Lt. Gov. Nunez: GOP will work out differences
agency Visit Florida. “I would just say that they’re healthy spirited debates that are going to continue over the course of the next two months.”
E-Verify is strongly backed by DeSantis but not a priority of Senate President Bill Galvano, while Speaker Jose Oliva is again questioning whether Visit Florida should get the $50 million DeSantis wants for the agency.
“There’s a couple of things last session that looked like they weren’t necessarily going to make it to the finish line, and they did,” Nunez said. “I think that while the onset of session [may see] some challenges and some roadblocks, I’m confident that we’ll be able to have just as – if not even more – successful a session that we did our first year. So I think the talk [of ] ‘the honeymoon is over,’ I think it makes for good political theater, but I don’t think it’s reality.”
Nunez spoke to the Sentinel the day before a scheduled visit to Melbourne on Tuesday, in which she will meet with White House and other federal officials at Orlando Melbourne International Airport to discuss “Opportunity
Zones.”
The zones, created by President Trump through an executive order in 2018 with bipartisan support, are designed to help drive investment to poorer communities.
But a wide berth for governors to pick favorites, including former Gov. Rick Scott’s designation of a census tract containing a yacht marina owned by a major contributor, has led to Democrats and other critics calling for reforms.
In Central Florida, prime development areas such as Ravaudage Winter Park, SoDo and the Packing District in Orlando have ended up in the zones, putting developers there in line for potentially major tax benefits on any future projects.
“While one could criticize ‘why this,’ or ‘why not that,’ ” she said, “I think my focus really is on, how do we take advantage of those areas? And make sure we not only look at additional private capital but also what can we do in the public sector to perhaps provide investment on the public side with things like education and workforce training?”
Nunez, who oversees the Space Florida partnership, also praised the creation of the U.S. Space Force and Cape Canaveral’s Patrick Air Force Base being designated as a Space Force base.
Still, she said, there was a lot of “jockeying back and forth [and] a lot of friendly rivalry between us and other areas, in particular Colorado and even Alabama” for the location of the Space Force’s headquarters.
“But again, I want to just really stress the point that if you look at all that’s going on, not just really from a launch perspective — because obviously clearly Florida’s a leader in that department — but technology and just the deployment of resources and being able to utilize all of our assets,” Florida was at the forefront of the burgeoning space industry, Nunez said.