Oh, what Floridians could do with the $15+ million DeSantis squandered on immigration stunts! | Opinion

It’s time for budget reveals in Florida’s cities and counties — and the stakes involved in how government funds are spent couldn’t be higher.

For one, while Gov. Ron DeSantis touts on the presidential campaign trail that we’re “the No. 1 state in the nation,” citing categories such as education, where we’re definitely not, Florida comes in at the top of the heap in one classification — an undesirable one.

While the nationwide inflation rate has dropped sharply, Florida has the nation’s highest, with living costs rising at more than twice the national average. Tampa and Miami lead the pack in inflation rates at 7.3 and 6.9, respectively.

But you wouldn’t know this from the way DeSantis has spent our money to campaign for the Republican nomination.

Despite a healthy war chest for a floundering but still-in-the-running candidate (blame the absence of better choices), DeSantis used taxpayer money — $15.2 million in six months — to stage an immigration war that’s essentially a campaign stunt.

Claiming to “protect Floridians against the dangerous impacts of the Biden Border Crisis,” DeSantis even tapped into an emergency fund, a Herald review of records reveals, to fashion himself as an immigration czar.

All for the benefit of Republican voters.

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Immigration czar

While the migrant flights from Texas to blue states were his most infamous charade, he also spent considerable amounts of money staging his own border security and scaring away the undocumented from Florida by signing a draconian law, SB 1718, severely punishing people for helping undocumented migrants in any way — not even family members were exempted.

Now being challenged in court by a coalition of civil-rights groups, defending possible violations, too, will become a costly taxpayer-funded expense.

None of what DeSantis has done has yielded positive results — but plenty of negative ones, including a shortage of immigrant workers in Florida.

And it’s affecting us all.

In towns like mine, Republican-led Miami Lakes, the throngs of lawn maintenance workers have shrunk to a trickle. Legally owned companies are out workers. Undocumented one-man-band operators are only sticking with clients they already know won’t turn them in.

We’re all competing for the few operators left with enough personnel to handle work that’s already behind schedule because of the heavy rains and the record-breaking temperatures. Neighbors’ contact lists have become the new gold.

Call this one our DeSantis-sponsored Summer of Desperation 2023.

I’m sitting here wearing the scars of his war on immigrants: Six tick bites on my left leg, two on the right from raking leaves in the backyard where stray cats roam at night. And a close-call with heat stroke after the guy I tried to hire stood me up five times. I went outside in heat that felt like 100 degrees to tame my disgusting front yard.

I’m still without help. The new contact said he would come Thursday. I’m not holding my breath.

Thanks, Gov. DeSantis.

Worse yet than a labor shortage, here come new local taxes to pay for needs like flooding mitigation, upgrading parks, and improving public transportation services.

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Money better spent

Here’s what the $15.2 million DeSantis spent on immigration could have bought us, according to proposed city and county budgets I perused:

▪ More temporary housing for Florida’s homeless, a statewide issue in big cities.

▪ Relief to renters and homeowners in Miami-Dade, where Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is “growing our Office of Housing Advocacy, to connect more residents to critical services” under a record spending plan of her $11 billion budget.

▪ A drainage improvement project in Jacksonville to build a pump station in historic San Marco where rains and normal high tides cause the type of flooding that brings everyday activities to a halt. New Mayor Donna Deegan has budgeted $3 million more than what DeSantis spent on immigration initiatives. Not to worry, the Biden administration’s Department of Environmental Protection is funding the flooding mitigation.

▪ A $20 million road improvement project in Hillsborough County, but Floridians can thank Joe Biden for that one, too. On the cultural side of appropriations, the county is allocating $2 million for the planned African-American Cultural Center, more needed than ever in a state dead-set on whitewashing Black history.

The list of needs goes on and on, none greater than our need for relief from the highest insurance rates in the nation. There, too, we’re Número Uno, governor.

But all those things Floridians need are petty stuff for DeSantis, who has bigger plans for himself and his first lady. His donors come first. His conservative voters don’t have a problem throwing away good money at immigration non-starters.

Meanwhile, we’re stuck mowing our lawns, trimming our trees, bagging leaves — and hurricane watching, praying that we won’t need emergency funds a la Hurricane Ian.

But, to borrow from Dr. Seuss, oh, the places DeSantis will go!

This story was originally published July 18, 2023 at 4:24 PM.

Fabiola Santiago

Miami Herald

305-376-3469

Award-winning columnist Fabiola Santiago has been writing about all things Miami since 1980, when the Mariel boatlift became her first front-page story. A Cuban refugee child of the Freedom Flights, she’s also the author of essays, short fiction, and the novel “Reclaiming Paris.” Support my work with a digital subscription