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Tallahassee, FL – Rick Scott based his campaign to be Florida's governor on one promise: he knows how to get the state back to work. The former health care executive takes office at a time of 12-percent unemployment in the state and a projected $3.5 billion budget shortfall for next year. As James Call reports, the 58-year-old Scott said he intends to bring a more businesslike approach to state government.
Rick Scott has never held public office. His first political campaign was a 2009 effort opposed to a public option in the federal health care act. In 2010 Scott spent more than 70 million dollars promoting the slogan "Let's get to work." That message transformed Scott from a long-shot candidate into Florida's 45th governor. And now he says he knows his success depends on fulfilling a promise to create 700,000 new jobs.
"The reason I won the election is over one issue and that is getting the state back to work, so my goal and the things I'm going to focus on when I take office is how are we going to get the state back to work," he said.
Scott worked a $125,000 investment into part ownership of the Columbia/HCA hospital chain. He resigned as CEO amid an investigation of what became the largest Medicare fraud case in history. Scott was not charged or fined, and his gubernatorial campaign touted his experience of owning and running businesses, from a doughnut shop to a hospital. He said he's been sensitive to the relationship between state policy and economic development since growing up along the Kansas-Missouri border. Raised in Kansas City, Mo., Scott recalled businesses moving to Kansas to avoid a Missouri tax. An awareness of how taxes and regulations influence the flow of capital and business development guided Scott while he grew a two-hospital partnership into the world's largest hospital chain and is shaping his economic development plan for Florida.
"I'm going to freeze regulations," he said. "I'm going to go back, the people who are going to be in there are going to go back through and say what regulation do we need, what is really just killing jobs. That's step one. I'm going to look at every place that we can cut spending. That we don't have to do because it is no longer a priority or we can't afford it. I'm going to make sure we reduce property tax rates and we phase out the business tax."
Scott assembled a team of advisers who have developed a blueprint to get Florida back to work as his campaigned promised. He has traveled the state to solidify support for his agenda and has met with lawmakers and business leaders. The message of lower taxes and fewer regulations has been advocated by many Republican lawmakers throughout their careers. Sen. Don Gaetz chairs the budget subcommittee on economic development.
"Part of what the governor is doing, the governor-elect is doing, is to listen to people who are job creators and ask them what are the ingredients in the decision to stay in Florida, to expand in Florida and to come to Florida," Gaetz said. "And we need to have policies that address the ingredients for a more competitive job creation marketplace. And in some cases it may be the regulatory environment, in some cases it may be the lack of a higher education system that is sufficiently lashed to the needs of the economy in other areas it may be the tax environment."
Scott's team of advisers has proposed making Florida the number-one tourism destination in the country, cutting taxes, reducing the cost of government by, among other things, merging more than a dozen state agencies into three departments and lowering commercial electricity rates by raising residential rates. The various proposals are united by the belief they will stimulate economic development and create jobs.
"We are competing with Texas, and Alabama and Mississippi, and we are competing with other countries. If their taxes are lower, if their regulations make more sense, if they have a better attitude about business people, then business people are going to move to those states and move out of the state. If we do better than everybody else then people are going to move here."
More details about Scott's plans will be included in his first budget recommendation to the Legislature in early February.