Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
State may offer Reagan license plate
If approved, most of the revenue would go toward Alzheimer’s research
President Ronald Reagan could become the latest face to grace Florida license plates under a bill being considered in the Florida Senate.
If approved, it could be the only plate in the country honoring the 40th president. A sample design includes a profile of Reagan, the U.S. flag and the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, which is stationed in Japan.
Neither Reagan’s birth state of Illinois nor the state that gave birth to his political life, California, has such plates. Neither do Texas and Virginia, the only two states surpassing Florida in sheer volume of specialty plates they offer, with more than 300 in each.
Why Florida? “The concept for the plate actually began in 2011 with the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth,” said Doug Guetzloe, a lobbyist whose firm has successfully pushed for some other specialty plates.
Reagan, who was president from 1980 to 1988, easily carried Florida primary and general elections in 1980 and 1984. In his later years, he had Alzheimer’s disease. He died in 2004.
“The Alzheimer’s issue is so prominent in Florida. We have one of the largest Alzheimer’s populations in the country,” Guetzloe said.
According to the national Alz-
heimer’s Association, more than half a million Floridians over the age of 65 suffer to some extent from the dementia-inducing disease.
The Reagan plate would not be the only Florida specialty plate to concentrate on an individual. The state offers a John Lennon “Imagine” plate and a Martin Luther King Jr. “Live the Dream” plate. Proceeds from the Lennon plate go to food banks, while the King plate benefits a variety of anti-poverty and public health organizations.
The Reagan plate would be the only one that dedicates funding to educating Florida children about a single individual.
About 65 percent of money from the $25 license plates would go toward Alzheimer’s research and to fund programs that educate students and residents about Reagan’s contributions to Florida and the United States as a whole.
The annual fees taken in per plate would go to Florida Ronald Reagan Centennial Inc., an Orlando-based nonprofit. About $150,000 would go to the organization to pay back startup costs. After that, 15 percent would go to administrative costs, 10 percent to marketing and promotion of the license plate and 10 percent to the Florida National Guard Foundation, to be given in individual grants to Guard members or their family members who have Alzheimer’s disease.
The bill doesn’t say how much should go to Alzheimer’s research and how much should go to Reagan education.
“I’m going to anticipate that 50 percent would go to Alzheimer’s research and other programs supporting Alzheimer’s research,” Guetzloe said.
The $150,000 in reimbursement costs is unusual. Only two other Florida specialty license plates — “Stop Child Abuse” and “Stop Heart Disease” — came with statutory language allowing the nonprofit behind them to recoup startup costs, according to a state analysis.
Florida Ronald Reagan Centennial Inc. was founded in 2016, according to state records. Its three board members — Kathleen Lee, Lorrayne Barrow and Michelle Johnson — are all members of the Lee family, which controls the private enterprise LeeVista Inc. and a string of related companies. The Lees are prominent developers and real estate investors in the Orlando area.
The patriarch of the family, Richard T. Lee, has donated more than $15,000 to Republican campaigns and committees fighting to lower property taxes, campaign finance records show.
Guetzloe handles government relations for the family.
If approved, the license plate would join several other public works named for the president, including a high school and middle school in Doral and Florida’s Turnpike, which was renamed the Ronald Reagan Turnpike in 1998, the year Republicans took control of the Florida Legislature and the governor’s office.
“We did some marketing research and found the Ronald Reagan plate would be tremendously popular here in the state of Florida,” Guetzloe said. “We think it’s gonna sell like hot cakes.”
The Ronald Reagan specialty license plate unanimously cleared its first committee in the Senate but has two more committee hearings to go before it comes to the Senate for a vote. A House version has not yet been filed.
“I think probably the philosophical question that I run into is, ‘Do you really want to start doing presidents?’ ” the bill sponsor, state Sen. Dennis Baxley, ROcala, told the News Service of Florida. “And I say I’m fine with honoring anybody, but [the honorees] have to be dead to do it.”
The license plate would also join 123 other specialty license plates in the state. If it’s approved, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles must begin offering pre-sale vouchers to motorists who would like the face of the Gipper on their vehicles. After 1,000 drivers have requested vouchers, the state can begin issuing plates.
If the number of plates of a given design ever falls below 1,000 for a full year, that plate must be retired. College and university plates are exempt, and they include the most and least popular specialty license plates.
The most popular, the University of Florida, had 88,906 on the road in 2016, according to a DHSMV report. The least popular plate was that of Lake Wales private liberal arts college Warner University, which had just 114.