A tale of two piers: FEMA, favors, Kristi and Ian

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, center, speaks with Mayor Teresa Heitmann of Naples, Florida, and City Manager Gary Young on the city’s damaged historic pier on Aug. 29. (Photo:DHS/Tia Dufour)

Sept. 29, 2025 by David Silverberg

Who would have thought that sleepy, obscure Southwest Florida, including Collier County and the City of Naples, would move to the forefront of national attention under the second administration of President Donald Trump?

First, there was the establishment of the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp in far eastern Collier County. Implemented by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Alligator Alcatraz has drawn national scrutiny, condemnation, lawsuits and opposition. As intended, it has been a model for a whole gulag archipelago of anti-migrant concentration camps rising throughout the nation. Its fate is uncertain.

But now there’s a new focus: the City of Naples pier, which was destroyed in 2022’s Hurricane Ian.

New developments in the restoration of the Naples pier also serve to highlight the story of the Fort Myers Beach pier—and how each one is being treated illuminates larger trends in America today and the way government now operates.

Kristi Noem and the Naples pier

*The current state of the Naples pier, seen over the shoulder of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during her visit to Naples on Aug. 29. (Photo: Kristi Noem/Instagram)*

For those unfamiliar with it, the City of Naples is an incorporated municipality of roughly 20,000 people. It sits on the Gulf of Mexico at the southwestern tip of Florida and is primarily a tourist and leisure destination. Always a winter haven for the wealthy, its attractiveness to the millionaire—and billionaire—class has grown in recent years.

Among its attractions, Naples has an iconic pier that extends into the Gulf. Originally used for the offloading of supplies when Naples was founded and developed starting in the 1880s, it subsequently became a tourist attraction, a place above the beach to stroll and fish.

*The Naples pier in 2020. (Photo: Author)*

The pier has been destroyed by hurricanes several times, most recently by Hurricane Ian in 2022.

After Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Naples on Aug. 29, she immediately ordered $12 million in federal funds for its rebuilding, granted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that she heads.

It emerges that the grant was the result of city lobbying and the intervention of a major Naples-based Noem donor.

The entire story of the lobbying and Noem’s intervention is presented in an article titled “Kristi Noem Fast-Tracked Millions in Disaster Aid to Florida Tourist Attraction After Campaign Donor Intervened.”

The article was published last Friday, Sept. 26, by the non-profit investigative journalism newsroom, ProPublica, which, as it states, “investigates abuses of power.” ProPublica is known for its meticulous journalism. The article is based on emails and records obtained through public records requests, as well as interviews by its three authors: Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski.

The article details how Naples Mayor Theresa Heitmann, frustrated by delays in getting the pier addressed, contacted Naples cardiologist Dr. Sinan Gursoy, who had been a $25,000 donor to Noem when she was governor of South Dakota.

At Gursoy’s urging, “Noem flew to Naples on a government plane to tour the pier herself. She then stayed for the weekend and got dinner with the donor, local cardiologist Sinan Gursoy, at the French restaurant Bleu Provence,” according to the article. Noem stayed the weekend at the Naples Bay Resort & Marina.

She toured the wrecked pier with Heitmann and City Manager Gary Young.

Afterwards she posted on Instagram: “The iconic Naples Pier was destroyed in 2022, and the city is still waiting on answers from FEMA. They couldn’t even get permission to remove the old pier. I saw this failure first-hand today with Mayor Heitmann and Gary Young, and now the project is back on track.

“Americans deserve better than years of red tape and failed disaster responses. Under @POTUS Trump, this incompetency ends.”

It is important to note that the article does not allege any illegalities or criminal activity by any party.

However, it states: “Noem’s actions in Naples suggest the injection of political favoritism into an agency tasked with saving lives and rebuilding communities wiped out by disaster. It also heightens concerns about the discretion Noem has given herself by personally handling all six-figure expenses at the agency, consolidating her power over who wins and loses in the pursuit of federal relief dollars, experts said.”

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told ProPublica that the pier decision “has nothing to do with politics,” since Noem has visited the sites of other disasters. “Your criticizing the Secretary’s visit to the Pier is bizarre as she works to fix this issue for more than 1 million visitors that used to visit the pier,” she said.

*A visualization of the restored Naples pier. (Rendering: City of Naples)*

The Fort Myers Beach pier

Noem’s treatment of Naples can be contrasted with the experience of Fort Myers Beach, just 20 miles northward, whose tourist pier was also wrecked in Hurricane Ian.

Fort Myers Beach, like Naples, is a tourist-oriented, incorporated town on the Gulf of Mexico, although appealing to much smaller and less wealthy population than Naples, both in permanent residents and visitors. Its population is about 5,300 people.

This is the town where Hurricane Ian made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane and it did horrendous damage, virtually scraping buildings from their foundations all along the sea front and well inland.

The damage included its tourist pier. (Most towns along this stretch of coastline have piers because in their early days they were supplied entirely by boat.)

Like Naples, Fort Myers Beach officials are also trying to rebuild their pier.

Also, like Naples, Fort Myers Beach officials applied for FEMA funding. They were granted funding but only for the pier’s original structure. However, the city wants to expand and lengthen the pier, adding 415 feet so that it extends 1,000 feet into the water. They also want to widen it by four feet so it spans 12 feet.

This is expected to cost the city $17.1 million and the new parts won’t be covered by FEMA. To make up the shortfall, on Sept. 16, the Lee County Commissioners voted to seek $7 million from the Gulf Consortium, which manages compensation for the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. That money is provided under the RESTORE (Resources and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist Opportunities, and Revived Economies) Act of 2012, administered under Florida’s State Expenditure Plan.

“The project is proceeding as planned and designed,” Lee County spokesperson Betsy Clayton told the Fort Myers Beach Observer and Bulletin. “The plan all along was to use FEMA and Tourist Development Tax [funds].”

However, if BP funds are approved, “this would reduce the need for Tourist Development Taxes,” Clayton told the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Fort Myers Beach and Lee County officials can only sit and wait to hear.

*The restored Fort Myers Beach pier as conceived.* *(Rendering: Fort Myers Beach)*

Commentary: Winners and losers

While Fort Myers Beach officials can lobby for their hoped-for BP funds to move the application process along, it seems doubtful that they can arrange a lunch with Kristi Noem and get the full funding over a weekend, as the far richer City of Naples did.

The incident also highlights why allegations of favoritism and political interference are—or should be—a sensitive issue and why inequitable distribution of government funding can be so disruptive.

What is more, both piers are very small disasters for FEMA and Noem amidst a very large array of natural events. As of Saturday, Sept. 27, FEMA was handling 58 major disasters and seven emergency declarations all around the United States and territories.

Complaints about slow responses and bureaucracy have always plagued FEMA.

However, this is nothing new. After every disaster people demand that aid arrive instantly, which, other than help from immediate neighbors, it never does. Government at all levels takes time to work, even when a response is urgent. As for its bureaucratic and procedural slowness, FEMA is bound by laws and regulations and has always had to ensure that money is properly accounted for, monitored and distributed.

But there are new reasons for FEMA delays and bottlenecks, chiefly the result of Trump and Noem’s own actions. FEMA has been battered by layoffs and staff dismissals, cuts to funding and Trump’s repeated attacks on it to the point of calling for its disestablishment.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, FEMA was reformed and streamlined, with two Floridians taking a leading role: R. David Paulison, a former Miami fire chief, and Craig Fugate, who had been Florida’s chief emergency manager. Under their administration and that of other DHS secretaries, FEMA was reworked to provide more timely responses and be completely evenhanded and apolitical in its actions and funding. It also made a major effort to prevent future disasters through preparedness, mitigation and increased resilience.

In the first Trump administration there were fears that Trump was politicizing responses, withholding aid to Democratic states like California and reducing preventive measures that responded to climate change challenges. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a future administration, proposed that much more of the fiscal burden for disaster recovery fall on the states. (See “Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters.”)

On the campaign trail Trump repeatedly attacked the agency and its responses, especially in the wake of Hurricane Helene and flooding in North Carolina. Among these he leveled baseless accusations of political favoritism by President Joe Biden.

Once in office Trump has maintained the drumbeat of criticism and repeatedly threatened to eliminate FEMA as an agency. The agency’s layoffs and dismissals have hampered its functioning and ability to respond to disasters.

Noem from the beginning has been an aggressive operative for the Trump agenda, implementing cuts to the FEMA workforce, verbally attacking the agency, as in her Instagram post, and echoing Trump’s lies.

As the ProPublica article pointed out, she has also insisted on personally approving all FEMA expenditures over $100,000, making her personally responsible for them—and since $100,000 is a very small expenditure in government operations, it means she has to be personally involved in every small and petty purchase.

This requirement vastly slows down the process of approving any sort of aid or expenditures—unless a community can short-circuit the entire system by going straight to the Secretary as Naples did. Other communities awaiting assistance and with far greater damage have been left hanging, also hoping for the kind of aid that was previously processed through established, rationally conceived procedures.

It needs to be emphasized, as previously, that there are no allegations of illegality or criminality here and certainly not on the part of Naples City officials. They were confronted with frustrating delays and a lack of response from FEMA. They chose to take action, as should be expected of city officials.

According to the ProPublica article, Mayor Heitmann tried a variety of different avenues to address the issue. The City already employed some expensive Washington consultants to guide the process but this was unproductive. She wrote directly to FEMA, attempted to enlist Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a Naples resident, and finally decided to go directly to Noem through Gursoy, who had introduced Heitmann to Noem at a private party when Noem was governor.

When she contacted Gursoy, he agreed to “get on it.”

It has to be said: It was a good idea that produced results.

Interestingly, nowhere did Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.) appear to play a role in any of this even though his district encompasses both towns with their piers and he would logically be the first official to contact in pursuing the city’s interests in Washington.

However, Donalds has been notoriously lax in producing results for his district in Washington, DC and he is currently running for governor, so his attention to the district, already tepid, is now nearly non-existent.

If there is fault to be had it lies with Noem. In pre-Trump days, a secretary of Homeland Security when faced with this kind of request would have declined it. Perhaps he or she would have responded: “Thank you for this kind invitation. Due to the many requests and needs from deserving communities across the country, I have to respectfully decline. However, I will forward your request to the proper offices in FEMA.”

But that kind of rectitude and propriety is a thing of the past.

The bigger issues

Beyond problems created for FEMA aid and distribution caused by Trump, Noem and the Department of Government Efficiency when it was operating, Noem’s personal intervention in the Naples pier project illustrates much broader issues of governance, personalization and inequality among communities.

The United States has been unique in creating “a nation of laws, not men,” as President John Adams put it. Constitutionally, its institutions are intended to function according to law and objective facts, not the personal preferences of any one person.

That is not the case with Donald Trump who is openly and blatantly making governance about himself, whether that applies to prosecuting his perceived enemies, or levying tariffs, or silencing those who satirize him.

As Trump has driven toward a more authoritarian, dictatorial form of government that centers entirely on his personal decisions and predilections, his personalization of government operations is leaching down into lower levels of decisionmaking.

This is glaringly evident in the case of the Naples pier. Noem may say that she’s heroically cutting red tape and taking action—and she may actually think it—but it also sends a signal to all other distressed communities around the country that the way to get disaster aid is not to follow the law and procedure but to somehow reach her personally, with paid travel and a nice dinner (at the least). It announces that emergency management decisionmaking now officially depends on her whims and personal preferences. It also announces that the American people and their communities cannot depend on a government that previously responded to their distress as one of its primary duties.

There has always been an element of personality and lobbying in government operations, whether in the legislative or executive branches. It’s what created the vast lobbying industry that exists today at all levels of government. But lobbying and advocacy was always peripheral to the government’s essential decisionmaking. Now, with Trump’s personalization and weaponization of government, it’s central to it.

In 1655 King Louis XIV of France is reputed to have said, “L’État, c’est moi!”—“I am the state.” It has gone down in history as the ultimate expression of personal power. The American revolution was an explicit rebellion against that philosophy. The state was the Constitution, an expression of “We the people”—all Americans.

As Trump drives toward becoming the embodiment of the American state, situations like Noem’s favoring Naples, or for that matter Tom Homan, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taking cash for favors and then escaping any kind of law enforcement, are becoming more common.

The Naples pier is just one small example of the increasing personalization of government in America today. It’s also the embodiment of increasing stratification between affluent, well-connected communities and more obscure, modest and poorer communities in getting attention paid to their needs by a government originally formed to be of them, by them and for them.

So, while the focus in this instance may be on two closely-placed towns and their structures of planks and concrete jutting out into the waters of Florida, the gulf between them is actually broader, vaster, more profound—and, unfortunately, growing.

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Heavily redacted Alligator Alcatraz evacuation plan sheds little light on hurricane response

*A hurricane hits Alligator Alcatraz. (Art: AI for TPP/ChatGPT)*

Aug. 4, 2025 by David Silverberg

A draft hurricane evacuation plan for the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp in the Everglades released by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is so heavily redacted that the public and relevant officials cannot determine its effectiveness or use it for planning purposes.

(The full document is available for viewing and download at the end of this posting.)

“We can’t go by just blacked-out information in a 30-page document and just trust the DeSantis administration,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-25-Fla.) told CBS News Miami in an interview. “This is what is unacceptable. We absolutely need to have a clear, written, confirmed plan in hand from the Division of Emergency Management and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], who are responsible for these detainees at the end of the day.”

“The 33-page draft plan appears to detail alternate facilities that could be used in an evacuation, procedures for detainee transportation and other measures that would be enacted in the event of a powerful storm or other emergency,” stated state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-42-Orlando) in a Facebook posting. “But specific details are a secret. Officials blacked out almost all of the pages, citing exemptions in the state’s public records law that allow information about ‘tactical operations’ during emergencies to be shielded from disclosure.”

DeSantis released the draft “South Florida Detention Facility Continuity of Operations Plan” on Wednesday, July 30 in response to a report in The Miami Herald newspaper the same day that Alligator Alcatraz lacked an evacuation plan in the event of a major weather event.

“Legacy media made a mistake by concocting a false narrative that can so easily be disproven…” he posted on X. “Failed drive-by attempt…”

He released the draft to Florida’s Voice Radio, a conservative media platform, which headlined its X posting, “WRONG AGAIN! The Miami Herald reports FAKE NEWS that @GovRonDeSantis, @KevinGuthrieFL and @FLSERT have no “formal hurricane plan” for Alligator Alcatraz. Here it is.”

The Voice then posted two pages of the plan, the cover and a summary sheet. The full 33-page plan was then released to media outlets with extensive redactions. (The plan refers to Alligator Alcatraz as the South Florida Detention Facility (SFDF), its bureaucratic designation.)

The evacuation plan was not posted to any official state website that this author could determine. Since it is still a draft—essentially, the concept of plan—The Miami Herald was technically correct that Alligator Alcatraz does not have an evacuation plan.

Commentary: The hidden dangers of hiding

Because details of the plan remain secret, emergency managers, law enforcement, medical personnel and local officials cannot take it into account when they make their own hurricane plans should an evacuation be necessary, nor can they coordinate their efforts with those of authorities, either state or federal, at Alligator Alcatraz.

This is particularly acute for officials and law enforcement officers in Collier and Miami-Dade counties, where Alligator Alcatraz sits astride their mutual borders.

There is a historic precedent for a plan’s secrecy causing extreme harm during an emergency.

In 1906 the emergency plans for the city of San Francisco resided in the mind of one man: Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, who never shared them with anyone. Sullivan was incapacitated in the first shock of the earthquake that occurred in the early hours of April 18. Living on the top story of one of the city’s firehouses, he fell through the floor into the basement when the building broke apart, getting severely scalded by a broken radiator when he hit the bottom.

Sullivan never recovered from his injuries, dying three days later. As a result, first responders and officials had no guidance or direction in their response, which contributed to the city’s extensive damage when it was ravaged by fire.

As the 2012 book Masters of Disaster: The Political and Leadership Lessons of America’s Greatest Disasters by this author states: “…A critical lesson from the San Francisco earthquake and fire is that a plan is only as good as the people who know it. Disaster plans have to be known in advance by key decisionmakers and shared among those people who will implement them. They cannot rely entirely on a single individual and ultimately, they cannot be kept secret.”

Alligator Alcatraz has been so hastily thrown together and poorly conceived that nothing about it—not its detention, inmate processing, housing, food, shelter, or evacuation plan—can be judged at face value as acceptable.

Further, its secrecy in all aspects, whether the refusal to allow unannounced inspections, the difficulties of attorneys to meet their clients (currently the subject of a lawsuit), the blindsiding of local officials, and now the covertness of its evacuation plan make everything about it suspect. As an unfinalized draft, there is no telling which officials have input into the final product. Even then, if this is the final plan, its secrecy to all but a few officials renders it ineffective.

If Alligator Alcatraz is in all respects legal and proper, as DeSantis contends, it should be open to inspection, visits, detainee access, due process, public scrutiny, press examination and all the other legal standards of incarceration that govern correctional facilities in the United States.

And an evacuation plan that’s secret to all but a few is no plan at all.

Click on the button below to read and download the full “South Florida Detention Facility Continuity of Operations Plan” with redactions.

Draft South Florida Detention Facility Continuity of Operations Plan 7-30-25 Download

SWFL-sponsored bills passed in 2024 will aid disaster victims

Victims of disasters like the California wildfires, with damage shown here, will receive tax breaks thanks to a bill introduced by Rep. Greg Steube and signed into law by President Joe Biden. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Jan. 15, 2025 by David Silverberg

In an unprecedented feat for Southwest Florida members of Congress, two representatives succeeded in getting laws passed in the last session, a remarkable achievement.

Both pieces of legislation were propelled by the devastation of Hurricane Ian in 2022 and will benefit disaster victims in the future.

Rep. Greg Steube (R-17-Fla.) introduced and then shepherded to passage his Federal Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2023 (House Resolution (HR) 5683).

For the first time Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.) moved a legislative proposal all the way to enactment with the FISHES Act (Fishery Improvement to Streamline untimely regulatory Hurdles post Emergency Situation) (HR 5103).

Both bills were passed by the House and Senate and were signed into law; HR 5683 on Dec. 12 and HR 5103 on Jan. 4.

Ironically, both bills were enacted by President Joe Biden, whom both Steube and Donalds repeatedly attacked, denigrated and insulted during the preceding two years.

The Tax Relief Act

Of the two laws, Steube’s has the wider national impact. In the most current disaster situation, it will help victims of the California wildfires.

The bill provides tax relief for victims of disasters. Taxpayers can exclude compensation they receive for disaster losses from their income taxes and specifically losses caused by wildfires. It also extends tax relief to the victims of the East Palestine, Ohio train wreck in 2023.

Steube introduced the bill in October 2023, almost exactly a year after Hurricane Ian. It went through the committee process but after being reported out by the Committee on Ways and Means, which oversees tax measures, it got stuck when Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson (R-4-La.) didn’t advance it to the floor.

To overcome this roadblock, Steube relied on a rarely used procedure called a “discharge petition.” It provides that if a majority of members want legislation advanced it must go forward.

Steube and his staff began the laborious work of rounding up 218 member signatures, a notoriously difficult task in a fractious and partisan House of Representatives. However, the Democratic leadership chose to support it and by May, 189 Democrats and 29 Republicans signed the petition.

“I am grateful for the motivation and support of 217 of my bipartisan colleagues as we join forces to deliver tax relief for Americans all across the country,” Steube stated at the time. “That’s a testament to how important this issue is for ALL of our constituents.”

When the vote was taken on the floor the bill passed overwhelmingly, with a vote of 382 to 7. All seven nay votes were Republican. (Donalds didn’t vote on the measure.)

Following this the Senate took it up and passed it on a voice vote on Dec. 4.

It then went to President Biden, who signed it on Dec. 12.

The FISHES Act

In the 118th Congress Donalds was a prolific introducer of legislation; according to the official record of Congress, he introduced 61 bills, very few of which related to his district, which runs along the coast from Cape Coral to Marco Island.

Of all the bills, only four passed the House, one was voted down and the rest languished in committee, never advancing past their introduction.

However, the FISHES Act made it all the way through the House, Senate and onto the President’s desk.

Another product of Hurricane Ian, the bill is aimed at helping the fishing industry after disasters.

Under current law, after a disaster, funding to help fishing industry applicants has to be approved within 90 days. Once approved, it is up to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to sign off on a spending plan for disbursement within 90 days.

The bill speeds up the approval time to 10 days. If a grant applicant’s plan is incomplete, NOAA must tell the applicant what’s necessary to finish the application and then further tell the applicant when the plan is satisfactorily finished.

The plan can be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as long as its review doesn’t extend the timeline past 90 days.

The bill was backed by 49 cosponsors, 31 Republicans and 18 Democrats. It was also backed by 107 fishing-related organizations, associations and lobbying groups.

On Dec. 3 it passed the House by a voice vote. In the Senate it was approved by what is called “unanimous consent”—i.e., no one objected.

On Jan. 4, President Joe Biden signed it into law.

One question that will affect its implementation, though, is that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation master plan for the Trump administration, advocates elimination of NOAA. If in fact NOAA is disestablished, the authority for issuing funds will be called into question as well as implementation of the FISHES Act.

Analysis: District needs and distractions

To date Southwest Florida members of Congress have had a poor legislative record, particularly given the needs of the region.

These successes are rare exceptions.

Both Steube and Donalds are intensely ideological congressmen, pledging total loyalty to Donald Trump and his agenda.

In the past, Steube has largely been notable for introducing firearms-related legislation; i.e., making guns faster and easier to get (and allowing their presence in the US Capitol, pre-Jan. 6, 2021). Donalds is a prolific bill introducer on a wide range of topics unrelated to his district (most notably nuclear power and premium cigars) who has shown next to no interest in follow-up and passage. He largely spent the past two years stumping for Trump around the country.

However, the prevalence of disasters and environmental challenges to the region requiring federal attention clearly forced both to propose practical measures transcending ideology.

Steube’s tax bill in particular is a nationwide measure that will bring considerable relief to victims of natural disasters and it is particularly timely in light of the California wildfires now burning.

It bears repeating that Steube’s success would have been impossible without the support of the entire Democratic caucus and leadership, who put his discharge petition over the goal line—and President Joe Biden, who signed the bill into law.

Donalds’ measure is much narrower in scope and far less impactful to the public at large, just making assistance approvals a bit quicker for fishing industry victims.

Following these successes, both congressmen immediately reverted back to ideological combat.

Steube had another legislative success yesterday, Jan. 14, when the full House passed his Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 (HR 28) by a largely party line vote of 218 to 206. The bill establishes that in athletics receiving federal funds, “sex shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth”—i.e., it prohibits transgender athletes.

Steube’s other bills in the current Congress include HR 320 to eliminate the “marriage penalty” in certain tax brackets, HR 244 to provide military healthcare to eligible veterans, and HR 321 to expedite airport gate passes for caregivers, guardians and parents boarding airplanes.

Donalds has not introduced any legislation yet this year. In the early days of his past two terms he introduced and then re-introduced the Harmful Algal Bloom Essential Forecasting Act and the Combat Harmful Algal Blooms Act, both of which are of direct relevance to his district. However, he never followed up on either of them.

This year so far, his attention appears focused on preparing a run for the Florida governorship in 2026. (More about this in a future posting.)

This year will be a tumultuous one, given the change of presidential administrations. Steube, Donalds and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-26-Fla.) will all no doubt be working legislatively and, certainly, rhetorically to advance the Trump agenda both in Southwest Florida and nationally.

The thing for Southwest Floridians to watch as the year unfolds is whether these men can keep any of their attention focused on the real needs of their districts and constituents—without the impact of another hurricane.

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As Hurricane Helene lashes Florida coast, Rep. Byron Donalds votes to close government, starve FEMA and Flood Insurance program

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart supported funding; Rep. Greg Steube, Sen. Rick Scott were absent

*Rep. Byron Donalds (Photo: Office of Rep. Byron Donalds)*

Sept. 26, 2024 by David Silverberg

As Hurricane Helene began her run through the Gulf of Mexico, striking Southwest Florida and headed toward what is expected to be a devastating landfall in the Big Bend region, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.) voted against the major bill keeping the federal government functioning and providing funds for flood and disaster assistance.

The Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (House Resolution 9747) passed the House of Representatives yesterday, Sept. 25, by a vote of 341 to 82.

Immediately afterward, the Senate also approved the bill by a vote of 78 to 18.

The bill, having been passed by both the House and Senate, now goes to President Biden for signature.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) was absent for the Senate vote. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) voted for it.

The bill funds government operations through Dec. 20 and prevents a government shutdown on Oct. 1, the beginning of the 2025 federal fiscal year.

Of Southwest Florida’s two other congressional representatives, Rep. Greg Steube (R-17-Fla.) was absent. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-26-Fla.) voted for the bill.

While all 82 nay votes were from Republicans, 132 Republicans supported the bill as did 209 Democrats. No Democrats voted against it.

As part of its appropriations, the bill authorizes funding for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and allows the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to spend money from its Disaster Relief Fund as quickly as necessary to aid Americans in distress.

Both the NFIP and FEMA will be playing major roles in assisting Floridians and coastal communities in coming days as Hurricane Helene, which is expected to be a Category 4 storm when it makes landfall, pounds Florida’s coast.

President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for 41 of Florida’s 67 counties on Tuesday, Sept. 24, making them eligible for federal aid and picking up the tab for 75 percent of response and recovery expenses.

Donalds, who has kept up a steady and vigorous drumbeat of attacks on Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (D) on the X Internet platform and in media interviews favoring Donald Trump, had not posted any explanation or commentary on his vote as of this writing. Prior to Biden’s emergency declaration, he joined the rest of the Florida congressional delegation in calling for such a declaration.

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Project 2025 remake of FEMA would hit communities hard after disasters

Southwest Florida would face fiscal blow after nature’s damage

*A victim of Hurricane Ian in Venice, Fla., hugs a federal officer in gratitude for his help as part of the national response after the storm in 2022. (Photo: CBP/ Glenn Fawcett)*

Aug. 1, 2024 by David Silverberg

Updated Aug. 2.

While the head of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has departed, the ideas his Project proposes for completely remaking the federal government remain and could be implemented if Donald Trump is elected president a second time.

These changes would directly affect Southwest Florida in the event of a disaster like a hurricane—and one may be on the way as this is written. Today, Aug. 1, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) declared a state of emergency in 54 of Florida’s 67 counties in anticipation of a storm coming from the Caribbean Sea.

Among Project 2025’s proposals are changes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which would impose new and heavily burdensome costs on local governments and reduce federal support.

Changes at Project 2025

Project 2025 is a sweeping, 887-page tome of recommendations for presidential and legislative changes to be made under a conservative president, in this case, upon the election of Donald Trump. It is authored by the conservative, Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation think-tank. The proposals were accompanied by a drive that included recruitment of personnel, training for those people and a 180-day Playbook for immediate implementation should there be a change of administrations.

As people become familiar with its contents, it is increasingly a target for Democrats and critics alarmed by its radical proposals.

Although Trump campaign operatives repeatedly called on the Heritage Foundation to stop promoting Project 2025 as part of the campaign, the Heritage Foundation did not do so, leading to a rift between the camps.

On Tuesday, July 30, Paul Dans, head of Project 2025 stepped down from his position under pressure from Trump and his campaign.

“Friends and patriots: to every thing there is a season. We completed what we set out to do, which was to create a unified conservative vision, bringing together over 110 leading organizations united behind the cause of deconstructing the administrative state,” Dans wrote in an email to Heritage and Project 2025 staff.

“This tool was built for any administration dedicated to conservative ideals to utilize. The work of the project was due to wrap with the nominating conventions of the political parties. Our work is presently winding down, and I planned later in August to leave Heritage. Electoral season is upon us, and I want to direct all my efforts to winning bigly,” Dans wrote.

Despite Dans’ departure, the work of Project 2025 is expected to continue, as confirmed by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation.

“Project 2025 will continue our efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels—federal, state, and local,” Roberts stated in an X posting.

While Trump has denied and dismissed Project 2025, much of it was written by former officials in his administration and it is endorsed by Sen. James David “JD” Vance (R-Ohio), his vice presidential running mate. Vance wrote the foreword to an upcoming book written by Roberts based on Project 2025.

Moreover, if Trump is elected, his army of loyalists, enablers and aspirants will no doubt use Project 2025 as their policy roadmap regardless of what he says—and therein lies its potential impact on Southwest Florida.

Targeting FEMA

If changes proposed by Project 2025 are made to FEMA, Southwest Florida cities and towns would incur a far heavier financial burden for disaster preparedness, response and recovery than at present.

The proposals would especially impact this region vulnerable to hurricanes, algal blooms, wildfires and other natural disasters. This is especially relevant in the midst of what is expected to be a very active hurricane season.

Under Project 2025’s proposals, Southwest Florida communities—and all American communities—would have to bear a far larger proportion of the expense of a disaster or meet deductibles, as in the private insurance market.

Lee County communities just went through the trauma and uncertainty of retaining a discount for flood insurance, which if lost would have been extremely costly to local homeowners. The Project 2025 proposals would be similarly costly to local governments, which would have to pass on the costs to residents in new taxes to provide the funding for recovery.

A quick primer on the current system

To fully understand the impact and nature of Project 2025’s proposals, it helps to be familiar with the existing FEMA system of disaster response and support for individuals and communities.

The current FEMA system is fundamentally based on the belief that the American government has a duty to assist its citizens and communities when disasters occur that are beyond their immediate ability to handle. While it regards this as an integral role for the federal government, it relies on states and localities to first respond to the degree they can before relying on federal help.

The Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act is the law that defines and determines what officially constitutes a disaster. It also sets out the authorities and responsibilities of different federal agencies in responding to disasters.

The law was first passed by Congress as the Disaster Relief Act of 1974 and then substantially amended by then-Sen. Robert Stafford of Vermont in 1988. It has been amended further as definitions were refined and different forms of disaster added.

(Of relevance to Southwest Florida has been the effort, started under then-Rep. Francis Rooney in June 2019, to include harmful algal blooms as officially designated disasters. Rooney’s successor, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.), although reintroducing the bill as the Combat Harmful Algal Blooms Act (HR 1008), has not pursued it with any effort during his time in office.)

When a disaster strikes, state and local officials determine if they need federal assistance. If they do, they put in a request for aid and the President (actually, FEMA and the Office of the President) approves the request and makes a disaster or emergency declaration. A major disaster declaration allows a wide variety of assistance, while an emergency declaration provides federal supplements for local efforts, for example to stave off a worse disaster or protect property and public health.

There are three types of federal assistance:

Individual Assistance helps individual survivors with immediate needs like shelter and repairs.

Public Assistance is a government-to-government program. It provides federal grants to state, local, tribal and territorial governments. It helps with a wide variety of activities like restoring public infrastructure and providing life-saving emergency protection.

Hazard Mitigation helps with the rebuilding of communities to be stronger, more resilient and prepared for future hazards.

Of great importance to Southwest Florida is federal assistance for debris removal, which has been a major expense for all communities hit by hurricanes.

After the immediate response, FEMA aids communities with their rebuilding and recovery. This is guided by the National Disaster Recovery Framework.

The Lee County experience

The impact and importance of federal support can be seen in Lee County in the aftermath of 2022’s Hurricane Ian.

The Lee County government put the estimated cost of Hurricane Ian in the county at $297.3 million. Over half of this was for debris removal, whose cost came to $156.3 million.

According to Lee County, FEMA approved $477.7 million in Individual Assistance. That included $299 million for repair and replacement assistance and $6 million in rental assistance for 23,704 households. Moreover, 775 households were approved for direct housing assistance.

When it came to Public Assistance, Lee County received $293.9 million in funding. This aided in repairing the Fort Myers Beach Water Reclamation Facility, lift stations for sewage flow, repairing the Lee County Sports Complex and Jet Blue Park, and the Bonita and Lover’s Key beaches.

Looking toward the future from 2023 when Lee County’s report was written, it was estimated that improving and rebuilding Lee County communities would cost $293.9 million, which would be covered under the FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program.

These were substantial funds provided to Lee County by FEMA. They have made the rebuilding of communities like Fort Myers Beach possible at a much faster pace than would be otherwise possible.

Project 2025 would change that.

What Project 2025 would—or wouldn’t—do

The changes to FEMA are contained in the section of Project 2025 that covers homeland security, since FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

This section appears under the byline of Ken Cuccinelli.

Project 2025 observes that while FEMA is the lead agency for preparing and responding to disasters, “it is overtasked, overcompensates for the lack of state and local preparedness and response, and is regularly in deep debt.”

Project 2025 blames the Stafford Act for a shift in disaster response from the states and localities to the federal government and complains that FEMA is too “state-friendly.”

In particular, it takes aim at a “per capita indicator.” The indicator gives FEMA the authority to set a threshold below which states and localities are ineligible for public assistance, i.e., the level under which a community won’t get FEMA assistance if its damages are too small.

FEMA, argues Project 2025, sets the indicator so that most communities will get FEMA assistance.

What is more, it states, the indicator has “failed to maintain the pace of inflation and made it easy to meet disaster declaration thresholds. This combination has left FEMA unprepared in both readiness and funding for the truly catastrophic disasters in which its services are most needed.”

Project 2025’s solution is to make it tougher to get federal aid.

“FEMA should raise the threshold because the per capita indicator has not kept pace with inflation, and this over time has effectively lowered the threshold for public assistance and caused FEMA’s resources to be stretched perilously thin,” it states.

If the indicator can’t be raised there’s another option: “Alternatively, applying a deductible could accomplish a similar outcome while also incentivizing states to take a more proactive role in their own preparedness and response capabilities.”

“In addition, Congress should change the cost-share arrangement so that the federal government covers 25 percent of the costs for small disasters with the cost share reaching a maximum of 75 percent for truly catastrophic disasters.”

In other words, states and localities should bear the greatest financial burden for disaster preparation, response, recovery and resilience and that’s where Project 2025 would put it.

For Southwest Florida, this would be…well, in a word…a disaster.

The impact

Under Project 2025 communities already reeling under the devastation of a disaster would be hit with far higher costs and financial burdens for response and recovery than at present. They could look to FEMA for assistance but that assistance would be much lower and more grudging than at present.

FEMA would go from “state-friendly” to “state-stingy.”

Imagine Lee County in the wake of Hurricane Ian under Project 2025 guidelines.

Lee County would have had to bear the cost for most of the $297.3 million in damages from the hurricane. It would have been a staggering burden; in fact, it could have driven the county into bankruptcy—or at the very least the recovery would be even slower and more painful than at present. People would suffer longer. As it is, Lee County’s recovery has been agonizingly slow for some people. Under Project 2025, it wouldn’t recover for decades.

The other Project 2025 alternative, having communities pay deductibles, would be equally burdensome. At a time when their communities were flattened by hurricanes or tornadoes and digging out, towns and cities would be ineligible for aid at the very moment they need it most unless they met arbitrary deductible thresholds.

Lastly, imagine a system in which “small” disasters get only 25 percent in federal support. Was Hurricane Ian a “small” disaster or a “truly catastrophic disaster?” Anyone on the ground knew it was truly catastrophic—but in the full spectrum of disasters handled by FEMA it might not be considered such and so would not have gotten the support for a full recovery. Every new disaster would leave devastated populations wondering: was this “a truly catastrophic disaster” that will get federal help?

The evolution of caring

In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge included this in his annual message to Congress:

“The Government is not the insurer of its citizens against the hazard of the elements. We shall always have flood and drought, heat and cold, earthquake and wind, lightning and tidal wave, which are all too constant in their afflictions. The Government does not undertake to reimburse its citizens for loss and damage incurred under such circumstances. It is chargeable, however, with the rebuilding of public works and the humanitarian duty of relieving its citizens from distress.”

Coolidge was writing in the midst of a truly horrendous Mississippi River flood that devastated the states along its banks and displaced millions of people.

Throughout that disaster, which lasted over months, he refused to visit the site of the floods, wouldn’t request additional appropriations from Congress, wouldn’t make any appeals for voluntary donations and for all intents and purposes ignored the whole event.

It’s a response unthinkable today. But he was reflecting the attitudes of the time. People were on their own, he was saying, and so were their towns, counties and states.

That attitude changed with the Great Depression and the New Deal.

The Great Depression was a natural disaster only in that evoked natural feelings of panic and fear. But it was a disaster that overwhelmed people and even their best individual efforts had virtually no effect.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt altered the national attitude. For the first time the federal government felt an obligation to aid its citizens in their times of need, when they couldn’t cope with a disaster with the tools at hand. (For a full history, see the author’s book, Masters of Disaster: The Political and Leadership Lessons of America’s Greatest Disasters, available on Amazon Kindle.)

More specifically, each natural disaster has led to greater federal involvement to help people crushed by overwhelming events.

In 1950, Congress passed the Federal Disaster Relief Act authorizing federal assistance if a governor requested help and the president approved by declaring a major disaster.

In 1968 the National Flood Insurance Act was signed into law to aid people afflicted with flooding (and which is another program that Project 2025 proposes ending. For more details see “Project 2025 would end federal flood insurance, devastate Southwest Florida and coastal communities.”)

In 1974, after tornadoes struck across 10 states resulting in six federal disaster declarations, Congress passed the Disaster Relief Act.

Then, in 1980, after Mount St. Helens erupted and blanketed parts of the West in volcanic ash, for the first time the federal government assumed 75 percent of the cost of the recovery.

The capstone was the 1988 passage of the Stafford Act, which has been updated since.

Commentary: Project 2025 makes Americans vulnerable again

Project 2025 is critical of FEMA from a banker’s perspective. It correctly points out that FEMA’s emergency fund sometimes gets low. In the Project’s view, that is because FEMA is overly generous to states and localities.

But when this last happened, in August 2023, it was because FEMA was handling multiple disasters including Hurricane Idalia—which especially hit Florida—and wildfires in Maui, Hawaii. As a result its funding had to be replenished by an emergency appropriation of tax dollars.

(It should also be noted that Southwest Florida’s congressman, Rep. Byron Donalds, has consistently voted against appropriations bills that would replenish FEMA funding.)

What the Project 2025 analysis neglects is that FEMA is not a bank. It does not operate a profit and loss balance sheet. It doesn’t charge interest.

FEMA’s mission is to “help people before, during and after disasters.” That means assisting them when they’re in need and usually at the worst times of their lives. It’s not a loan or a handout.

Federal disaster assistance is one of the greatest benefits of being an American citizen.

What’s more, it is what a citizen’s taxes buy. As has been said in these pages before, taxes are a two-way street. A citizen pays into the general pot but gets appropriate benefits as needed.

In this case people’s taxes buy them help when they need it as a result of a natural disaster.

There’s nothing wrong with that, nor is there anything wrong with replenishing FEMA’s emergency funds when there are so many disasters that those funds run low.

Lastly, as for FEMA failing to promote state and local preparedness and response, as Project 2025 charges, the Project’s authors might ask the city officials of Cape Coral, Bonita Springs, Fort Myers Beach and Lee County whether FEMA insists on local preparedness, readiness and resilient rebuilding.

Project 2025 wants to leave American citizens, states, territories, tribes, counties, cities and towns financially naked and vulnerable to natural disasters. It wants to go back to Calvin Coolidge’s cold indifference to Americans’ suffering and return to a time when there was no federal help of any kind.

Moreover, it wants to do this at a time when climate change is making disasters of all sorts more frequent, more intense, and more devastating—and there is no longer any reversing this, it is the new normal. The state of Florida may think it can eliminate climate change by banning mention of it in textbooks and official documents but that’s not the way reality works, as its current state of emergency demonstrates.

Project 2025 is correct in one assertion: FEMA is indeed “overtasked.” But far from gutting FEMA and its capacity to help Americans and their towns and cities, FEMA needs buttressing and support. It already has a big mission and that mission is only going to get bigger.

If Donald Trump is elected and Project 2025 implemented by his sycophants, enablers and loyalists, when it comes to disasters they won’t make America great again.

Instead, they’ll make it weaker, more vulnerable and more devastated— and they’ll do it in Southwest Florida just as much as they’ll do it everywhere else they can.

That is, unless the American people stop Project 2025 at the ballot box this November.

To subscribe to FEMA’s Daily Operations Briefing, click here. This free service provides a daily overview of American disasters, hazards and FEMA responses. (It’s especially informative during hurricane season.)

Liberty lives in light

Joe, Ron, Don: Who were Idalia’s winners and losers?

*Gov. Ron DeSantis, President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump. (Illustration: Neil Freese, UC Berkeley)*

Sept. 9, 2023 by David Silverberg

Natural disasters create political winners and losers.

As a general rule, disasters favor incumbents—but only if they perform well.

Florida has just been through Hurricane Idalia. So how well did the three of America’s top politicians (two in Florida) perform in response? And what are the likely political consequences of their actions?

Joe on the spot

*President Joe Biden, with a map of Florida, coordinates the federal response to Hurricane Idalia. (Photo: White House)*

For a sitting president, disasters are dicey propositions. A responsible president wants to be alert and aware of all developments and take whatever actions are necessary to aid and support the victims and the response. He wants to do all this without seeming to exploit the situation for political or partisan benefit.

A good example of this occurred in 1969 when President Richard Nixon stayed in touch with affected governors in the run-up to Hurricane Camille. As the storm approached the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama Gulf coasts, Nixon appointed Vice President Spiro Agnew to personally handle states’ needs. Mississippi Gov. John Bell Williams received a phone call from Agnew. “…The Vice President of the United States wanted us to know in advance that they stood ready and anxious to assist us in any way that they could,” Bell said afterwards.

Today the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) handles all the preparing, prepositioning, mobilizing and coordinating when a storm is about to strike. (Of course, sudden, unexpected disasters like the Maui wildfires pose different challenges.) There are well-established protocols before, during and after the event.

Once the disaster has occurred all officials face new choices. High-profile executives like presidents, governors and mayors want to get a sense of the scope of the disaster with a personal visit and provide comfort and show concern for the victims. Against this is the concern that a visit will interfere with operations and rescues. Moreover, failing to visit in person or waiting too long can seem to signal indifference or neglect.

An example of one of the worst presidential responses to a disaster came in 2005 when President George W. Bush, chose to fly over the stricken city of New Orleans in Air Force One. He hadn’t responded to the storm when it struck the city days earlier and his distance and the superficiality of his flyover suggested callousness and disengagement. It was no substitute for a visit on the ground.

Biden has seen many disasters and responses during his time as a US Senator, Vice President and President, so Hurricane Idalia was nothing new. Just ten days before Hurricane Idalia hit, he visited wildfire-stricken Maui.

Before the storm, Biden was in contact with all the governors of the likely affected states. After speaking to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) he prepared an emergency declaration so Floridians would get the federal support they needed once the hurricane struck.

With Biden’s approval, FEMA surged emergency personnel into the affected area and got endangered residents out.

“As a matter of fact, I have asked that [FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell] get on a plane and leave for Florida this afternoon,” he announced on Aug. 31. “She will meet with Governor DeSantis tomorrow and begin helping, conducting the federal assessment at my direction.”

He also told the press corps: “I let each governor I spoke with know that if there’s anything — anything the states need right now, I am ready to mobilize that support of what they need.”

He also convened a Cabinet meeting to make sure that all federal departments and agencies contributed to a “whole-of-government” response.

That may seem like an obvious action to take but that hasn’t always been the presidential response in past disasters.

Particularly dicey was Biden’s relationship with DeSantis, who as a Republican presidential candidate had been relentlessly criticizing and attacking him. However, the two had experience working together on other disaster responses: the Surfside building collapse in 2021 and Hurricane Ian in 2022.

Biden was asked directly about this by a reporter: “Mr. President, Governor DeSantis is also running for president. You are running for reelection. Do you sense any politics in your conversations with him about this issue?”

Biden answered: “No, believe it or not. I know that sounds strange, especially how — looking at the nature of politics today.

“But, you know, I was down there when…the last major storm. I spent a lot of time with him, walking from village to — from community to community, making sure he had what he needed to get it done. I think he trusts my judgment and my desire to help. And I trust him to be able to suggest that he’s… .This is not about politics. This is about taking care of the people of his state.”

Biden came to Live Oak, Fla., on Saturday, Sept. 2 to see Idalia’s damage for himself.

“I’m here today to deliver a clear message to the people of Florida and throughout the Southeast,” he said, standing in front of a home with a massive, downed tree in the background. “As I told your governor: If there is anything your state needs, I’m ready to mobilize that support — anything they need related to these storms. Your nation has your back, and we’ll be with you until the job is done.”

Of course, DeSantis wasn’t present to hear those words.

Ron returns

*Gov. Ron DeSantis gives one of his press conferences regarding Hurricane Idalia. (Photo: NBC)*

On Saturday, Aug. 26, while still campaigning in South Carolina, DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 33 Florida counties. This allowed the Florida National Guard to mobilize 1,100 troops and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to assign officers and mobile command units to hurricane response. Throughout the state, government agencies prepared for the impact, including the Florida Highway Patrol and the departments of Commerce and Transportation.

On Sunday, Aug. 27, DeSantis suspended campaigning and returned to Florida to oversee the Idalia response.

“We’re locked down on this. We’re gonna get the job done. This is important, so people can rest assured,” DeSantis told reporters during a briefing at the state Emergency Management Center. Asked where he’d be for the next week, he replied: “I am here. I am here.”

DeSantis wasn’t just returning to a hurricane; on Aug. 26 a racist gunman in Jacksonville randomly killed three black shoppers at a Dollar General store before committing suicide. On Sunday DeSantis was booed when he attended a vigil honoring the dead.

But the hurricane was an ongoing and impending threat that demanded attention. In the days that followed, as Idalia strengthened, traveled up the coast and made landfall in the Big Bend region, DeSantis focused on his gubernatorial duties, regularly briefed the media, and warned Floridians of potential dangers and urged precautions. He seemed in command, both of the forces on the ground and of the facts.

DeSantis didn’t just suspend his in-person campaigning, he also suspended his hostility to Biden.

“When you have situations like this, you’ve got to put the interests of the people first,” DeSantis told reporters in Tallahassee the next day. “There’s time and a place to have [a] political season, but then there’s a time and a place to say that this is something that’s life-threatening. This is something that could potentially cost somebody their life, that could cost them their livelihood. And we have a responsibility as Americans to come together and do what we can to mitigate any damage and to protect people.”

He appeared authoritative and knowledgeable and when Idalia made landfall and moved on, the DeSantis campaign was ready to make the most of it.

Andrew Romeo, DeSantis campaign communications director, issued a campaign memo praising DeSantis in for “Strong Leadership” and a “Swift Response.”

In the memo, obtained by Florida Politics reporter Jacob Ogles, which provided talking points for DeSantis supporters, Romeo stated: “The DeSantis Administration helped guide the state through another historic storm.” He noted that, “As part of that effort, Ron DeSantis appropriately left the presidential campaign trail to focus on the needs of Floridians.”

Democrats were unimpressed. “It’s the bare minimum,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-42-Orlando). “In the context of responding to a hurricane, of course you’re supposed to be here and to help communicate what first responders are doing. In the context of innocent people being murdered for the color of their skin by a racist gunman, the bare minimum is to express condolences with loved ones.”

After Idalia passed, DeSantis faced a new choice: how to react to Biden’s visit? Now that the immediate emergency was over, it was time for politics.

On the one hand, DeSantis and Biden had seemed to reach a truce in order to serve Floridians.

Much depended on where and when the President would visit.

According to FEMA Administrator Criswell, the White House took operational issues into consideration when choosing the place and time and informed DeSantis in advance.

“When the president contacted the governor to let him know he was going to be visiting … the governor’s team and my team mutually agreed on a place that would have minimal impact into operations,” Criswell said on the program CNN This Morning. “Live Oak, you know, the power is being restored. The roads aren’t blocked, but there’s families that are hurting there.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed Criswell’s account, saying: “The president spoke with the governor. It was an understanding. The president said to him he was coming to Florida. We never heard any disagreement with it.”

Biden said he expected to meet DeSantis when he arrived.

But the day before, DeSantis announced that he wouldn’t be present.

“We don’t have any plans for the Governor to meet with the President tomorrow,” Jeremy Redfern, DeSantis’ press secretary, announced in a press statement. “In these rural communities, and so soon after impact, the security preparations alone that would go into setting up such a meeting would shut down ongoing recovery efforts.”

Once he was in Live Oak, Biden was asked if he was disappointed that DeSantis was absent.

“No, I’m not disappointed,” Biden responded. “He may have had other reasons because…but he did help us plan this. He sat with FEMA and decided where we should go, where it’d be the least disruption.”

In pointed contrast, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a bitter rival of DeSantis, was present and had fulsome praise for Biden.

“First off, the President did a great job with the early declaration before the storm hit the coast. That was a big deal. It helped all these first responders,” said Scott, who as governor had weathered Hurricane Irma. “And then with how fast you approved through FEMA the individual assistance, the public assistance and debris pickup is a big deal to everyone in these communities.”

Biden, for his part, said he was “very pleased” that Scott was present even though politically they do not agree on “very much at all.” That was especially gracious given that last year after Hurricane Ian and just before his visit to Southwest Florida, Scott called Biden “a raving lunatic.”

Another of DeSantis’ political rivals had sharp words for his absence from the president’s visit—and he spoke from hard experience.

*Then-Gov. Chris Christie greets President Barack Obama in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey. (Photo: NJ Governor’s Office)*

On Oct. 29, 2012, amidst a presidential campaign, Hurricane Sandy came ashore in Brigantine, NJ as a Category 3 storm and did tremendous damage to the Garden State and neighboring New York City. Republican Chris Christie was then the governor and was considered a leading vice presidential candidate for nominee Mitt Romney and a potential contender in 2016.

When Democratic President Barack Obama, running for re-election, offered help to the stricken state, Christie eagerly accepted it and praised the president, whose assistance he called “outstanding.”

“I want to thank the president personally for his personal attention to this,” said Christie at the time, adding later that Obama kept all his promises. When Obama arrived on the last day of October to see the damage for himself, Christie hugged him and faced scorn and vituperation from fellow Republicans ever afterwards.

So Christie, a presidential candidate this year, knew whereof he spoke when it came to disasters and presidential visits.

“Your job as Governor is to be the tour guide for the President. It’s to make sure the President sees your people, sees the damage, sees the suffering, what’s going on, and what’s going to need to be done to rebuild it. You’re doing your job. And unfortunately, he put politics ahead of his job. That was his choice,” Christie said of DeSantis in a television interview.

He continued: “I’m not the least bit surprised that that’s what he chose to do. You’re the governor of the state. The President of the United States comes and you’re asking the President of the United States or the Congress for significant aid, which Ron DeSantis is doing, and especially if you voted against it ten years ago for Sandy aid, you should have been there with the President to welcome it.” That last reference was a bit of payback for DeSantis’ vote when he was a congressman to deny an appropriations bill that helped New Jersey.

DeSantis maintained he spent the day touring other places. “I was in the communities that were the hardest hit by the storm. And Joe Biden didn’t go to those areas, I think correctly, because the whole security apparatus would have shut down the recovery. So I was exactly where I needed to be,” DeSantis said in a television interview at the end of the day.

Missing man

Former President Donald Trump did not have any executive authority or operational responsibilities during Hurricane Idalia. However, he was a Florida resident and a presidential candidate, so his actions and pronouncements were in the public domain.

Like both Biden and DeSantis he had experience with disasters. On Sept. 14, 2017 he visited Fort Myers and Naples after Hurricane Irma, accompanied by his wife Melania and Vice President Mike Pence. He offered words of thanks and encouragement to first responders and in East Naples handed out sandwiches. This followed a visit to Texas and Louisiana to see the effects of Hurricane Harvey, which had struck 16 days earlier. Then, on Oct. 4, he visited Puerto Rico, which had been struck by Hurricane Maria. It was on that occasion that he infamously tossed paper towels to a church full of hurricane victims.

This year, Trump did not take any actions or make any statements related to the hurricane, which bypassed his Palm Beach home, Mar-a-Lago.

He did, however, maintain a drumbeat of criticism of DeSantis on his Truth Social media platform, ranging from floating a false statement that DeSantis had dropped out of the race to attacking him for Florida’s high insurance rates.

“Trump ignored the storm for days, instead posting a litany of insults aimed at his political adversaries while highlighting positive poll numbers for his campaign,” reported Max Greenwood in the Tampa Bay Times on Aug. 31.

“By the time Trump mentioned Hurricane Idalia in a Wednesday afternoon post, he had already posted more than 140 times on Truth Social since Monday on a multitude of subjects, even dredging up an old letter the late actor Kirk Douglas sent him in 1998. (The count of Trump’s posts includes times in which he reposted messages from other accounts.)

“Kirk was a real Movie ‘Star,’” Trump wrote Wednesday, before mentioning the hurricane. “Not many left today. They are mostly woke and weak!”

When asked about Trump’s hurricane-related silence at one of his press conferences, DeSantis shrugged it off. “Not my concern. My concern is protecting the people of Florida, being ready to go,” he said.

Analysis: Winners and losers

Of the three politicians, DeSantis faced the most difficult choices: one was to decide whether to suspend his campaign and return to Florida and the other was whether to meet Biden when he visited.

The decision to return to Florida was relatively easy: First, he belonged in Florida at that moment. Secondly, if he had not returned, he would have faced blistering criticism from all quarters and been hammered for not being presidential. It would have also damaged the state and its people. While the lieutenant governor could have handled the crisis, an absent governor would have seemed cowardly and hurt the response. His already declining poll numbers would have plummeted. It might have meant the end of his candidacy. Returning was the obvious and proper thing to do.

The Biden visit presented a very different challenge. With the storm passed, political considerations were paramount. DeSantis and his people had to worry that perhaps the governor’s relationship with the President had become too close and might alienate Republican primary voters. After all, they had the example of Christie’s 2012 embrace of Obama as an example of extreme Republican voter retaliation for a momentary human act of bipartisan cooperation (as well as Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s 2014 Obama embrace).

Also, greeting the president might have made the defiant, anti-Biden DeSantis seem too subservient to a president he had repeatedly insulted and denigrated and might be running against. And Biden would have completely eclipsed the governor, who would have had to respectfully and silently stand behind him as he spoke.

So the choice was: greet the president for the sake of Florida and face Republican primary voter retaliation, or avoid the president and face media and opposition criticism.

Whatever the exact calculation, DeSantis chose to snub Biden—and snub it was, the DeSantis camp’s lame excuses notwithstanding. It made DeSantis seem petty, overly political and irresponsible, as Christie pointed out. It added to his image of meanness and arrogance.

The snub has already overshadowed an otherwise capable performance as governor in a crisis. People expect calm, command, and competence from their leaders during events like hurricanes and in this DeSantis delivered. His job was to make the emergency declarations, authorize the proper state agencies to take action and facilitate the response. From all evidence, he did this.

The question for DeSantis is not whether this will find favor with Floridians since they’ve already voted and he won’t be running again for governor. The real question is whether an effective performance as governor in Florida will have any resonance at all with Republican primary voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. South Carolinians know from hurricanes; Iowans and New Hampshirites, not so much. They’re more likely to remember a presidential hug than a hurricane response, so snubbing Biden came at less cost to DeSantis than the value of a meeting for the state of Florida.

Whether Idalia made DeSantis a winner or loser will be told in polls in the days to come and especially in the primaries and caucuses next year, which will determine his presidential fate.

For Biden, Idalia completely confirmed the truth that disasters, if competently handled, favor incumbents

From the outset, Idalia posed no political threat to Biden unless he utterly flubbed the response—which he certainly did not.

In natural disasters, presidents are expected to offer and authorize support for affected areas, coordinate among states and governors, ensure as smooth a federal response as possible and provide comfort and encouragement to victims. Biden did all these things.

While Biden is being criticized for his age, his long governmental experience, political savvy and past disaster management showed in his competence and responsiveness to the Idalia challenge. He knew to stay out of the way of the operators in FEMA and on the ground. He offered a non-partisan hand of cooperation to DeSantis despite the latter’s previous attacks on him. He was high-minded and gracious in the face of an obvious, though petty, snub. He showed care and concern for everyday Floridians hurt by the storm.

It’s not as though he couldn’t get his partisan digs in but they were subtle and dignified yet telling. For example, by making perfectly clear that his visit had been coordinated with DeSantis beforehand he reinforced the perception of DeSantis as petty and politically-obsessed. But Biden did it without anger or rancor.

Clearly, Biden emerged from the storm a winner.

As noted before, Donald Trump had no operational responsibilities or command authorities during the storm. Nonetheless, he is a presidential candidate, a public figure and a Floridian. Despite this, his response, as is so characteristic of him, was deranged, narcissistic and divorced from the reality of a crisis afflicting what is now his home state. Unless the storm had damaged Mar-a-Lago, it’s doubtful he would have noticed it at all.

What is more, at a time when all the other Republican candidates suspended their attacks on DeSantis while he faced the crisis, Trump barely skipped a beat. His attacks “underscore the degree to which Trump, in ways that often escape notice anymore, forgoes the traditional, sober-minded approach of nearly every other Republican and Democratic politician in times of crisis in favor of a style that keeps the focus on himself rather than imperiled communities,” Greenwood observed in the Tampa Bay Times.

“The former president overcame that unorthodox approach to win a presidential race in 2016. But it does still carry some political risk for the candidate, including from some conservatives who bristle at his decision to stay on the attack against DeSantis even amid Florida’s recovery efforts,” he wrote.

As though the indictments, impeachments, past incompetence and insults did not already make clear that Trump is unfit for any office, his response to Idalia should remove any doubts—if doubts anyone can still have.

This particularly applies to Floridians who should remember it when it comes to the presidential primary next March or if, as seems likely, Trump is the Republican nominee in the general election in November. Trump currently leads DeSantis in presidential polling in Florida. But when Florida specifically was threatened, Trump just did not care even though he lives on the same peninsula and shares its fate.

If Joe Biden had Floridians’ backs, Donald Trump turned his back on Floridians.

By any objective measure, Trump should be classified an Idalia loser—but there’s no telling if it will play out that way when the votes are counted in the early primary states and Florida.

Hurricane season is not over. Climate change is producing wild and unpredictable weather. There will be other storms, there will be wildfires, there will be roasting heat, there will be plagues.

Elected leaders will have to cope with all these challenges. A good leader in a crisis saves lives, manages well and provides comfort. The electorate should know what to look for in those who seek to lead them— and make their selections accordingly.

*Hurricane Idalia as it approached Florida. (Photo: NOAA)*

____________________________

Editor’s note: The author’s book, Masters of Disaster: The political and leadership lessons of America’s greatest disasters, is available on Amazon Kindle.

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The Donalds Dossier: How a shutdown threat hurts hurricane victims, SWFL and reveals legislative failures

*President Joe Biden surveys the damage from Hurricane Idalia during a visit to Live Oaks, Fla. (Image: CSPAN)*

Sept. 4, 2023 by David Silverberg

On Saturday, Sept. 2, President Joe Biden came to Live Oak, Fla., to see the damage from Hurricane Idalia for himself.

During a press conference, Biden was asked: “Are you confident there will be enough money to deal with the disaster and other disasters that have happened and will continue to happen around the country?”

Biden answered: “The answer is I am confident because I cannot imagine Congress saying, ‘We are not going to help.’ There are going to be fights about things that do not relate to this. But I think we will get through it, I cannot imagine people saying ‘No,’ they are not going to help.”

And yet there is a very significant faction in Congress saying exactly that.

The federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30 and this year, as in past years, the far right Freedom Caucus in the US House of Representatives is threatening to shut down the government if its policy demands aren’t met.

In an Aug. 21 statement, the Caucus listed their demands before approving government appropriations for the next fiscal year. They demanded that the United States vastly restrict border access and end “woke” policies of inclusion and non-discrimination in the military. But their truly significant demand was that Congress “address the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI to focus them on prosecuting real criminals instead of conducting political witch hunts and targeting law-abiding citizens;” i.e., stop investigating and prosecuting former President Donald Trump and other insurrectionists like fugitive Proud Boy Christopher Worrell of Naples.

If these demands are not met and the Freedom Caucus succeeds in stopping next year’s appropriations in any form, the government will stop functioning at midnight on Sept. 30. Critical services and functions will shut down. Most importantly, federal aid and assistance to people and communities suffering from natural disasters like Hurricane Idalia will suddenly stop at a time when need will still be extremely high.

Among the members of this extreme, Trumpist, invitation-only 45-member Caucus is Rep. Byron Donalds (R-19-Fla.), who is ready, willing and eager to bring government to a halt. (Another member is Rep. Greg Steube (R-17-Fla.))

“I’m not afraid of shutdowns,” Donalds told Punchbowl News, a website that focuses on Washington news. “American life doesn’t halt because government offices are closed … We have to be serious about spending.”

As early as July 25 he told reporters “If it’s [a government shutdown] a requirement to break bad habits, so be it. And this town [Washington, DC] has a bad habits problem.”

Of course the people who would suffer to break these bad habits would not be in Washington, DC; they would be in Florida and in the places where they’re still recovering from the effects of the storm.

In a more immediate impact for his constituents, Donalds’ support for shutting down the government sabotages his own legislation, introduced early in the session, to help protect Southwest Florida from the effects of harmful algal blooms (HABs) even if there’s a government shutdown.

In fact, this contradiction brings to light Donalds’ legislative record in the current Congress, which is, to put it mildly, abysmal. He’s introduced 46 bills and then ignored them all.

Background to the blooms

The HABs bill has its origins in 2018’s massive and persistent red tide and blue-green algal blooms. Then-Rep. Francis Rooney, the Republican congressman who represented the 19th Congressional District covering the coastal area from Cape Coral to Marco Island, introduced two pieces of legislation.

One was the Harmful Algal Bloom Essential Forecasting Act. This bill ensured that federal agencies would monitor HABs even if there was a government shutdown. The agencies included the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science. Their monitoring enables local communities to prepare for bloom effects and warn residents of health and water hazards.

The other bill added HABs to the official roster of major disasters eligible for federal aid. The Protecting Local Communities from Harmful Algal Blooms Act consisted of a three-word amendment to The Robert T. Staff ord Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. Under this, Southwest Florida businesses and residents would be eligible for a variety of federal support if businesses or livelihoods were damaged by a bloom just the same as if they were hit by a hurricane.

Neither bill made any progress during Rooney’s two terms in office, which ended in 2021.

This year Donalds reintroduced Rooney’s two previous pieces of legislation.

In January he introduced the Harmful Algal Bloom Essential Forecasting Act as House Resolution (HR) 325. In February he introduced the Combat Harmful Algal Blooms Act as HR 1008.

(Also in February he introduced a new water-related piece of legislation, the Water Quality and Environmental Innovation Act (HR 873). This established and funded a Water Quality and Environmental Innovation Fund that for five years would provide money to the Environmental Protection Agency to use advanced technologies to protect water quality. This proposal would also be sabotaged by a government shutdown.)

These bills directly benefited Southwest Florida. But none of them have made any progress after being introduced. In fact, of 46 bills he has introduced, he has not worked to advance any of them. None have made any progress at all.

To understand why this constitutes such a legislative failure, it helps to understand the legislative process.

Protocols and procedures

When a member of the House of Representatives introduces a stand-alone bill (one not attached to any other piece of legislation), the Speaker of the House (actually, his office) refers it to a committee for consideration.

Especially when a bill is of a technical or scientific nature, the committee chair usually refers it to a subcommittee handling specialized topics.

The subcommittee holds hearings, gets input from the public and listens to experts before recommending that the bill be considered by the full committee. The committee considers it, often does a “mark-up,” in which it is edited and revised, then votes whether to send it for consideration by the full House of Representatives.

If the bill gets to the floor and passes, it’s then sent to the Senate for consideration. If it passes the Senate in the same form as received from the House it then goes to the president’s desk for signature and implementation.

Any member of Congress can introduce a bill on any topic. But the art and craft of legislating is in moving a piece of legislation from introduction, through committee, to full passage—to say nothing of getting Senate approval and presidential signature. It’s an arduous process full of compromise, contention and often controversy. It takes skill, perseverance and attention to get a piece of legislation all the way through the process.

In this session of Congress, Donalds has not advanced a single stand-alone bill he introduced.

He counts as successes three amendments to other people’s legislation, which passed. Two were related to the nuclear industry, one streamlining the permitting process (House Amendment (H.Amdt) 133) and the other (H.Amdt. 149) to require a report on the status of US uranium. A third, (H.Amdt. 265) established an aircraft pilot apprenticeship program.

None directly affected Southwest Florida.

Legislation introduced this year by Rep. Byron Donalds and its status

Below is a list of all the stand-alone bills introduced this year by Rep. Byron Donalds with their status and a brief description. They are in chronological order. Categories are assigned by the author. No bill has advanced further than its initial introduction. More details on each individual bill can be obtained by going to Congress.gov and entering the bill number in the search box or by accessing and downloading the Excel Workbook available at the end of this article. (Source: Congress.gov)

Analysis: Going nuclear

Instead of attending to the legislation he introduced that directly affected Southwest Floridians, Donalds chose to become a champion of the nuclear power industry and is putting all his effort into promoting and expanding it through legislation. No doubt most—if not all—of the legislation he has introduced on this topic, some of it very technical and specific, was drafted by nuclear industry lobbyists and simply introduced under Donalds’ name.

None of this is directly related to the 19th Congressional District, which is drenched in 266 days of sunshine a year and perfectly situated to take advantage of solar power. As of this writing, no known nuclear power plants are planned for the district.

Opponents of nuclear power will be comforted, however, by the fact that Donalds hasn’t advanced any of his nuclear bills, nor is there any prospect of him doing so. Like his every other piece of original stand-alone legislation, they sit at their committees’ doors, ignored by their sponsor. They are more likely to be promoted by far more active and attentive nuclear industry lobbyists than anyone working on behalf of Southwest Florida.

More than any legislative efforts, Donalds has put his real energy into ideological crusades, either promoting extreme Make America Great Again positions, defending former president Donald Trump, raising money, impeaching President Joe Biden, or trying to rise in the Republican Party. Political speculation is that he’s either angling for a slot as Trump’s vice president or positioning himself to run for Florida governor in 2026.

Whatever Donalds’ aims, protecting Southwest Florida from harmful algal blooms and helping hurricane-devastated Floridians are not among them.

Commentary: Moving the legislation

When it was introduced, HR 325, the bill keeping forecasting going in the event of a shutdown, was referred to the Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee. It was also referred to the Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

HR 1008, treating blooms as a natural disaster, went to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials. It was also referred to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

In normal times, it’s unlikely that either of these would be passed by the whole Congress this late in the legislative session. But with a government shutdown looming, it may make sense for Southwest Floridians to take matters into their own hands and try to lobby for the legislation that their congressman seems to have forgotten.

As a start, concerned, active Floridians can contact the subcommittee chairs and ranking members (the most senior member from the other party) and tell them that in light of their congressman’s inaction, they themselves are urging that these pieces of legislation be advanced as soon as possible to beat a possible shutdown.

It’s a Hail Mary play but when the quarterback is missing in action, there’s not much else anyone can do. (Contact information is at the end of this article.)

Commentary: No time to shut down

Donalds’ embrace of a government shutdown at this time is incredibly irresponsible. A government shutdown will be a new form of devastation for Floridians already suffering from the devastation of Hurricane Idalia. It would certainly hinder, if not bring to a screeching stop, operations by FEMA. Assistance to individuals, communities and the state could be cut off just when people need it the most.

Donalds’ willingness to shut down the government is especially illogical in light of the fact that legislation he introduced is intended to ensure that essential forecasting services helpful to his district continue despite a possible government shutdown—a shutdown which he himself is now accepting and promoting as a position of the Freedom Caucus—which might better be termed the Crazy Caucus.

Donalds’ action (or inaction) on these matters has brought to light his gaping failure to responsibly advance the legislation he has introduced during this session. Clearly, to Donalds, introducing bills is nothing more than throwing mud at a wall, hoping some of it sticks and not even waiting around to see if it does. He’s not serious about what he proposes; it’s merely an ancillary activity while he concentrates on ingratiating himself with the nuclear industry and Donald Trump.

And his efforts are in the service of the Crazy Caucus’ efforts to disrupt, derail and destroy the government. These people want to shut down the government chiefly to protect Donald Trump, who is finally facing justice in a court of law.

President Joe Biden has other priorities more critical to Florida: “As I told your governor, if there’s anything your state needs, I’m ready to mobilize that support,” Biden said at his news conference. “Your nation has your back, and we’ll be with you until the job is done.”

The Crazy Caucus threat to the nation’s appropriations comes as FEMA’s disaster fund is running low because of all the climate change-related natural disasters it’s had to handle. The administration is asking Congress for $16 billion to cover not just the Idalia cleanup but everything else as well and looming future challenges.

Providing that funding in the next fiscal year or sooner is really what Congress needs to be doing—not wrestling with a government shutdown caused by a handful of fanatics that will hurt all Americans and especially those suffering in Florida and its Southwestern region.

Donalds should be giving his loyalty to the people he represents, not an indicted former president and a suicidal cultic caucus.

*At a May 30 press conference at the Capitol building Rep. Byron Donalds and other members of the Freedom Caucus listen to Rep. Lauren Boebert. (Photo: Washington Post)*

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To contact members of Congress and urge them to advance legislation to full committee consideration, contact the following key chair people and ranking members. E-mail addresses are only for constituents so this requires a paper letter or phone call. In any messages, it should be made clear that you are contacting them in their capacity as leaders of their subcommittees. Be sure to mention the bill number and your concern for the 19th Congressional District of Florida.

For HR 325 in the Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries Subcommittee:

Chairman, Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-2-Ore.)

409 Cannon House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

Phone: (202) 225-6730

Ranking Member Rep. Jared Huffman (D-2-Calif.)

2445 Rayburn House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

Phone: (202) 225-5161

For HR 1008 in the Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials Subcommittee:

Chair Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-5-Ore.)

2188 Rayburn House Office Building

45 Independence Ave. SW

Washington, DC 20515

(202) 225-2006

Ranking Member Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6-NJ)

2107 Rayburn HOB

Washington, DC 20515

Phone: (202) 225-4671

Click below to access and download a Windows Excel interactive version of the Donalds legislative record spreadsheet.

rep.-byron-donalds-legislative-record-2023-the-paradise-progressive Download

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Collier County condemns bigotry, anti-Semitism and hate in proclamation

Oct. 25, 2022 by David Silverberg

Full disclosure: The author was the drafter of the proclamation covered here.

Today, the Collier County Board of Commissioners proclaimed the county’s condemnation of bigotry, anti-Semitism and hate towards all people.

The proclamation made at the Commission’s regularly scheduled general meeting came amidst a rise in anti-Semitic expressions nationally and incidents locally, as well as a general increase in expressions of intolerance and prejudice (proclamation image below).

The proclamation was introduced by William McDaniel (R-5), chair of the Commission. It was approved by all commissioners.

This author spoke in favor of the proclamation, stating “President George Washington famously wrote that the United States gives ‘to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.’ This proclamation puts Collier County squarely within that fundamental, patriotic American tradition.”

Also speaking was Rabbi Adam Miller of Temple Shalom in Naples. Miller noted that Temple Shalom was 60 years old and when he became rabbi, one of the oldest congregants related that when she was being shown local properties the realtor told her that she should stay on Florida’s east coast with other Jews.

The current proclamation, said Miller, was valuable for everyone because “it expresses respect and engagement” with the whole community.

Also present to lend support was Rabbi Ammos Chorny of Beth Tikvah Congregation, Naples; Rev. Tony Fisher, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greater Naples; Vincent Keeys, president of the Collier County National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and Bebe Kanter, Democratic candidate for county District 2.

Significance of the proclamation

No proclamation is going end hate or bigotry or anti-Semitism. However, amidst a rise in prejudice, especially during a heated election period, there is value in a formal statement condemning those sentiments.

The proclamation puts Collier County officially on the record against that kind of bias.

Deterrence

Very importantly, the proclamation may deter hate crimes, violence and expressions of anti-Semitism. It “condemns any call to violence or use of violence for any purpose at any time; and resolves to actively and vigorously oppose, investigate, and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law any advocacy of violence, acts of violence, or crimes manifesting hatred against any person, property, or institution based on faith, race, gender, creed, sexual orientation, or national origin.”

Given that there have been instances of anti-Semitic vandalism and leafletting in neighboring Lee County, this may protect Collier County from similar incidents. Anyone contemplating such actions, if made aware of the County’s position, may decide not to break the law.

It also makes vigorous investigation, pursuit and prosecution of hate crimes a priority for county law enforcement.

The denunciation of violence also comes amidst advocacy of violence and violent political rhetoric. Most immediately, yesterday, Oct. 24, Christopher Monzon, a supporter of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was brutally beaten by four men while passing out campaign flyers in Hialeah.

The proclamation also repudiates the kind of overtly anti-Semitic allegations made locally by Katie Paige Richards, who claimed to be campaign manager for Collier County School Board candidate Tim Moshier. On a national level, rapper and singer Kanye West (who now prefers to go by the name Ye) has tweeted anti-Semitic tweets, sparking anti-Semitic demonstrations and leafleting in California.

*An anti-Semitic demonstration on an overpass in Los Angeles, Calif., on Saturday, Oct. 23. (Image: TMZ)*

Hospitality

With Southwest Florida recovering from Hurricane Ian and its hospitality and tourism industries damaged, the proclamation makes clear that Collier County is an open, welcoming place and ready to receive all visitors and guests.

This is important on a global basis as people make their vacation plans and the tourist season rolls around. They will be carefully examining Southwest Florida.

Despite the physical damage resulting from the storm, at least Collier County’s welcoming attitudes and commitments are intact, as made clear by the proclamation.

History

It is a sad fact of history that after a natural disaster there is frequently scapegoating and persecution of minority ethnic, racial or religious groups. It seems that people must vent their frustration and anger resulting from a natural calamity. But since they can’t take it out on the storm, fire or flood, they take it out on each other—and it’s at its worst when it’s officially sanctioned.

There are numerous examples of this.

Reaching back in history, after the Great Fire of Rome in the year 64 of the Common Era, the emperor Nero sought to deflect suspicions of his own arson by blaming and persecuting Christians in the Roman Empire and especially in the city of Rome itself. In 1666 during the Great Fire of London, with Britain at war with Holland, Londoners attacked foreigners living in their midst while the fire raged.

In the United States, people of Irish extraction were blamed for the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, giving rise to the legend of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, a sly canard against them. In 1889, after the Johnstown Flood in Johnstown, Pa., survivors, some of Eastern European extraction, blamed ethnic Hungarians for a variety of lurid crimes and alleged atrocities. In 1906 after the San Francisco earthquake, the discrimination and prejudice against the city’s Japanese community was so great that it threatened to cause war between Japan and the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt had to intervene on behalf of the community. In 1927, after the Mississippi River and its tributaries severely flooded there was a savage wave of lynchings of blacks when the waters receded. During the 2019-2021 COVID pandemic, goaded by President Donald Trump, attacks on Asians rose exponentially.

In an example of better behavior and the positive influence authority figures can have, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (a deliberate, man-made disaster), President George W. Bush and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani successfully tamped down any retaliation against American Muslims.

“I ask you to uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here,” Bush said in a speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001. “We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith.”

So far Southwest Florida has not seen any of this kind of scapegoating in the wake of Hurricane Ian. The Collier County anti-bigotry proclamation may go some way toward preventing it in the days ahead.

A reaffirmation

There is a power in reaffirmation and recommitment—just ask couples who renew their wedding vows.

The Collier anti-bigotry proclamation may seem to simply restate principles and values that all decent people share. But sometimes it’s things that seem most self-evident and obvious and taken for granted that need reaffirmation.

Further, these values and principles have long been under assault, along with democracy itself. They can no longer be taken for granted or assumed to have power on their own.

The proclamation makes clear that Collier County is a place of tolerance that “abhors bigotry, discrimination, prejudice, and all forms of hate against all people regardless of faith, race, gender, creed, sexual orientation, or national origin,” as it states.

Beyond just setting an example for Southwest Florida, the Collier proclamation can serve as a template for every town, city and county in the nation as they reaffirm their allegiance to common values and principles. The village-to-village fight can be waged for good.

Collier County’s issuance of the anti-bigotry proclamation puts it squarely within the fundamental, patriotic, American tradition expressed by President George Washington at the dawn of the nation in 1790. He wrote that “…happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

And now Collier County has again made clear that applies in Southwest Florida as well as everywhere else.

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Southwest Florida can build back better—if it chooses

*A Naples resident looks out over the pier after Hurricane Donna in 1960. (Photo: Collier Museum)*

Oct 12, 2022 by David Silverberg

Even weeks after Hurricane Ian stormed ashore in Lee County it’s still shocking to see the debris and destruction all along the Paradise Coast. New victims are being found and new stories of survival are coming to light.

But as stunning and disorienting and overwhelming as the storm’s impact continues to be, it’s not too soon to begin thinking about building back—better.

A disaster is awful but it’s also an opportunity. With a blank slate and a clear field, post-disaster periods can also be a time for grand plans and sweeping visions.

That may seem illusory as people just find places to live, food to eat and get back basic utilities like electricity and water. But it would be a mistake to overlook the chance to reinvent, reform and uplift communities that seem at the moment to have lost everything.

The rebuilding process can be tricky, though. The inclination of people is to try to rebuild exactly what went before and to do it as quickly as possible. There is always a clash between those who want to restore and those who want to renew and getting to one or the other of those destinations can be a winding and uncertain road.

Southwest Florida is hardly the first place to face such a dilemma.

Past examples

To reach back in time and space to an example long ago and far away, this is what happened in London after the Great Fire of 1666. This immense conflagration leveled much of the ancient city, including its crowded medieval streets and tenements. In its wake, planners and architects like Chistopher Wren envisioned a new, clean and fresh London rebuilt in the latest style and according to rational principles.

However, property owners and landlords wanted to rebuild their buildings on their holdings as quickly as possible and as closely to the previous plans as they could.

What resulted was a jumble of claims and counter-claims that was so chaotic and complex that Londoners created a special court to sort through them all. It took many years to resolve them. Meanwhile, what was rebuilt was a hodge-podge of the old and the new. Christopher Wren never got his sweeping new city but he was able to design and oversee the construction of a new St. Paul’s Cathedral, the one that stands today.

Closer to home in time and location, in 1960 Hurricane Donna swept into Naples, Florida and wiped out what was largely an undistinguished and utilitarian downtown. Naples rebuilt but its retail center, Fifth Avenue, declined in the face of suburban mall competition. In 1992 local merchants brought in Miami architect and urban planner Andres Duany to take a holistic view of the town.

“The key to reviving Fifth Avenue is not solely to make it work competently from the point of view of retail,” Duany told the city council, businesspeople and community leaders in 1993. “…Fifth Avenue must be made into a community space, a civic space, a place where neighbors can come to know each other.”

Duany’s detailed planning and vision not only revived Naples’ downtown, it made it a tourist destination and created a consistent, themed urban landscape that supported vibrant retail businesses and restaurants.

This year Naples took its own hit from Hurricane Ian, with storm surge flooding Fifth Avenue. Some stores and restaurants remain closed and some will no doubt not reopen. But it’s also likely that it will revive and attract new businesses—and that revival will build on the planned concept already in place.

Another town that sought to build back better after a disaster was Greensburg, Kansas. On May 4, 2007 an E-5 tornado swept into the small town of 1,400 people, killing 12 and virtually wiping it off the landscape.

The town’s council, meeting in a parking lot, decided that when they rebuilt they would do it in as energy-efficient and environmentally friendly a way possible.

When Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) visited a few days later and learned of the plans, she told them “‘It sounds like you’re going to build it green,’” then-city manager Steve Hewitt recalled to The Washington Post in a 2020 article. “Then we walked out to a press conference and Governor Sebelius said we were going to put the green in Greensburg. We were already talking about it, but she helped brand it and gave energy to what we were trying to do.”

It should be noted that Greensburg was not the home of tree-hugging hippies. It was a conservative Republican town. But city leaders could see a reality beyond political orthodoxy.

As of 2020, according to the Post, “…Greensburg draws 100 percent of its electricity from a wind farm, making it one of a handful of cities in the United States to be powered solely by renewable energy. It now has an energy-efficient school, a medical center, city hall, library and commons, museum and other buildings that save more than $200,000 a year in fuel and electricity costs, according to one federal estimate. The city saves thousands of gallons of water with low-flow toilets and drought-resistance landscaping and, in the evening, its streets glow from LED lighting.”

Greensburg has had its challenges (among others, at one point a wind turbine collapsed in a field). Its green rebuilding was not a panacea and did not result in an economic boom. But it put the town on the world map as a visionary municipality and made it stand out among all the other places on the plains. It also attracted $120 million in disaster relief funds from Kansas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and US Agriculture Department. To this day it remains an American touchstone in disaster recovery and rebuilding.

A coastal Renaissance?

It may seem premature to note this but towns like Sanibel, Matlacha and most of all, Fort Myers Beach now have similar opportunities to plan their rebuilding along rational, visionary lines.

As Greensburg chose to build back better emphasizing energy efficiency and environmentalism, the towns of the Paradise Coast now have an opportunity to be world leaders in climate resilience and protection, rebuilding to take into account climate change and sea level rise—and anticipating its effects.

They have the potential to update their water management practices and systems and have an unparalleled resource in Florida Gulf Coast University’s Water School.

Like Greensburg, they can also rebuild in an environmentally and energy-efficient way.

Like Naples, the rebuilt towns can be made more esthetically pleasing and pedestrian-friendly, perhaps with waterside boardwalks or promenades and a re-built Times Square in Fort Myers Beach, where “neighbors can come to know each other,” as Duany put it.

To rebuild in this fashion would attract federal support and funding that is sorely needed now. Unfortunately, before Hurricane Ian, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) line-item vetoed $1 million for Times Square renovation in Fort Myers Beach. Perhaps that state money can be restored and increased for rebuilding.

The alternative is to allow a haphazard scramble. In this case, the likely scenario is that developers and speculators swoop in and buy up distressed beach properties from desperate owners for pennies on the dollar. Building commences in a chaotic, uncoordinated way and the result is an unsightly and inefficient mish-mash of commercial and residential buildings.

Better rebuilding will take a lot of discipline, cooperation and coordination. Naples’ 1994 revival was done by the city council, business owners and residents all working together guided by a common vision. To successfully rebuild Hurricane Ian’s communities will take similar unity.

But the time to start doing this is now. The potential rewards justify the effort. If people are willing to be cooperative and patient, Hurricane Ian may be the precursor to a Paradise Coast renaissance—but only if Southwest Floridians are willing to build back better together.

______________________

To learn more about past disasters and responses, see the author’s book: Masters of Disaster: The political and leadership lessons of America’s greatest disasters.

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President Joe Biden is no stranger to Southwest Florida

*The former Biden property on Keewaydin Island. in 2016 (Photo: Derrick Moreno)*

Oct. 3, 2022 by David Silverberg

When President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden come to Southwest Florida as scheduled on Wednesday, Oct. 5, they will not be coming to unfamiliar territory.

Biden’s connection to Southwest Florida is through his brother, James Biden Jr., who bought a vacation home on five acres of Keewaydin Island for $2.5 million in 2013. He then sold it for $1.35 million in February 2018. This was after Hurricane Irma struck in September 2017.

Joe Biden spent Christmas 2013 on Keewaydin with the family.

The exact status of Keewaydin Island is unclear as of this writing, as is the fate of the house that Biden Jr. once owned.

Further to the south, the iconic dome homes of Cape Romano are now completely submerged due to Hurricane Ian.

Biden’s stops and itinerary in Southwest Florida for his Wednesday visit have not been publicly released. However, a common practice for officials is to do a flyover of an affected area to get an overview of the damage. Biden can be expected to do the same before meeting local officials and victims on the ground. If the flyover includes Keewaydin Island, he may get to see the house where he once visited—or at least what’s left of it.

Presidential visits to disaster-stricken areas can have a major impact on speeding recovery and assistance, particularly if the president is familiar with the region.

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