Anne Geggis
Sen. Lori Berman will reprise her role as Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Agriculture, Environment and General Government, and will also join the Senate Agriculture Committee.
The Boca Raton Democrat will not be returning to her seat with the Military and Veterans Affairs, Space and Domestic Security Committee, however.
Berman, a lawyer, said she liked serving on the Military and Veterans Affairs, but the switch makes sense.
“A large part of my district is agricultural,” she said, referencing Senate District 26, which includes cane fields in Belle Glade and equine-minded Wellington.
In handing out Committee assignments, Senate President Katheen Passidomo made few major changes to committee assignments with significant influence, leaving Committee Chair or Vice Chair positions unchanged for the upcoming Session.
Like last year, Berman will be on committees for Community Affairs, Finance and Tax, Fiscal Policy, and the Select Committee on Resiliency.
Berman will also reprise her role on the Education Pre-K-12 Committee, during which last year she raised questions regarding the Republicans’ priority to expand school choice. And answers to those questions have proven thorny as the state has implemented the expansion.
She asked how the state would control the nearly $8,000 per child annually that the expansion represented for home-schoolers. She referenced how an Ohio home-school pod used Nazi curriculum. She said later she felt that question wasn’t adequately answered, and now it’s come to light that Florida theme park admissions and exercise equipment are among the items parents can ask the state to reimburse as education expenses.
Democrats have promised they will tighten the list of allowable expenses.
She said last year’s pace of Committee hearings made it challenging to meet with constituents during the intense schedule.
She introduced bills to bolster abortion rights and gun control, but they died in Committee. However, she was successful in passing legislation that dealt with the support of dependent adults with disabilities and Greyson’s Law, making it so that parental threats against another spouse had to be evaluated in determining a child’s custody arrangement.
One comment
It's Complicated
September 11, 2023 at 2:17 pm
“Democrats have promised they will tighten the list of allowable expenses.” Florida Democrats will have to thread the needle carefully to make any gains on this front.
No person with sound mental health supports of sympathizes with the Nazis. Arguing against homeschooling Ohio Nazi sympathizers for the purposes of amending Florida Statute is a bit of a Straw Man argument. If Florida Democrats limit their case for tighter controls on homeschool or charter school curriculum to prohibiting the presentation of the Nazis in a positive light, they may get some buy-in and traction. My guess is they will not be able to resist tossing in a myriad of other cultural issues into the mix which will render their proposals DOA.
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