By JIM TURNER
News Service of Florida

A 14-day sales tax tax “holiday” on school supplies, clothes and personal computers kicked off Monday, aimed at helping families save money in preparation for the 2024-25 school year.
A tropical wave brewing on Florida’s doorstep prompted Gov. Ron DeSantis to issue a state of emergency on Thursday for 54 counties, most along the Gulf Coast and in northern Florida.
And the week closed out as the fight over an effort to legalize recreational marijuana continued to heat up, with billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin dropping millions of dollars to help DeSantis defeat the plan.

GETTING IN THE WEEDS

Griffin on Friday said he has given $12 million to an effort to defeat Amendment 3, which if approved in November by 60 percent of voters would allow recreational use of marijuana in Florida.
Griffin, an ally of DeSantis’ who is CEO of the firm Citadel, announced the contribution in an opinion piece in the Miami Herald, calling the proposed amendment “a terrible plan to create the nation’s most expansive and destructive marijuana laws.”
Meanwhile, state Sen. Joe Gruters, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, lent his support to the proposal this week.
Gruters, who is running for state chief financial officer in 2026, was one of few lawmakers who backed former president Donald Trump when DeSantis unsuccessfully ran for president.
Gruters’ Wednesday endorsement of the marijuana initiative puts him directly at odds with the governor, who has harshly criticized the proposed amendment. It also came a day after the Florida Sheriffs Association and the Florida Police Chiefs Association voiced their opposition to the initiative.
“By legalizing recreational marijuana for adults, we can give Floridians access to safe products, generate significant revenue for critical public services and create new job opportunities for Floridians,” Gruters, R-Sarasota, said in a press release issued by the Smart & Safe Florida political committee backing the initiative.
The proposal would allow the state’s medical-marijuana companies to sell recreational pot to people ages 21 and older. Trulieve, the state’s largest medical-marijuana operator, largely has bankrolled the initiative, contributing more than $60 million.
DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, is heading two political committees aimed at fighting the marijuana measure and another proposed amendment that would enshrine abortion rights in the state Constitution.
The pot amendment “would create a monopoly for large marijuana dispensaries and permit pot use in public and private areas throughout Florida,” Griffin wrote in Friday’s op-ed.
“That will help no one other than special interests — and it will hurt us all, especially through more dangerous roads, a higher risk of addiction among our youth, and an increase in crime,” he argued.
But Morgan Hill of the Smart & Safe Florida political committee, which is leading efforts to pass the amendment, issued a statement Friday that said more than “1 million Floridians signed a petition to put Amendment 3 on the ballot so that no adult will go to jail for possessing small amounts of marijuana, and Floridians will no longer have to turn to street products laced with dangerous substances like fentanyl.”

SQUEEZING
CITIZENS

Florida regulators this week backed private insurers taking more than 400,000 policies from Citizens Property Insurance Corp., while the state-back carrier moved forward with a double-digit rate increase proposal.
Both efforts are intended to help shrink Citizens, which was created as an insurer of last resort but has become Florida’s largest property insurer in recent years.
“The market is recovering, and that is really good news,” Citizens President and CEO Tim Cerio told reporters Thursday. “But Citizens’ rates are actuarially unsound, and we are competing with the private market. The market’s rates are up here, and we are down here. It’s basically a form of subsidized insurance.”
The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation on Thursday held a three-hour hearing that put on display longstanding tensions surrounding Citizens’ rates, as many homeowners struggle to find affordable coverage — or any coverage — in the private market.
The proposal in part would lead to an average 13.5 percent rate increase for the most-common type of Citizens policy, known as homeowners’ multi-peril coverage.
That would translate to the average price of homeowners multi-peril policies going from $3,560 to $4,041.
Citizens reached as many as 1.412 million policies in fall 2023 before seeing reductions because of what is known as a “depopulation” program designed to shift policies into the private market. Cerio said Citizens could be under 1 million policies by the end of this year.
Increasing the rates could help with the depopulation effort, as Citizens customers are required to accept offers of coverage from private insurers if the offers are within 20 percent of the cost of Citizens premiums.

DESANTIS SIGNS DEATH WARRANT

DeSantis on Monday signed his first execution warrant since ending his presidential run at the start of the year, picking an inmate convicted for a 1994 murder.
Loran Cole, 57, is scheduled to be executed Aug. 29 at Florida State Prison for the murder of John Edwards, a Florida State University student who went to the Ocala National Forest to camp with his sister, a student at Eckerd College.
Cole would be the first inmate executed in Florida since October, when Michael Duane Zack was put to death by lethal injection for a 1996 murder in Escambia County.
The signing of the death warrant Monday likely will touch off a flurry of legal activity. With the scheduled execution a month away, the Florida Supreme Court issued an order that said proceedings would be “expedited.”
Florida has executed 105 inmates since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, including six last year, information on the Department of Corrections website shows.

STORY OF THE WEEK: State insurance regulators continued efforts to move insurance policies from state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. into the private market.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “What they’re saying is the only way that women can be successful is if they’re sleeping their way to the top or they got that position because they needed more women or women of color in that organization. And it just continues to layer on and layer on. I just think people are really unhappy about those comments.” — Ruth’s List CEO Christina Diamond, referring to comments made by former president Donald Trump’s running-mate J.D. Vance about “childless cat ladies” and disparagement of Vice President Kamala Harris.