High Speed Rail is Alive in Florida

Whoever said high speed rail is dead in Florida hasn’t been following what’s going on in Tallahassee. The 2012 Legislative Session officially started early this year because Florida’s voting districts need to be re-drawn, re-configured, re-aligned and re-manipulated. 

This happens after a new census is completed and new population data is then carefully, meticulously, and cautiously dumped into the Legistron1200^® Super Computer. After the districts are drawn, and the lawsuits are settled, the State of Florida sells the new district shapes to the Rorschach Inkblot testing folks to pay down collateralized campaign obligations, highly complex derivative type financial instruments used to fund our state representatives’ campaigns.

This year while our legislators are waiting for the Legistron1200^® to be hooked up to a plotting printer, they have decided once again to tackle that all consuming problem that is on every Floridians mind. It is a topic that is all over talk radio, nursing homes, unemployment lines and water coolers every where.  It is now actually impacting tourist dollars. Rumor has it that just recently a resort manager testified before a special Florida legislative investigative committee. The manager, violently and uncontrollably sobbing during the testimony, said that he had lost countless bookings to his beach resort because Florida’s prisons were not private.

Supposedly, this shocking testimony outraged Sen. President Mike Haridopolos.  He was reported to have said to the manager, “Look at me when I am talking to you,” and then proceeded to tell him that this would be his personal call to rise from the ashes of a Hindenburg senate campaign. He promised that manager that he would no longer be the laughing stock of out of state resorts that stole his customers. On this day, some say, the pledge was made to try once again to privatize more prisons in Florida.

Very quickly a team of loyal lieutenants was mustered to a secret mahogany bunker and a strategy was devised. Tinfoil hats were passed out so that the committee could communicate with each other in secret. This was absolutely necessary. The members were reminded that just last year someone had cracked the code that was embedded in the state budget. Horror of horrors and egg on your face embarrassment this was not going to happen again.

Within a few weeks legislation was crafted that removed the cost benefit analysis from legislative bills. No longer would it be a felony to make a law without a Willy-Nilly-Class-IV-Audited-Financial-Pro-Forma-Green-Light-Go-For-The-Jack-Money-Saving-Analysis. The thinking here was that by divine right if a legislator sat on a PAC dollar it would make them and whatever they could conceive right.

On the other side of Tallahassee it was reported that Gov. Rick Scott invited some legislators over for lunch. Strangely these legislators didn’t have their tinfoil hats tuned to the right frequency. Sensing this the governor invited them to an arm wrestling match. He thought that certain neurons and synapses could be fine tuned through hand and arm muscle flexing and this would re-calibrate their hats. Unfortunately, it didn’t work and those legislators were promptly asked to leave and then handed a bill for the lunch.

The next night, some say, Sen. Haridoplos tip-toed through the capitol took documents from Sen. Mike Fasano’s office, changed the locks and sign on his door, and then sent an email explaining that Sen. Fasano was too rogue to be chairing the Senate Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations Committee.  Dialogue, openness, input and testimony are not the things that make a good chairperson in this senate session.

If this scenario seems far fetched then how else would you explain it?  What has possessed the members of our legislature? Fortunately, this play hasn’t reached the final act and perhaps some true leaders will emerge to restore some faith back to the citizens of Florida. If prisons should be privatized do it the right way, in the open and with dialogue and supporting analysis.

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Clearwater Neighborhoods Coalition