NEBA Forum Recap: Legislative Update from State Representative Matt Caldwell

The Network of Entrepreneurs and Business Advocates (NEBA) held our monthly meeting Tuesday, January 23.  The featured speaker was FL Representative Matt Caldwell, who graciously filled in after our planned speaker became ill.  Representative Caldwell discussed a wide range of topics currently being debated in the legislature.  A few highlights:

• He supports having elections on the same, well publicized, days state wide and doing away with off-cycle elections some communities schedule that result in very small turnouts.
• This year there’s a Hurricane Committee looking at grid security during disasters (natural resources, infrastructure, internet).
• He supports consolidating data on all publicly owned land, Federal, State, Local and NGO, to see where we really stand in regards to needed environmental acquisitions.
• Florida’s current tangible property tax formula hurts in the recruitment of manufacturing businesses.
• He believes cities exist only by State Statute and they are getting into areas that are not their proper roles; this, in his opinion, justifies legislating from Tallahassee.
• In the Supreme Court arguments for the FL/GA water wars, he felt the Justices’ questions seemed sympathetic to FL.  He also thinks Congress should fix this dispute and that they have abdicated their responsibilities by kicking the issue to the courts.

Below are photos from the forum. As always, thank you to Catherine Baer for taking the photos and making them availiable to NEBA.