Latest news with #FloridaPhoenix
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Did Florida end HOV lanes? What to know about changes to the diamond lanes
Inside the more than 150 new laws that went into effect this month was one small line in one bill: "Section 316.0741, Florida Statutes, is repealed." And with that, Florida's HOV lanes were struck down. HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes are lanes in public roadways reserved for vehicles with more than one occupant, or for hybrid and low-emission vehicles that are registered with the state. HB 1662, a wide-ranging transportation bill, removed HOV lanes from state law along with a variety of other changes including giving disabled veterans more specialty license plate choices and adding a more robust state framework for space flight development. Here's what to know. HOV lanes are intended to encourage carpooling and reduce traffic congestion by providing highway lanes limited to vehicles with a certain number of passengers or more. Sometimes the restriction is only for certain high-traffic times of the day. HOV lanes have diamond symbols along their length and signage listing applicable times and occupancy limits. Driving in an HOV without anyone else in the car was a moving violation and law enforcement shared stories of catching people driving with mannequins, dolls, stuffed animals, inflatable people and other workarounds. More recently, electric vehicles were added to the HOV lane list if they meet standards and are registered with the state. Florida's first HOV lane arrived in 1976, a 14-mile segment of Interstate 95 that eventually expanded to 21 miles between I-395 and I-595, according to a Department of Transportation report on managed lanes. HOVs were included in the federal Interstate Highway System Policy in 1991 and a 30-mile stretch of I-4 received an HOV lane during the morning and evening peak times. In 2015, former President Barack Obama signed the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act (FAST Act), which, among many other things, allowed authorities to offer HOV access to low emission and energy efficient vehicles such as electric cars and hybrids if the driver pay a toll. The FDOT started selling HOV decals for such vehicles to enable them to use HOV toll lanes. However, that provision in the FAST Act was scheduled to end on Sept. 30, 2025, unless it was renewed. Meanwhile, HOVs have been fading in Florida since the development of express lanes — toll lanes that run alongside highways to provide a smoother drive, for a price — started under former Gov. Jeb Bush and dramatically increased under former Gov. Rick Scott, according to the Florida Phoenix. From 2008 to 2015, the Florida Department of Transportation converted the single HOV lanes on South Florida into two high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes going either direction. In 2023, FDOT converted HOV lanes along portions of I-95 from Broward County to Palm Beach County into non-HOV express lanes. The state also has been reducing or removing incentives to use electric vehicles as part of Florida's energy policy, which continues to emphasize fossil fuels. In 2024, DeSantis signed a bill (HB 1645) removing references in state law to climate change or greenhouse gas, banning offshore wind-energy generation in Florida, blocked cities and counties from approving energy policy restrictions, and repealing the state's renewable energy goals. The bill followed up on former Gov. Scott's repeal of the state's carbon-reduction goals. "We're restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots," Gov. Ron DeSantis posted on X. More laws passed this year prohibiting local governments from banning or restricting appliances or watercraft based on what fuel or energy source they use and blocked FDOT from providing funds to transportation-related entities for projects or programs that conflict with the state's energy policy. The bill repealed all HOV mentions in Florida statutes and repealed authorization for the FDOT to sell HOV decals. It also repealed the tax exemption for EV and hybrid vehicles, but the agency said existing decals will be active until they expire. 'With recent changes this legislative session, there are updates to the toll exemptions for electric vehicles, Inherently Low Emission Vehicles (ILEV), and hybrid vehicles,' FDOT spokesperson Guillermo Alberto Canedo told 'As a result, no new exemptions or renewals for these vehicles will be issued after June 30, 2025. All exemption decals issued prior to this date will remain active for one year from issuance of the decal.' This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida repealed HOV lanes. What does this mean?
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ahead of anti-Trump rallies, officials say: ‘If you resist lawful orders, you're going to jail'
Anti-Trump protesters stand in front of the Florida Historic Capitol on Feb. 5, 2025. (Photo by Jackie Llanos/Florida Phoenix) Floridians in more than 70 cities throughout the state plan to join nationwide demonstrations to protest the Trump administration on Saturday, prompting Attorney General James Uthmeier and other law enforcement officials to say they won't hesitate to quash protests. The protests, part of the 'No Kings' movement, are set to take place the same day as the multimillion-dollar military parade in D.C. and President Donald Trump's 79th birthday. Uthmeier, who along Gov. Ron DeSantis has been criticizing the protests in downtown Los Angeles against Trump's immigration crackdown, said he wanted to put the public on notice before Saturday. Trump sent the California National Guard into the city despite opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, and the California governor rejected DeSantis' offer to send the Florida State Guard, according to the Miami Herald. 'If you want to wreak havoc and destruction in Florida, we have enhanced penalties to ensure you will do time, so we do not tolerate rioting. As groups talk about assembling over the weekend, we haven't seen much of that in Florida,' Uthmeier said during a press conference in Brevard County. However, protests are planned in all the state's major cities, including in front of the Florida Historic Capitol in Tallahassee, according to the movement's website. The messaging from Uthmeier reflects Trump's warnings that those who protest the D.C. parade will be met with 'very heavy force.' 'If you resist lawful orders, you're going to jail. Let me be very clear about that: if you block an intersection or a roadway in Brevard County, you are going to jail,' said Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey. 'If you flee arrest, you're going to go to jail tired because we are going to run you down and put you in jail. … If you throw a brick, a fire bomb, or point a gun at one of our deputies, we will be notifying your family where to collect your remains at because we will kill you.' Uthmeier also announced that Florida Highway Patrol troopers would start patrolling the houses of federal immigration officials who believe they have been doxxed. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Challenge to Tampa Bay Senate seat revisits how it was created in 2022
The federal courthouse in Tampa on June 11, 2025. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix) Day Three of the federal lawsuit alleging that a Tampa Bay area state Senate district was racially gerrymandered focused in part on how that district was created in 2022. The suit, filed by the ACLU of Florida and the Civil Rights & Racial Justice Clinic at New York University on behalf of three residents of Tampa and St. Petersburg, alleges the Legislature packed Black voters into District 16 to reduce their influence in nearby District 18, in violation of their equal-protection rights. Democrat Darryl Rouson serves in SD 16, while Republican Nick DiCeglie is the incumbent in SD 18. The defendants are Senate President Ben Albritton and Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, and their attorneys began their defense on Wednesday, bringing Jay Ferrin back to the witness stand in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Tampa. Ferrin is now a senior adviser to the Florida Senate, but he served as staff director of the Florida Senate Committee on Reapportionment in the fall of 2021, when the districts lines were created. He discussed how he and his staff went about drawing up the Senate districts that year and the guidelines they followed. The reapportionment process beginning that fall was taking place under the guidance of Ray Rodrigues, who chaired the Senate Reapportionment Committee. Defense attorneys aired several Florida Channel video excerpts on Wednesday showing Rodrigues explaining how 'hard lessons were learned' following the Florida Supreme Court's decision in 2015 to throw out the GOP-controlled Legislature's maps after deeming them unlawful under the Fair Districts constitutional amendments adopted by voters in 2010. Rodrigues was insistent that he wanted the 2022 Legislature to conduct itself in such a fashion that the courts would not reject the maps lawmakers would produce. 'This map will withstand a court challenge,' Rodrigues declared on the floor of the Senate. That's what the trial taking place this week will ultimately determine. Ferrin testified that, after his staff created other Senate districts in the Tampa Bay area, there remained about 100,000 residents in Pinellas County who would have to be inserted into another Senate district. (With the population of Florida in 2021 at 21.5 million people, Ferrin said, his staff were tasked to draw approximately 538,438 voters into each of the 40 Senate districts). The resultant SD 16, which encompasses parts of St. Petersburg and Hillsborough County, is similar to the 'benchmark' map created in 2015 that was then known as Senate District 19. Ferrin denied that he was instructed to maintain that same configuration. He also said that under the rules promulgated by Rodrigues, he and his fellow staffers could speak about any new maps only with either the Senate's general counsel or other Senate members — and not the general public. He was not supposed to review public submissions. Florida senators were allowed to propose amendments during the reapportionment process, to add their own maps. Rodrigues and Democratic Sen. Audrey Gibson had filed such amendments, Ferrin said, but no senator had asked him to directly to create any Senate maps. ACLU attorney Nicholas Warren said at the beginning of the morning that he had sought to depose Rodrigues and fellow Republican and committee member Danny Burgess before the trial, but both had asserted legislative privilege, which shields them having to testify in certain lawsuits. In the afternoon, the defense called two expert witnesses who criticized the expert witness testimony and voting analysis that came from the plaintiffs on Tuesday. Steven Voss is a political science professor at the University of Kentucky. When asked to break down the political partisanship of the Tampa Bay area, he included four counties that make up the Tampa Bay metropolitan statistical area — Hillsborough, Pinellas, Polk and Hernando. Based on population, he said, five Senate districts could be folded into the area, and that three historically were reliably Republican while two would favor Democrats. Currently, that breakdown is four Republican districts and one Democratic — with Senate District 14, which Voss said historically favored Democrats, going to the GOP in 2022. Voss took aim at the alternative voting maps produced for the ACLU by Penn State University professor of statistics Cory McCartan. Those maps showed that a district could have been fairly drawn up exclusively in Hillsborough County while still protecting Tier-1 standards there and in Pinellas County. (That involves the Florida Constitution's Fair District Amendment, which says that districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice). Voss said that the result of McCartan's work was that he was 'cracking and packing' voters in his maps to ultimately help Democrats at the voting booth. Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, also testified for the defense. He praised the composition of the Senate maps passed by the Legislature in 2022, saying it was 'pretty incompetent racial gerrymandering, if that's what's going on.' The trial is expected to conclude on Thursday. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Legislature eyes changing Medicaid eligibility rules for people with intellectual disabilities
House Speaker Daniel Perez (R) with House budget chief Rep. Lawrence McClure (L). (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix) Florida could be poised to make it easier for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities (IDD) to maintain their Medicaid services. The latest round of budget negotiations between the House and Senate includes a proposal by the House to eliminate a requirement for people with IDD to annually be redetermined eligible for the health care safety net program for the poor, elderly, and disabled. If approved once, they would be presumptively eligible the rest of their lives unless they no longer qualify for Medicaid or their condition changes. The proposal, if accepted by the Florida Senate, would require approval from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to take effect. 'I'd call it a game changer for our population,' Florida Developmental Disabilities Council Executive Director Valerie Breen told the Florida Phoenix Wednesday. The council aims to increase the capacity of individuals with IDD to be included in their communities. The House health care budget conferees made the offer Tuesday. As of this publication, the budget negotiators had not met again. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Breen said people with these disabilities face difficulties when they have to be re-determined Medicaid-eligible. She said people with IDD erroneously fell off the Medicaid rolls when, following the end of the public health emergency associated with Covid 19, people had to requalify for Medicaid. Breen guessed that as many as 1,000 people with IDD who were eligible for Medicaid erroneously lost their coverage. For people with IDD the redetermination process requires the Department of Children and Families (DCF), which determines eligibility, to communicate with the state Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), which administers the Medicaid program, and the Agency for Persons with Disabilities (APD), which is charged with oversight of programs that serve these populations. Sometimes, Breen said, redetermination also included interaction with the Social Security Administration. 'Those were the critical components, and the agencies did not communicate with each other,' she said. As a result people with IDD lost access to the home and community-based services that help them with the activities of daily living like eating and grooming. 'They were not able to access any of those services,' Breen said. The Legislature was forced to extend the 2025 Session after legislative leadership couldn't reach an agreement on how much state money to spend in state fiscal year 2025-26, which begins July 1, and how much tax relief to provide residents. House Speaker Daniel Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton ultimately agreed to extend the session until June 16 and to spend about $50 billion in general revenue, or state tax dollars, across various government agencies. Most of the money will go to two areas: education and health care, with the former receiving more than $22 billion and the latter about $17.5 billion. Budget negotiators have been meeting to try to hammer out the details of how the money should be spent. The state budget must be printed and distributed to legislators by June 15 in order to vote on it by June 18. That's because of a constitutional provision that requires the budget to cool off for 72 hours before legislators can vote on it. New law brings managed care to people with intellectual disabilities The move to allow people with IDD to remain on Medicaid after initially being determined eligible is one of several proposals relating to people with IDD that are being championed by the House. Perez vowed to make those issues a priority during his two year tenure. To that end, Perez championed HB 1103, a proposal to make a small managed care pilot program, available statewide for people with IDD. HB 1103 also requires APD to publicly publish reports regarding the number of people with IDD the state serves and the number of people on a wait list for the Medicaid services. Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed the legislation. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
New law brings managed care to people with intellectual disabilities
Gov. Ron DeSantis, left, and House Speaker Daniel Perez, right. (Photos by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix) Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday signed into law priority legislation for House Speaker Daniel Perez that addresses how people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) receive health care. There were fears in the IDD advocacy community that DeSantis was going to veto the bill but he signed HB 1103 into law without any ceremony or a press conference. He acted three days after receiving it and while the House and Senate met in an extended session to craft the next state budget. Jim DeBeaugrine, a former Agency for Persons with Disabilities (APD) director and now a lobbyist, praised language that requires the agency to make public information about the number of people served in the Medicaid waiver program known as iBudget, plus the number of individuals on the waiting list, broken down by the counties in which they live. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Federal Medicaid law provides coverage for health care services to cure or ameliorate diseases but generally doesn't cover services that won't. Specific to IDD, Medicaid covers the costs of institutional care but not of home- and community-based services that, if provided, can help people with IDD live outside of institutions. Former Gov. Jeb Bush applied for a Medicaid waiver to provide these services to people with IDD. Eligible diagnoses include disorders or syndromes attributable to intellectual disability, cerebral palsy, autism, spina bifida, Down syndrome, Phelan-McDermid syndrome, or Prader-Willi syndrome so long as the disorder manifested itself before the age 18. But the program is underfunded and has had lengthy waiting lists on which sometimes people have lingered for more than a decade. The Legislature has required APD to provide it with information about the program but while the information was once easily publicly available, the DeSantis administration stopped posting it online. The bill requires the information to be made public again. 'You know, APD has gotten hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several years. And I think it'll help to hold the agency accountable. And it's good for the public, particularly the advocacy community, to understand what happens with those dollars, how many people we're funding, whether the dollars are being spent for services,' DeBeaugrine told the Florida Phoenix Tuesday. 'You know, the rub on all of this is that the agency used to publish that data without the law telling them to. But since they stopped, I believe this is a positive step towards re-establishing accountability and transparency.' The law also involves a Medicaid managed-care pilot program launched at the behest of then-House Speaker-Designate, now speaker, Perez in 2023. The pilot was designed to care for up to 600 individuals and was approved for Medicaid regions D and I, which serve Hillsborough, Polk, Manatee, Hardee, Highlands, Miami-Dade, and Monroe counties. The state received federal approval for the pilot in February 2024. The Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) issued a competitive procurement for the pilot with two vendors, Florida Community Care and Simply Healthcare Plans Inc., vying for the contract. AHCA eventually awarded the contract to Florida Community Care. Three hundred and fifty eight people were enrolled in the pilot program as of May 5. During testimony before the House Health and Human Services Committee in February, Carol Gormley, vice president for government affairs for Independent Living Systems, attributed the slow start-up to administrative barriers on APD's part. Independent Living Systems is the parent company of Florida Community Care. The new law lifts the 600-person cap on the pilot program on Oct. 1, expanding enrollment statewide for qualifying disabled people on the Medicaid iBudget wait list. There are 21,000 plus people on the waitlist, according to a legislative analysis. In a statement to the Florida Phoenix Tuesday, Gormley lauded DeSantis and the Legislature for their 'commitment to expanding and improving services for persons with disabilities. 'We look forward to the opportunity to extend the comprehensive benefits offered through the pilot program to families who choose to participate,' she said. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE