Florida voters will decide this November whether to enshrine abortion access in the state constitution with amendment 4. However, there’s been a push locally to bring conversations about the initiative into Tallahassee city elections.
Tallahassee Commissioner Jeremy Matlow’s OneTallahassee political committee put out an attack ad last month that included a young woman accusing Commissioner Curtis Richardson of failing to stand with women to protect abortion access.
“Women deserve to have access to health care. When it was his turn to vote. Curtis didn’t side with girls like us, he sided with them,” she said in the ad.
The video got 38,000 views on Facebook. OneTallahassee is backing Dot Inman-Johnson against Richardson in their race for city commission. The group’s advertisement is a reference to a vote the commissioner cast against a pro-choice resolution the city passed in 2021. The resolution asked the state legislature and governor to support abortion access, but had no legal impact.
Richardson told WFSU he will be voting for Amendment 4 during the general election and that while he voted against the resolution, he supports a woman’s right to choose. That’s consistent with the position he took back in 2021 before the vote. Here’s what he said during that 2021 meeting.
“I believe in a woman's right to choose. I believe that wholeheartedly, and I say that as a husband—a devoted husband of almost 30 years with two beautiful daughters,” Richardson said.
At the time, Richardson said he was voting against the resolution because he thought it would be ignored by the legislature.
“What we say would not be heard over there or considered seriously by the majority I've been there. I served eight years in the legislature in the minority party, and it's worse now than it was then in terms of influence on policy and decision making for those in the minority party,” he said.
It was ignored. Florida’s 15 week then six-week abortion bans were passed in legislative sessions after the resolution was sent. Local governments cannot enact abortion policy.
But Inman-Johnson said that doesn’t matter. She said the vote was symbolic, arguing its commonplace for municipalities to make recommendations to the state.
“Every year, the city commissioners send a lobbying agenda to the legislature with issues on it that the legislature what may not support, but they sense a need for it here in this community, and that was one of the things that he should have definitely supported,” she said.
Inman-Johnson also questions whether Richardson’s support for Amendment 4 is genuine. She says he defended the arrest of several pro-abortion access advocates outside city hall in 2023 which included Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried.
The group’s permission to hold a protest on city property was revoked by city officials when they made posts that they wanted to camp. Police gave protesters several warnings before they began making arrests. At the time, Richardson told the Tallahassee Democrat that the city tried to accommodate them, but that, he felt the protestors wanted to make a statement and “we had to do what we had to do as a city.” Inman-Johnson thinks it was the wrong move.
“He supported the city manager sending police officers there to arrest them, and they were demonstrating against the six-week ban on abortion,” she said.
The Inman-Johnson campaign’s attempts to paint Richardson as anti-Amendment 4 speak to their efforts to target Democrat and female voters, two groups polling with high support for the amendment. About 54 % of registered voters in the city are Democrats, while almost 55% of registered voters are women.