A.G. Gancarski
One of several potential 2022 gubernatorial candidates for the Florida Democrats made a Jacksonville appearance Sunday, with an eye on the 2020 campaign.
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, the Orlando Democrat, held a town hall with a local City Council candidate seeking to flip a Republican-held seat.
The topic was unemployment, and Eskamani was unflinching in her assessment of failures, foibles, and flaws of the Ron DeSantis approach to what now has been a six-month crisis, with more pain to come.
At issue: communication that caused confusion and chaos, the Representative noted.
For months, the DeSantis “administration really didn’t want to talk about unemployment,” a lack of transparency that has “caused more chaos than needed to happen,” Eskamani said.
“If there was just improved communication, it would have at least alleviated some of the confusion for the unemployed,” Eskamani said.
Amid a “gap” from a “non-present” Department of Economic Opportunity, a shop with “customer service close to zero,” the legislator noted that she and her colleagues have had to backfill for the executive branch.
“Our office has escalated formally 16,000 claims to DEO,” Eskamani said of her skeleton crew staff.
There is some hope for optimism, with the Ken Lawson era having closed.
Regarding the leadership change at DEO, Eskamani is hopeful new head Dane Eagle will “hear our ideas” and “make the system responsive” as he said he wanted to.
“We’re going to hold him to that,” Eskamani vowed.
Issues still mount, including difficulty encountered by many in securing claims.
Eskamani noted that even tomorrow, the CONNECT site will be shut down for maintenance, an indication that despite months of work from the DeSantis administration and an unemployment rate in decline, capacity is still an issue.
Nicole Hamm, running for Jacksonville City Council in District 4 on the city’s Southside, noted that the problem of a collapsed economy is evident even when one looks on the Nextdoor website.
“We’ve been seeing a lot of requests for work,” Hamm said, “This is a broken system plaguing this area and the state.”
One comment
Thomas A
September 9, 2020 at 6:00 pm
Received those funds today. It was helpful but when I heard that Montana-Montana pays out $508 weekly to their unemployed workers i thought to myself once again-When is Florida going to get with the program and have legislators advocate for a higher weekly benefit than $275 per week. It does not go far at all. We are the third most populous state in the country and our unemployment benefits are appalling
Comments are closed.