, is making sure that kids, no matter what environment you put them in, are reading, doing math, and writing at grade level or higher. I think mastery is important. So that's the type of information. I think also in high school, what are the SAT and ACT scores saying? Because, you know, anybody that's had teenagers, I've had, I have three of them. What parents are thinking about is, well, what'd you get on the ACT? And how does that cooperate or correlate to where you think that child's going to be able to go to college? That's the output that I think parents want to see. That's the output that we want to make sure we deliver to people. If a private school teaches that biological evolution does not occur or that humans coexisted with the dinosaurs, should those schools be able to accept public vouchers? First of all, I think we want to have a situation where if a private school does not want to accept those dollars, then we're not going to force a private school to accept those dollars. Number two, once again, if a parent chooses this is where they want to have their child educated, that's the decision of a parent. What the state of Florida is saying is that we trust parents more than we trust institutions. And we want to empower parents and give them the flexibility and the ability to find the best environment for their child. The same thing that my mother did for me and my mother back in New York City in the 80s, she was a school choice mom before school choice was even a thing and there was no ability for her to be able to just use state dollars and state resources to educate me. I think my mother did the right thing in deciding to go out on her own and find the best environment for her son. We want to empower every mother to go out and find the best environment for their children. The state is currently working on new K-12 science standards across the schools, public schools. Those standards include requiring students to be taught about biological evolution and about the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth and the scientific consensus on the age of the universe. I have no problem with that. I think those are things in the standards that I'll get with my team as the state's things go and review them. But I think those are all things. Those are topics that are fine. That's common sense stuff. I think there's large consensus on those topics. But I think if I'm trying to read through your question, it's not just about what the state requires. I think that if a parent decides to send their child to a Christian school and they teach the theory of evolution, but they also teach a math. Like conception, I don't believe there's anything wrong with that because a parent has decided that's what they want their child to learn. Let's move on to Medicaid and disability rights and related issues. We have Floridians with developmental disabilities waiting years for home-based services through the iBudget waiver. Do you believe the program is adequately funded and what, if anything, would you change about how the state administers that program? Well, I think the agency for persons with disabilities needs to be, needs some major reforms. I won't talk to the funding specifically. I actually want to sit down and study those budget line items with my team. I do want to reform the operating practices in APD. There needs to be far more efficiency in getting people the resources that they so richly deserve. We right now have a 23,000 person waiting list as governor. Government efficiency is one of my top priorities. Because we want to make sure that the people who qualify for help and assistance, that they get those dollars immediately. To your point about operational reforms, APD has long received funds that it has not spent, and that lump sum is more than $450 million. If you add the federal match, it's more than $1 billion. So if elected governor, would you commit to drawing down that rolling surplus? I don't know, at least by half to help the kids in need. That's exactly what I said. At APD, we want to make sure those resources are getting out. Just setting in a government account doesn't help anybody. We want to make sure those resources are getting out so people with disabilities are getting that help. And not just the people with disabilities, the families that provide this care. I was at the Family Cafe's annual conference this summer. This was a commitment I made to the families in that crowd. We want to make sure that persons with disabilities in our state get the resources that they need. Would you support moving all Florida Medicaid-funded services for people with developmental disabilities from the current iBudget waiver to a managed care model, all of them? Maybe. I don't want to make that commitment. What I'm going to do when it comes to those dollars is study that with my team. The thing I want to communicate to you and to your viewers is that everything that we're going to be doing is going to be very efficient and very transparent. We want to make sure that if somebody qualifies for these benefits, that they get them as quickly as humanly possible. We don't want them to be bogged down in waiting lists or bureaucracy. This is why government efficiency overall is one of my top priorities. On that point, then, would you also commit to protecting access to home and community-based services for people with disabilities, even if federal policy or federal funding changes? We will, but I think we also are going to be working with the counterparts in the congressional delegation to keep those funding streams in place. One of the things I will add, when we talk about efficiency, we are also going to be doing a lot of checks around fraud. We are starting to see around the country as we dig in to how some of these dollars are being spent as fraudulent activities that are taking place with taxpayer dollars. We don't want that either. We want to make sure that we're efficient with people's resources, that they get where they need to be deployed. We also are going to be minding the store to make sure they're not being wasted or being fraudulently used, which not only goes against the taxpayer, it steals resources away from the people who need it most. Moving on to home insurance, you want to keep the pool of citizens insurance customers small to reduce the risk of surcharges, but the risk of surcharges would still exist. Then how could that not potentially lead to the same kind of hurricane tax that you accuse your opponent of supporting? You said it in your question. The reason why it doesn't lead to what my opponent supports is because the pool in citizens insurance remains low. How you take that effect away, you have more private carriers in our state. You actually make it easier for families to rebuild post-storm. There's a rapid cash buildup factor in the CAT fund today that I think it's time to remove. That would actually lower premiums and actually have people. More having the capability to be in private carriers as opposed to being in citizens insurance. But the reason why my opponent's plan leads to $1,000 hurricane tax is because when you put all property and casualty insurance, all. All homeowners into one big pot that we all know he doesn't have the money for, you have to do an assessment across the board. And that assessment hits renters with renter's insurance. It hits car owners with their auto insurance. Obviously, it would hit homeowners and everybody in between. That's how you get to the $1,000 hurricane tax. Because David Jolly, number one, doesn't know how to do math. Because if he knew how to do math, he would tell the people truthfully he doesn't have $30 billion. for his sovereign wealth fund. So he says that he wants to raise taxes on insurance companies, but here's how this works in the real world. If you tell a company you're going to raise taxes on them, but then you also tell them that once he fills his pot of money that he needs, that he's going to take over the business, the business model, you know what they're going to do? They're not going to write insurance in Florida. They're going to leave, which actually would push more people into citizens insurance, which will make the state more susceptible to the hurricane tax that I talked about. And even if the legislature agreed with him to repeal the assessment in state law, and he would have to get that through the legislature, even if they agreed to do that, what it would open the state up to is having to borrow tens of billions of dollars every time Florida got hit with a major hurricane. You and I know this state, the past 10 years, Florida has been hit with six major hurricanes, six of them. And so what would happen If there's no catastrophe fund, no private insurance. No sovereign wealth fund because he can't fund the thing that he talks so much about. When you can't do that, you have to go to the bond market and borrow that money. And that money is not gonna be free. It's gonna be very expensive. And that just covers one occurrence. But what happens when you have to go back and borrow money again? What happens if the state gets hit with three, four hurricanes in one season? How much is he gonna borrow? He doesn't even know the answers to that. This is why his plan makes no sense. This is why he cannot be the state's next governor. One of his proposed revenue streams would be to limit how much insurance companies can shift to their affiliate companies outside of Florida, which he says would increase tax revenue by implementing a specific definition of fair and reasonable. Do you think that is a good idea or a bad idea? To be clear, it's an idea that does not work. Even if you went to combined reporting like David Jolly talks about, insurance companies would start leaving the state of Florida. So that's number one. Number two, even if you model out how much revenue would generate from combined reporting, it would take him about 10 years to build his sovereign wealth fund. So like I said before, if you tell a company, I'm going to tax you more, and then you say at the same time, and then when my pot of money is full, then I'm going to replace your business model with the state. And why would they do business in Florida? They're just going to leave, which is actually will put more pressure on the state vis-a-vis through the taxpayers and through policyholders in our state. So his idea is Pollyannish. It's naive by somebody who's never worked in the private sector a day in his life, somebody who's basically a government staffer and a government lobbyist most of his life, not having any understanding of how market systems and business operations actually function. This is why his plan makes no sense. This is why I criticize him about his plan. And this is why he will not debate me on stage. Let's move on to workforce or affordable housing. The Live Local Act offers subsidies, breaks to developers who put a rent ceiling on a certain number of units, but the ceiling's based on 120% of the area median income, which means the rent ceiling can be at or above the going rate, as we've found. In your view, then, could it subsidize developers to build apartments that they would have built anyway? And if yes, how do you address it? I think that's one of the major concerns in Live Local. I think to a broader level, what we need to do is wholesale permitting. Top to bottom permitting reform. It can't take two years to put a shovel in the ground. If it takes two years to put a shovel in the ground, it just makes whatever, whether it's an apartment building or a single family home or a small business, a restaurant, it makes it more expensive. And who pays for that is the end user, whether that's the renter, whether that's a small business owner, whether it's the young family working hard trying to make ends meet. The reason why I talk about permitting reform as opposed to just talking about the ins and outs of live local. It's because the National Association of Home Builders came out with a study. It says that 30% of the cost of a new home is government. Not a roof, not windows, not appliances, government. And so if 30% of the cost of new construction is governmental permitting and governmental timelines, we need to reform that system, make it far more efficient, shrink it down so you can lower the cost of construction. I think that's a better approach overall than just relying on live local. Because if you reform permitting and you actually make it easier and more efficient to build and you lower the cost of housing, That directly impacts the affordability for renters and homeowners and small business owners in our state. We have just a couple of minutes left, so let's close by going back to Medicaid and specifically the kid care expansion, because for kids who lost Medicaid in the unwinding, the state's supposed to offer an affordable alternative, kid care. Governor signed it back in 2023, but the state still has not implemented it. If you're elected governor, would you implement that in your first year for the kids who lost Medicaid in the unwinding? It's one of the things that we're definitely going to be looking hard at. I think it's important to understand that when you talk about kid care, then comes the other side of that equation where people ask, are you going to expand Medicaid? And the reason why I've always opposed Medicaid expansion is because with every topic we've talked about in this interview, it all requires more resources. If you expand Medicaid to able-bodied adults between the ages of 18 and 55 in Florida, it crowds out funding for kid care, crowds out funding for our environment. Crowds out funding for education, crowds out funding for transportation, crowds out funding for persons with disabilities and every other topic that we talked about. So when it comes to kid care, yes, I'm going to look through it fully, make sure that as we implement it, it's done correctly so that the state can maintain that going forward in the future. But secondarily, when we talk Medicaid overall, I just want to be very clear with you, we're not going to expand Medicaid because Medicaid expansion will just balloon the state's budget. And that we wouldn't have the resources we need for some of the other topics that do matter to the people of Florida. Well, the key sticking point on kid care, at least presently, appears to be the federal requirement for 12 months of continuous coverage, that provision. Would you accept that? It's a provision, again, we're going to look at that very closely, because we want to make sure that if we make an implementation to it, that we can consistently apply it. I have nothing wrong with that provision. I think that's something we can find a way to work through to get the program implemented. We want to make sure that how we implement these things do matter. I think you're kind of noticing in this interview with me, I get very detailed. I don't give a lot of talking points. It's easy to say, yes, we're going to do that. I want to tell the people of Florida that as we do these things, We're going to be very mindful and thoughtful that they're done correctly so that we can, when we say that it's been done, that people are actually receiving the benefits in their communities. Republican nominee for governor, Byron Donalds. Thank you so much for your time.