Ed Hooper has a packed agenda for the 2025 Legislative Session

As he prepares to assume a key leadership role in his final term as a Senator, Ed Hooper has the budget on his mind.

Set to chair the Senate Committee on Appropriations for the 2024-26 term, Hooper will lead conversations and drive priorities for state spending over the next two fiscal years.

“We’re not broke, we have money,” said Hooper, who just began his second and final term in the Senate, defeating Democratic challenger Doris Carroll with nearly 60% of the vote.

Not being broke is obviously a good thing, but it’s even more important ahead of the upcoming 2025 Legislative Session. Lawmakers will have to grapple with allocating funds for hurricane recovery after parts of the Gulf Coast — including areas of north Pinellas County and southern Pasco County that Hooper represents — were hit with back-to-back hurricanes in late September and early October.

“I’m assuming that either with budget money or part of our reserves, we’re probably going to invest $2 billion-3 billion in storm-related infrastructure up and down the impacted areas,” he hypothesized, adding that infrastructure includes roads, bridges and even airports.

“We’re going to have to make some investment to help from Naples to Tallahassee, mostly the west coast,” Hooper said, adding that areas along the state’s east coast damaged by tornadoes that spun off from Hurricane Milton will also be in line for recovery funds.

All of the impacted areas, Hooper noted, will require extensive funding, and some of that money is likely to be drawn from the state’s reserves. The state has about $17 billion in reserves, according to the Florida Policy Institute.

While Hooper expects plenty of work on the budget, which will include funding for everything from education to health care, he said it hasn’t started yet. And in the meantime, he also still has a district to represent.

Among priorities for the Senate District 21 lawmaker are addressing condo inspections and assessments stemming from legislation passed during a 2022 Special Session following the Champlain Towers collapse in Surfside.

The bill (SB 4-D) required condominium and cooperative association buildings three stories or higher to have structural integrity inspections, in most cases, by the end of this year. With that deadline quickly approaching, Hooper said many condos put off the inspection, sometimes because a lack of inspectors made finding one challenging, and will soon be in noncompliance with the law.

“We need to visit that again,” he said, noting also that assessments set to ensure condo associations have the reserves needed to make structural repairs, if needed for compliance, continue to plague condo owners on the hook for additional fees.

And like everyone serving in the Legislature, Hooper will also be taking a tough look at property insurance. He, like his constituents, is frustrated with a relative lack of progress so far since the Legislature passed sweeping tort changes aimed at bringing more insurance companies to Florida’s insurance marketplace and lowering costs for property owners.

“They said it would drop like a rock. Well, it must not be much of a rock,” Hooper said.

But that doesn’t mean he thinks the tort package was a bad idea, or even that it’s not having an impact. Instead, he pointed to lawyers who Hooper said collectively filed some 200,000 lawsuits ahead of the tort package’s implementation, which have left insurance companies essentially “still playing under the old rules.”

“The biggest problem right now,” Hooper said, “is denying or lowballing claims.”

Hooper said his office gets more calls about homeowners frustrated with lowball claims from their insurers than any other issue right now. Some are without recourse, Hooper said. That includes individuals who may have suffered flood damage but who did not carry flood insurance.

“There’s not much we can do there,” he said. “But for other stuff like wind damage there seems to be too many companies that are sending their adjuster out and coming up with a number that is not reasonable.”

It’s created something of a cottage industry of private adjusters who will assess damage on a property for a homeowner. Those adjusters typically receive a percentage of the entire amount of the claim, not just the difference between what an insurance company’s adjuster quoted, Hooper said.

Hooper introduced 20 bills in the 2024 Legislative Session, and co-introduced another 16. Of those, more than a dozen were successful. The problem has created a new problem that Hooper says have similar ramifications as frivolous lawsuits that were frequent before the tort package.

“Now, the insurance company’s got to fight that number and us policyholders get the short end of the stick,” He said. “So we’re going to have to deal with it. It’s like whack-a-mole.”

Hooper said he’s not sure yet what an appropriate fix looks like, “but we will be aggressively identifying solutions.”

Looking toward the budget again, Hooper gets a bit of a headache about health care issues. Not because he thinks they’re unimportant — they clearly are — but because they are massive and complex.

Health care makes up about 44% of the total state budget, Hooper said. During COVID, the state received a ton of federal money to help cover increased costs, such as higher enrollment into Medicaid. Medicaid rolls during COVID went up by about 1 million patients, and even though the pandemic has passed, many of those individuals still qualify.

“The menu is so broad, you know that there are people out there who are falling through the cracks and there’s nothing you can do from a budget perspective,” Hooper lamented.

He said the Department of Children and Families (DCF), which falls under the health care umbrella, is underpaying staffers compared to wages they could make in the private sector, which makes it hard for DCF to maintain adequate staff. That workers are often overburdened with caseloads only exacerbates the challenge.

Hooper joked he’s glad he’s not overseeing health care appropriations, but said he’s looking forward to working with his colleague leading that committee, Sen. Jay Trumbull, to identify solutions.

Education is another area Hooper will be watching, and working. While Hooper supports school choice, he’s grown frustrated with the new flexibility provided in school vouchers that have allowed parents to purchase things like kayaks and even theme park passes.

That was made possible after lawmakers approved HB 1 in 2023 opening school vouchers to everyone, regardless of household income. It also provided $8,000 per student to cover the cost to attend private school. But for kids who were homeschooled, or whose tuition was less than $8,000, reports showed the cash was being spent in ways probably not originally envisioned.

“There’s really no guardrails on how that money gets spent,” Hooper said. He also is frustrated that some private schools, eyeing what Hooper described as “free money” for them, just increased their tuition by $8,000, meaning kids who would have gone thanks to the vouchers, can’t because it’s still cost-prohibitive.

“Let’s at least make sure that how that money is spent is for educating the child,” he said.

Hooper is also looking forward to work “rightsizing” how state colleges are funded. He said leaders at state colleges have conferred and “agreed that our funding model is broken.” Together, they’ve come up with ideas “that make more sense,” ensuring funding is distributed equitably among schools based on student population and need, rather than a school with a tiny cohort getting near as much as larger schools with significantly more students.

Hooper also had a positive note for Floridians concerned about the environment.

“The Senate President has been very clear for the past year and reemphasized it yesterday in his speech — he’s a citrus farmer and he’s been very clear that water, water quality, clean water, including stopping septic tank pollution and runoff pollution, are top priorities,” Hooper said.

Under Senate President Ben Albritton, Hooper said Floridians can expect efforts to make “citrus become king in Florida, not just barely hanging on.”