I have been offline for several weeks thanks to illness and the hurricane. Like most of you, I have been struggling with the cleanup from Helene that struck three weeks ago. I thought I had seen everything with Idalia last year, but Helene topped that by far. My rough estimate is that we suffered four times the damage with Helene as we did 13 months earlier. And as I write, Central Florida is dealing with the cross-state disaster of Hurricane Milton. Just as Florida will never forget the 2004 hurricane season, we won’t forget 2024 either.
The election is less than three weeks away, and among so many things on the ballot will be six constitutional amendments. I thought I would go through them one-by-one and give you my opinion on each. First, there are two ways an amendment can be proposed to be on the ballot. The Legislature can propose an amendment, and four of the six made it on to the ballot through this means. Secondly, a citizen-led initiative that gathers sufficient support can be added to the ballot provided our state courts approve, and that is the source of two proposed amendments. None of these amendments will pass and be added to the state constitution without 60 percent approval.