Larry Griffin
At the Senate District 11 Democratic debate Wednesday night, held by the League of Women Voters, only three candidates showed up, and an hour of questions from moderator Karen Castor Dentel had them mostly agreeing on liberal policies and ideals, only differing in exactly what areas they would focus on in applying them.
For an hour, Chuck O’Neal, Randolph Bracy and Bob Sindler talked issues ranging from the environment to policing to gun control.
The fourth Democratic candidate, Gary Siplin, didn’t show up and offered no explanation as to why he couldn’t make the debate.
The three candidates on stage, as several other Democratic candidates have done this election season, spoke of the need to get big business and corporate influences that don’t answer to the will of the people out of politics. When asked about how they would vote on bills relating to the state’s water, the candidates stood by that and said it was important to answer to the people rather than to lobbyists and corporations.
“Special interests are very quick to grab a bill and make it so they get the lion’s share of the water, while everybody else struggles to get what’s left,” Sindler said.
Bracy piggybacked on Siplin’s absence to hit him on the issue of private prisons — Siplin, Bracy said, has taken donations from private prison organizations, and that raises questions as to his objectivity on the issue.
“With all due respect to one candidate, part of his candidacy is funded by the private industry,” Bracy said. “One of the expectations, when they do fund your campaign, they expect you to vote in their favor to increase penalties that aren’t necessarily just. I will fight with all I have against private prisons. I don’t think it’s for the right motives.”
In one of the only instances of the candidates actively disagreeing, Sindler said that wasn’t indicative of Siplin being bought out — you “have to look at how [Siplin] voted,” Sindler said.
O’Neal disagreed with Sindler, saying it was pretty clear what was going on.
“I don’t know if, in this discussion, the jail group feels as though Sen. Siplin will vote, but they have a good idea he will,” he said. “Otherwise they would not be sending money to get him elected. People in this district need to know that there are people running that do not have their best interests in mind.”
The three of them universally rebuked Gov. Rick Scott‘s job-creating strategy of going to other states and trying to persuade large companies to move to Florida, with O’Neal calling it job theft rather than job creation.
Instead, O’Neal would rather see the state embrace solar energy, create a solar energy hub and use that to create jobs.
“We could manufacture panels in this district, sell them and maintain them and install them,” he said. “That would create jobs. What our governor has done, in trying to go around the country and steal jobs from other states — that’s not job creation, that’s job theft. To use our taxpayer dollars to lure these companies that give big incentives that end up in pockets of a CFO or CEO are criminal. But we do have a criminal, basically, for a governor, so I guess it is to be expected.”
Bracy said the state needs to instead work on making itself more attractive to prospective businesses. He said it would also be prudent to raise the minimum wage, which would give people more opportunities to thrive, and improve the education system.
Sindler called Scott’s strategy “corporate welfare,” and then said he thought the best path to job creation was to improve the state’s infrastructure so as to help those who want to set up businesses in the state do so. He said a focus on more vocational education in particular would be a plus.
On gun control, abortion and militarized police forces, the candidates found little ground on which they disagreed.
They all felt reasonable restrictions on assault weapons and banning those on a “No Fly” list from buying guns should be priorities. On abortion, they said it was a woman’s choice and she should have access to any health care she needs. On the militarization of police, they agreed that the police needed to focus more on community policing and service rather than brute force.
After nearly 50 minutes of the candidates’ liberal-leaning stances, Castor Dentel asked them how they’d deal with members of the Legislature who were defiantly opposed to those stances and get things done anyway.
Bracy said it was “part of being elected,” and that in his experience, a “lot of issues move forward” in the Senate. Instead, it was the House of Representatives that typically got more entangled in disagreements. Sindler said he has a history of working across the aisle and compared it to his time in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“You learn that you have to work with other cultures,” he said. “You have to understand them, get in their shoes and work together.”
O’Neal was confident he could explain his position in detail to anyone who might not understand where he was coming from.
In their closing statements, Bracy positioned himself as an experienced leader who could get Democratic policies passed on criminal justice reform, education, medical marijuana and more. O’Neal fashioned himself a fighter and said he would continue opposing Scott’s policies. Sindler appealed to the local level, saying he knew how things worked on that level due to his time with the Orange County Commission, and could take the same care and work ethic and apply it to the state Senate seat if he won.
