April 22, 2023

Your Action is Needed Now: Three bad bills are headed to the House floor on Monday (April 24, 2023). Tell your legislator to oppose them!

House Bill 931: Postsecondary Educational Institutions

Issue Area: Education

House Bill 931 forbids certain considerations when hiring faculty or staff, including preferential treatment based on political beliefs, race or ethnicity. It requires an Office of Public Policy Events with satellite offices on each public university campus that would monitor, post, screen all campus debates, forums, and individual lectures to be sure contrasting points of view are presented, with videos and calendars of all events posted. The Board of Governors will create and require each state university to conduct an annual assessment of the intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity at that institution.

The League believes House Bill 931 offers a solution for a problem that does not exist as university hires do not currently take any political loyalty tests, and diverse points of view are already evident in curriculum, faculty and staff hires, and campus events. The bill is vague since it calls for accepting diverse perspectives but offers no examples and diverse perspectives are already part of the available curriculum at Florida’s universities and colleges.

House Bill 931 is wasteful in that it spends taxpayer dollars on an Office of Public Policy Events within the State University System and satellite offices on each campus to monitor events, when the state’s campuses already have a wide variety of campus events representing diverse points of view. This bill promotes false equivalence in many instances by requiring that “debates, group forums, and lectures must include speakers who represent widely held views on opposing sides of the most widely discussed public policy issues of the day.” Lawmakers must reject this legislation!

House Bill 1403: Protections of Medical Conscience

Issue Area: Health Care/Reproductive Health & Justice

House Bill 1403 would allow healthcare providers and insurers to deny a patient care on the basis of religious, moral, or ethical beliefs. It creates a license to discriminate by allowing healthcare employers to discriminate in hiring, and it bars medical Boards from disciplining doctors for spreading misinformation. It prioritizes personal beliefs over patient well-being. The bill appears to allow discrimination by health care providers based upon religious and other beliefs. The bill indicates that objections to service on behalf of the health care provider can be documented in the patient’s medical file.

Because the League of Women Voters has long held the position that health care should be available to all, we must object to this bill that we believe will reduce the availability of health services. At the very least, conscience-based objections on the part of health care providers will result in adding confusion and delays in the scheduling of services. For example, will the teenager requesting birth control have to wait to see the doctor until the nurse is one who does not have an objection to providing this service? Will the transgender adult be the only one whose medical file indicates that the provider will not prescribe hormone therapy? Or will the file of every adult patient of the health care provider indicate that hormone therapy will not be available as a treatment? Lawmakers must reject this legislation!

House Bill 1911: Use of Phosphogypsum

Issue Area: Natural Resources/Clean Energy

House Bill 1191 would authorize the Florida Department of Transportation to undertake “demonstration projects” using phosphogypsum in road construction while ordering a fast-tracked study on the suitability of the product as a construction material. The bills would also deregulate phosphogypsum as a solid waste under some circumstances.

Decades of science show that phosphogypsum poses a substantial risk to humans and the environment. An expert consultant for the Environmental Protection Agency found numerous scenarios that would expose the public — particularly road-construction workers — to a cancer risk the agency considers to be unacceptably dangerous. The agency has also found that the use of phosphogypsum in roads may cause adverse effects to nearby surface and groundwater resources through leaching of trace metals and radionuclides. These toxins may also be resuspended into the air by wind and vehicular traffic.

Last September Hurricane Ian left a path of destruction across southwest Florida, demolishing roads and collapsing bridges along its path. The destruction highlighted the danger of proposals to use toxic, radioactive phosphogypsum waste in road construction, which could be unearthed and expose communities and the environment to harm. As climate change drives storms of increasing intensity, Florida faces escalating risks of similar destruction in the future. The EPA has long prohibited use of phosphogypsum in roads because it contains uranium and radium that produce radionuclides linked to higher risks of cancer and genetic damage. But for several years, the fertilizer industry has pushed lawmakers to allow it. Lawmakers must reject this legislation!

We're urging every Florida League member to contact their member of the Florida House and encourage them to vote "NO" on House Bills 931, 1191, & 1403.