Wednesday, March 27, 2024

ANNALS OF DeSANTISTAN: The Florida Legislature doesn’t care how hot outdoor workers get. (Craig Pittman, Florida Phoenix)

RONALD DION DeSANTIS and our extremist Dull Republican legislators are anti-worker and don't try to hide it.  While heat-related injuries are compensable under Florida workers compensation law, our legislature has stood in the way of local regulations to protect t workers from dehydration.  With extremist energumen Social Darwinist Tallahassee Republicans, it's all about the cruelty.  Friends don't let friends vote Republican.  From Florida Phoenix:


The Florida Legislature doesn’t care how hot outdoor workers get

MARCH 14, 2024 7:00 AM

 Outdoor workers in a field in Miami-Dade County. Source: We Count video screen grab.

The Oscars on Sunday honored the year’s best film performances, best direction, best picture and, as a bonus, the best shade thrown. My pick for the latter would be host Jimmy Kimmel’s response to a social media post from a certain deluded Palm Beach club owner: “Isn’t it past your jail time?”

In a similar vein, for the Florida legislative session that ended last Friday, the papers have been full of talk about the big winners and losers. Bears were the clear losers, while trigger-happy cops and corrupt public officials were the obvious winners.

But shade was in short supply and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

A mere two hours before the session adjourned, our fine lawmakers passed a bill that says no local government is allowed to protect outdoor workers from our worsening heat. No limiting their hours. No requiring access to water.

Definitely no shade.

If I were making a Hollywood soundtrack to go with this awful bill, it would start with “Too Hot to Handle” by UFO.

Our legislators do not toil, neither do they spin, in the sweltering outdoors. They filed, debated, and voted for HB 433 in air-conditioned comfort. Heck, they probably never worked up a sweat.

 A farmworker in Immokalee harvests tomatoes. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

“This shows a callous disregard for human life,” said Jeff Goodell, author of The New York Times climate-change bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. “Outdoor workers are far more vulnerable to extreme heat.”

Bear (ha ha!) in mind that these lawmakers are the same sensitive souls who also voted to loosen the laws on child labor although lawmakers agreed to a scaled-back version. Get those teenagers out there on the construction site! Make ’em perspire!

Picture a bunch of sunburned high school kids laboring outdoors for hours in the heat before they go start their homework. This is not likely to improve their awful ACT scores. Now we’ll play Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher,” although these students are just hot, period.

It was a member of an organization called Florida Student Power who broke down crying during a House Commerce Committee hearing on the bill last month.

“To me this bill is not about numbers, it’s about millions of Floridians and it is very personal,” said Laura Munoz, who testified that her father died in a workplace accident related to years of poor heat protections. “How much profit was worth his life, and how much profits are worth their lives? Because I don’t think there’s money enough to ever be worth it.”

Our legislators’ insistence on deleting references to climate change from state law now seems more sinister than silly. It’s like they’re removing clues from a crime scene to hide what they’re doing to working Floridians.

Sweatin’ to the oldies

For this next part, our soundtrack will switch to Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave.” We’re sweatin’ to the oldies!

Our spring weather right now is pleasant. But remember last summer? We suffered a heat wave the likes of which the world had never seen before. July 4 was the hottest day in human history.

It didn’t end with the summer.

“In Florida, 2023 was the hottest year on record for many locations, based on annual average mean temperatures,” the Florida Climate Center reported in December. “This includes Pensacola, Daytona Beach, Orlando, Tampa, Lakeland, Venice, Fort Myers, Miami, and Key West, all with a 60-year instrumental record or longer. Many other locations had one of their top five hottest years on record.”

These hot days and nights are increasing, too. According to the Miami-Dade County website, “Since 1970, Miami-Dade County has had an average increase of days above 90°F from 84 to now 133 days per year, which will continue to rise.”

 Dangerous heat levels are becoming routine in Florida as state leaders look the other way and do little to combat global warming. (Getty Images)

Working in all that heat is bad for the human body. A University of Florida study released three years ago found that between 2010 and 2020, there were 215 heat-related deaths in Florida.

Two years ago, I interviewed a Florida State University professor named Christopher Uejio, who studies the health impacts of climate change.

“Extreme heat is really insidious,” he told me. “It affects a wide range of bodily functions. It makes your heart pump harder. With your respiratory system, it makes breathing harder. And when you’re breathing in hot air, that makes your respiratory system work harder, too.”

As Grist pointed out this week, Florida’s lawmakers are well aware of the damage heat can do to a body. Four years ago, faced with a grieving mom talking about her child’s death from heat stroke after football practice, they passed a law to protect student-athletes from experiencing it.

But adults? As Willy Wonka put it so well: “You get nothing! You lose! Good day to you, sir!”

“It is an abomination that hundreds of thousands of workers in Florida continue to risk their lives by working in dangerous heat without relief. And the fact that lawmakers will not act to protect those workers’ lives is simply unconscionable,” said Gerardo Reyes Chavez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which has negotiated with employers to create the strongest heat protections in America.

Some like it hot

Now our soundtrack will play “I’m on Fire” by Bruce Springsteen.

While you hum along with The Boss, consider how many people were working outdoors in last year’s withering heat.

There were people building houses and stores, picking up garbage, fixing phone lines, working on boats, staffing the theme park rides, renting out cabanas at the beach, cleaning pools, taking your order at Chick-fil-a and picking vegetables. One estimate I read said 2 million people in Florida work outdoors, but that number seems low to me.

Unlike our fine legislators, these folks can’t do their jobs in air conditioned comfort. They have to do it while dealing with solar power shining down on their bodies.

 Jeff Goodell, author of “The Heat Will Kill You First,” via his website

Goodell contends that the disregard our constantly cooled politicians feel for these folks is rooted in one simple fact: “They’re brown people.”

For instance, the Florida Health Department reports that “150,000 to 200,000 migrant and seasonal farm workers and their families annually travel and work in Florida.”

Of course, that number maaaay have declined after the Legislature passed that rabidly anti-immigrant law last year — you know, the one that three lawmakers swore up and down was just political theater.

I disagree with him on this. I don’t think the politicians’ disdain is race-based. I think it’s all about class. These workers aren’t the wealthy folks that make campaign contributions. That means the politicos don’t see them as worth protecting. Our lawmakers seem far more interested in protecting the corporations that employ them.

When the bill came up in one House committee, the lobbyists who’d lined up to support it included well-dressed mouthpieces from the Association of Builders and Contractors, the Florida Farm Bureau, the Florida Home Builders Association, the National Utilities Contractors Association, and the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association.

Here’s where our soundtrack will play The Power Station’s Eighties hit “Some Like It Hot.” Remember that one? “Let’s turn up the heat till we fry!”

Safety last

In case you’re wondering why anyone would want workers to suffer in all that heat, let me tell you about who filed the bill.

 Republican State Rep. Tiffany Esposito, representing part of Lee County, via Florida House

The House sponsor of HB 433, Rep. Tiffany Esposito, R-Safety Last, heads a Lee County version of the Chamber of Commerce called Southwest Florida Inc. She’s made it clear that she’s pro-business and anti-regulation.

You may recall she was pushing a bill to cut the time that local governments have to review building permits, which also passed both the House and Senate.

She’s received hefty campaign contributions from the Florida Home Builders Political Action Committee and a whole bunch of builders and developers, including the PAC of Spring Hill builder Blaise Ingoglia, who’s also a state senator.

During one committee hearing, she mentioned that her own husband is in the construction business, too.

“Not only do they do daily safety talks, but once a month they take an entire day … where they are not making any progress on the job and do a safety briefing,” she said proudly.

But that’s like saying we don’t need speed limits on the interstate because her hubby is such a safe driver. She never explained why she wanted to block counties and cities from policing companies that are less focused on worker safety.

Nor did she explain why she filed this bill just in time to thwart the one county that was about to do something about the heat issue.

 We Count protest march for better working conditions in Miami-Dade

After last year’s heat wave, advocates from a group called We Count! , which works for better living and working conditions for immigrants, swung into action. They prodded the Miami-Dade County Commission to consider passing Florida’s first ordinance that would require heat protections for outdoor workers.

As first proposed, Miami-Dade would require construction and agriculture companies with five or more employees to guarantee workers access to water and give them 10-minute breaks in the shade every two hours on days when the heat index hits 90 degrees.

Employers would also train workers to recognize the signs of heat illness, administer first aid, and call for help in an emergency.

But then industry groups went to work on the commissioners and got these common-sense rules (ahem!) watered down (pause here for readers’ eyes to stop rolling). Then they persuaded the commissioners to postpone the vote. The whole thing was at last headed for a showdown this month.

But before that could happen, Esposito’s bill, filed two days after the ordinance was first introduced, killed it dead. Some lawmakers admitted they had a problem with that.

“We’re saying we don’t mind people dying,” said a clearly horrified Rep. Dotie Joseph, D-North Miami. No one told her she was wrong.

Too hot, baby

Next up on our soundtrack, it’s Kool and the Gang with “Too Hot.” Sing along! “Got to run for shelter, run for shaaaade…”

Professional hot air generators Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck used to rant about how evil lib’ruls were turning America into a “nanny state.” But the nannies never seemed to do much about the heat.

“Currently, there are no specific federal or state laws that provide heat exposure protections for outdoor workers,” said the House staff’s bill analysis on HB 433.

Year after year, some Florida lawmakers have proposed bills that would change that. The bills would have required everyone who employs outdoor workers to educate them about heat illness as well as provide workers with adequate drinking water, access to shade, and 10-minute recovery breaks in extreme heat.

Not one of those bills has ever made it out of committee.

As for the feds, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced in 2021 that it would draw up some heat-related regulations, but so far it hasn’t. All it’s posted are recommendations, which carry as much weight as the Pirate’s Code in “Pirates of the Caribbean”: “More what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.”

Goodell called OSHA’s foot-dragging “outrageous.” Coming up with rules for water and shade breaks shouldn’t be that hard, he said.

“You and I could probably work out a set in about 20 minutes,” he said, grossly overestimating my competence. “But industry has been lobbying against it, and that’s what’s causing the delay.”

Business lobbyists insisted to the Legislature that OSHA does regulate heat exposure. What they didn’t say is that OSHA penalizes employers only after something has gone horribly wrong.

For instance, in 2021, OSHA cited Valley Produce Harvesting and Hauling Company in Clewiston for exposing 49 sugar cane harvesting employees to “excessive heat, elevated temperature working conditions, direct sun radiation, and thermal stress.” One of the workers died from heat stroke.

Valley Produce was hit with a fine of $81,919. That did not, of course, bring the man back to life.

climate heat air
 Excessive heat fueled by climate change contributes to drought, wildfires, crop failures, and impaired human health. Getty Images

The Miami Herald reported that that was the company’s second fine for ignoring the dangers of heat. The first was just a year before. The company was fined $9,446 for letting an employee planting sugar cane in Belle Glade get so sick from the heat that he wound up in the hospital.

That sure seems like a failure on OSHA’s part. But during debate on the Senate version of the Florida bill, the sponsor, Sen. Jay Trumbull, R-Don’t Care, argued that, in the interest of uniform enforcement, OSHA should be the one to set the “overarching standard for the state.”

This marks quite a turnaround from all the times that Florida lawmakers have sneered at the feds’ other health-related departments, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I find it especially ironic because Trunbull’s family owns Culligan water franchises for the Florida Panhandle and South Alabama. He’s supplying water to office workers, but the heck with those poor folks who work outside. You get nothing!

The heat is on

Our soundtrack has one last number: Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On.”

This climate change problem is one that won’t go away, no matter how much our legislators snip-snip-snip at those words in state law. Our world just keeps getting warmer. The Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting this summer in Florida will bring above-normal temperatures and below-normal rainfall.

Unless Gov. Ron “I Love Fossil Fuels More Than I Love Chocolate Pudding” DeSantis suddenly sprouts a spine, he won’t veto this bad bill. Once he signs it into law, all these outdoor workers who want to stay employed will have to risk their lives without any rules protecting them.

I am not sure what it would take to change our lawmakers’ minds. But I have a suggestion for any working people who come into contact with them this summer.

Mess with their home air conditioning. Turn their office thermostat up and then break it. Fix their car’s A/C so it’s on the fritz.

If they call you for a repair appointment, explain that you’re booked solid for a month. No matter how much they plead, tell them they’ll just have to cope with it a while. Assure them they’ll live.

Let them see what it’s like to perspire heavily and wish for a drink of water and a bit of shade. Maybe that will change their tune.

Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site. AP and Getty images may not be republished. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of any other photos and graphics.

Craig Pittman
CRAIG PITTMAN

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the "Welcome to Florida" podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

CLIMATE POLLUTION REDUCTION GRANT APPLICATION (APRIL 2, 2024 COUNTY COMMISSION AGENDA, CONSENT AGENDA ITEM 20)

SEE CONSENT AGENDA NO. 20 ON ST. JOHNS COUNTY COMMISSION AGENDA FOR APRIL 2, 2024 --- CLOSER CONTROLS AND BETTER DATA REQUIRED FOR DECISIONMAKING 

https://stjohnsclerk.com/minrec/agendas/2024/040224cd/04-02-24CON20.pdf



 On Wednesday, March 27, 2024 at 11:04:40 AM EDT, Ed Slavin <easlavin@aol.com> wrote:



Dear Ms. Andrews, et al. al:
Would you please be so kind as to send me the Letter of Commitment, the accompanying list of County projects, and the Grants and Legislative Affairs Dept. review of the County's Climate Pollution Reduction Grant, to be funded pursuant to the Inflation Reduction Act?
Please place these documents on our SJC website, e.g, in association with draft resolution set forth as Consent Agenda Item 20 on the April 2, 2024 agenda, along with itemized estimated project costs for each project.
Thank you.

Florida Condo Sales and Prices Fall Due to Insurance, Association Costs, Redfin Says (Insurance Journal, March 18, 2024)

 Climate change, ocean level rise and high prices for insurance in an oligopolistic market are root causes.  Naturally, the insurance industry continues to spew propaganda.  NPR continues to feature insurance industry PR reps, as recently as last Friday, March 22, when the statewide Florida NPR weekly news program had only an insurance flak speak on insurance, just as our local NPR affiliate, WJCT, has done in the past.  Wonder why?  From Insurance Journal:


Florida Condo Sales and Prices Fall Due to Insurance, Association Costs, Redfin Says 

Insurance Journal, March 18, 2024

Condominium sales and prices in Miami, Jacksonville and Tampa and other parts of Florida have dropped over the past year, largely due to the soaring cost of property insurance and association fees, according to Redfin, a U.S. real estate and tracking service.

“The average cost of homeowners insurance across Florida increased by about 40% in 2023 alone, according to reports, and homeowners association (HOA) fees are multiplying for many condo buildings,” the Redfin report said. “In addition to slowing demand, the rising cost of insurance and fees are pushing prices down.”

The report is not surprising to insurance brokers and agents, who have seen some condominium associations’ property and liability insurance premiums quadruple, while policy limits have been slashed in Florida’s still-distressed market.

Legislation that would help to some degree, by allowing surplus lines to cover more condo associations, is still pending in the Florida Legislature. Senate Bill 1716 and SB 1503 were approved by second Senate committees in February. An effort to allow the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. to insure condo buildings with rental units has faced opposition from Citizens and has been left out of bills.

Another bill, creating a pilot program to provide wind-mitigation grants for condominiums, appears to be headed for passage this year, but it would apply only to buildings that are three stories or less.

Redfin’s data show that Florida condo prices and sales have fallen while prices have risen by 8.4%, on average, for the United States overall, from January 2023 to January 2024.

In Jacksonville, Florida, the recent median sale price for a condo was $254,000, a 6.5% drop from the previous year. Condo sales in Jacksonville showed the biggest drop for major Florida metro areas, falling more than 27% from the previous year, Redfin noted.

In Miami, the median price dropped 2.5% and sales fell 8.7%. The Orlando area saw prices drop 4.8% but sales rose by more than 6%. In Tampa, the median price declined by just 1% but sales slipped by 4.4%, the report noted.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

ANNALS OF DeSANTISTAN: Florida’s rule against updating gender on driver’s licenses may violate federal law. (WLRN)

RONALD DION DeSANTIS reminds me of the late Nixon Secretary of State Heinz "Henry" Kissinger once said, "the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer."  From WLRN:



Florida’s rule against updating gender on driver’s licenses may violate federal law

Originally published by The 19th

In Florida, transgender people can no longer update their driver’s license with their correct gender, according to a memo shared by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) in January. Although the rule does not apply to Floridians who have already updated their licenses, and should not affect first-time applicants, it still puts trans people at risk of discrimination in everyday interactions.

Multiple Democrats in Congress, as well as the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Florida and several legal experts, believe that the highway safety department rule likely takes Florida out of compliance with the Real ID Act — a federal law that will be enforced in 2025. But there’s currently no sign that the federal government agrees.

The Real ID Act, passed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, aims to make identity documents “consistent and secure” by setting shared security standards for licenses in all states. After May 2025, all state driver licenses will need to be Real ID compliant, and Americans will need a Real ID license to board domestic flights.

Among the requirements of the Real ID Act are that states include a person’s gender on each driver’s license.

The FLHSMV states that their new rule is in compliance with the Real ID Act. But the agency is defining gender as “biological sex,” which many states have tried to do in order to stop legally recognizing trans people in public life. That interpretation is not specified or sought in the Real ID Act.

READ MORE: Politifact FL: What Florida’s driver’s license policy change means for transgender people

“We do include gender on the credential as required by the Real ID Act,” FLHSMV communications director Molly Best said over email.

Florida’s policy ignores the complicated reality on the ground, said Cathryn Oakley, senior director of legal policy at the Human Rights Campaign. She expects that it will be a challenge for Florida to issue Real IDs under the state’s new policy.

Florida has been issuing Real IDs since 2010 — and receiving one requires bringing documentation to the DMV such as a passport and a Social Security card. These documents, beholden to federal rules that allow gender marker changes, may reflect a gender identity that Florida has now elected to ignore when it issues replacement licenses.

“If Florida is insisting on only giving out identification that is misgendering someone, those documents that are reflecting their correct gender are going to be in conflict and will hold up the process,” Oakley said. “They’re going to be relying on documents that have a different gender identity on them, potentially.”

In February, Rep. Maxwell Frost and seven other Florida Democrats asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to take action in response to Florida’s new policy. Frost and his colleagues pointed out that the directive equates gender to mean sex — and said that such a provision would create confusion and inconsistency that would hamper Americans’ ability to travel.

“Forcing Floridians to carry driver licenses that may not correspond to their gender is in direct conflict with the stated purpose of the Real ID Act,” Frost and his colleagues wrote in their letter.

The policy will lead to potentially dangerous situations where an individual’s Florida driver’s license and federal documents, like a passport, list two different genders, the representatives argued — which could lead to unnecessary detentions and unlawful stops. They urged the agency to pursue rulemaking under the Real ID Act to require that one’s gender or sex marker on a driver’s license match their gender on federal identification documents.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment on Florida’s policy or whether the agency plans to take action. Frost’s office also did not respond.

Equating gender to “biological sex,” or sex assigned at birth, has long been a staple of anti-trans legislation across the country. Within the past two years, conservative lawmakers have used that logic to push more extreme policies that would exclude transgender people from updating driver’s licenses and accessing public restrooms.

Florida’s policy is defining gender differently than the federal government does — which is what likely puts it out of compliance with the Real ID Act.

“They’re not wrong, necessarily, in saying that they are collecting gender, because they are,” said Simone Chriss, attorney with the Southern Legal Counsel in Florida and director of the organization’s transgender rights initiative. The FLHSMV memo published in January uses the word gender, she said, but the problem is that the agency has redefined gender to mean sex assigned at birth — which is inconsistent with other identification documents, including passports and other federal documents.

“I think it’s likely that it is violating the Real ID Act, but I don’t know what elements are required to prove that,” she said. Outside of the Biden administration telling Florida that they’re out of compliance, she’s not sure what else could be done to hold the state accountable.

Multiple Biden administration officials agreed on background that challenging the policy in court would be a promising course of action. None, however, indicated that the administration had plans to do so.

When asked, Department of Justice spokesperson Aryele Bradford replied, “We are declining comment.” The White House did not respond to multiple requests to comment on this story.

Oakley believes that the Florida policy and the federal government’s requirements under Real ID are on a collision course — and that at some point, someone in Florida will be denied a Real ID license that accurately reflects their gender identity.

“At that time, I would expect that litigation might be an excellent option and an enforcement action by the administration might be necessary at that point as well,” she said. “But as far as I know, that situation has not yet occurred.”

President Biden, who has achieved a number of substantial policies to undo former President Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, has also overseen a country that has grown increasingly hostile to transgender Americans, many of whom have begged him to use his platform and power to combat violence against them.

Before taking office, he vowed to pass sweeping LGBTQ+ anti discrimination protections in the form of the Equality Act, first introduced to Congress 50 years ago. He re-upped that call during his 2024 State of the Union address and reaffirmed support for transgender Americans.

Sasha Buchert, director of the nonbinary and transgender rights project at Lambda Legal, said her organization appreciates that inclusion in the president's address and added: “It remains imperative that this administration continue to translate those values into executive action."

Carlos Guillermo Smith, a former state lawmaker who is now senior policy advisor to Equality Florida, said the organization supports Rep. Frost’s effort to ask DHS to issue rules requiring states to be in alignment with federal policy.

Florida’s rule, he said, “blocks transgender Floridians from obtaining accurate state-issued identification, so that it's obviously denying their legal existence, but it also is out of compliance with the mission and spirit of the REAL ID Act, which is to make identity documents more consistent and secure.”

However, not all LGBTQ+ advocacy groups agree on whether Florida’s new license policy takes the state out of compliance with the Real ID Act — and if the Biden administration should take action on it.

“Whether termed as ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ or otherwise, the Real ID Act grants states wide discretion to establish their own guidelines for defining gender,” said Olivia Hunt, policy director of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), in a statement.

If the DHS were to require states to define gender in a specific way under the Real ID Act — a lengthy rulemaking process that would carry on beyond the necessary congressional deadline — that rule may have unintended consequences, she said.

Such a rule would potentially leave transgender people in non-compliant states unable to use their state IDs for airport travel and access to federal buildings after the May 2025 deadline, Hunt said. The NCTE advises trans people in states that don’t permit gender marker corrections on state IDs to obtain a passport instead, she said, since a passport is “a REAL-ID-compliant document.”

Florida’s policy may also be at odds with the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, the work discrimination case in which the court found gender identity to be a protected class of sex. As a result of Bostock, people in all states can seek legal recourse for employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

In Bostock, the Supreme Court found that discrimination against trans people is inherently sex discrimination, Chriss said — and refusing to allow transgender people to amend their gender marker is an example of that discrimination. Such a policy punishes people for failing to comply with sex stereotypes, she said.

“This draconian definition of sex that the state of Florida and others have come up with is at odds with Bostock, in that it literally redefines sex in a way that excludes transgender people and nonbinary people and intersex people,” she said.

Oakley sees a different problem. To her, the Bostock decision is not binding on the state of Florida in terms of making a determination about gender markers on driver’s licenses — but Florida appears to have differing interpretations of sex across various state laws. The state explicitly interprets existing protections against discrimination based on sex to include both sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, which tracks LGBTQ+ policy.

“The logic of ‘What do we think sex should be defined as, or is defined as?’ — those two things are in conflict here,” she said.

The Southern Legal Counsel in Florida is currently exploring options for a lawsuit against Florida’s driver’s license policy, Chriss said.

“It’s safe to say we will be challenging it. It’s just a matter of when and on what basis,” she said.


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