Democratic Attorney General candidate Dan Gelber was in Ybor City last night.
The Miami Beach State Senator was hosting a fundraiser at Bernini’s. CL spoke to him about a number of issues, including his somewhat nuanced “yes’ vote on rail last week.
“It was an imperfect deal,” he admits, referencing the issue of liability with CSX that prompted GOP State Senators like Ronda Storms and Paula Dockery to oppose the bill (as well as Democrats like Charlie Justice and Arthenia Joyner). " At the end of the day you had to decide on whether the advantages, where’s there’s sort of a net benefit over the disadvantages" he said. "The House wouldn’t change it at all, and the Senate leadership really wouldn’t either , so it became a game of whether to take it or leave it. And I thought leaving it behind us, was probably worse than taking it with the expectations that it would end up doing more good than not. Really, the prospect of mass transit in Florida is something we desperately need , and right now the Obama Administration has made it their priority. So for us to have not at least looked like we’re prepared to make this step into the next century, was, I think a big problem. So even though I didn’t like parts of the bill, including the indemnification provision, I felt like the net advantage of it, and the net benefit of it, was worth supporting. “
Having said that, Gelber said he would not be stunned if somehow Florida does NOT get the $2.6 billion for high speed rail that was the motivating factor that led to the special session on rail in the first place. "We’ve got to think about this state and what kind of state we want in the next decade. We’ve GOT to have an infrastructure that supports what we have here. It’s not simply good environmental policy, it’s good economic policy. And that’s why I support it, because if we get that other money, more importantly, we’ve got a template for the future of mass transit in Florida."
Included in the rail legislation was $15 million for what is always referred to as the “troubled” Tri-Rail service in South Florida. Gelber thinks Tri-Rail gets a bit of a bad rap, and gives words that critics of a proposed light rail line in Hillsborough County should consider. “Tri-Rail’s actually a pretty good line," he says. " It’s ridership is about 16,000 a day , so it keeps a lot of cars off the road in an area that’s highly congested, so it’s a pretty good economic engine. Like a lot of mass transit, it’s hard to run at a profit. But you’re not doing it to run as a profit, you’re running it to move people to get to their jobs, you’re trying to link urban areas to rural areas, you’re trying to give industry a leg up and keep cars off the road. “
Gelber is a former federal prosecutor who has spoken on the campaign trail about tightening the state’s anti-corruption laws. He applauds the recent news that the state’s Ethics Commission is asking the Legislature to increase its authority, such as allowing it to start its own cases (which it shockingly does not have at this time), and says, “listen, most of the bad things that happen in government are not even illegal. So we gotta change , you know, the laws. So that conduct that is perhaps unethical but not illegal is clearly illegal, so we’ve got to add a little sunshine to the legislature so that we see what’s happening there so that you really don’t have people watching what happens behind closed doors …we need to get prosecutors to go after corrupt public officials, and we ought to strengthen our public ethics laws.”
This article appears in Dec 16-22, 2009.
