“Hey Florida, your energy bills to rise if regulators approve this plan” (Tampa Bay Times, November 2019):
Both decisions could collectively cost customers more than $3 billion in the next three years and are being closely watched… The first issue regulators will decide is a rule that implements a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year that will allow utility companies such as Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy and Tampa Electric to charge customers so they can bury power lines in order to reduce storm-related outages in the future.
I wonder if the folks who opposed the Tallahassee Tyrant’s spending initiative on electric grid hardening and undergrounding are still opposed!
Separately, do we have a final verdict on the restoration of public services in Florida by Team DeSantis? Aside from repairs to and/or replacement of individual structures, what’s left to be done?
I don’t have the final verdict on anything, but I have seen that the power has been restored everywhere, even in Lee County. They have a lot of debris and destroyed houses to fix on the barrier islands, etc., and some people are going to have trouble for some time to come, but from my vantage point, DeSantis et. al. have done a very competent, no-whining job.
Also, since Florida is a fairly “gun heavy” state – as I’m sure you are aware – with legally-armed citizens comprising a significant fraction of the population, it looks to me like even a week of power outage in some places didn’t result in very much looting or other mayhem. That’s what I experienced in my Deplorable Area of Massachusetts when we had our week-long outage about a decade ago. When you know that about 1/3rd to 1/2 of the locals are armed, you tend to be polite when you ask them to borrow one of their generators, etc.
BTW Nickolas Cruz was sentenced to life in prison today. Everything could probably have been avoided if the FBI hadn’t dropped the ball.
The fact that we’ve heard almost nothing on the news from Florida for a while now implies that things are going pretty great down there. As I said once before, the media doesn’t want to show the contrast between what works, and the incompetents in Washington that DeSantis may be replacing before too long.
Anon: The Florida rebuilding indeed seems to be getting no more coverage than a mass murder perpetrated by someone who cannot be characterized as “white supremacist” (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waukesha_Christmas_parade_attack for example).
One of the main issues I have with the leftist media is what they choose to cover and what they don’t cover. I’ve noticed that when my friends on the left are bothered by something they’ve heard on the news that they watch/read, typically I know all about it. When I’m bothered by something that I’ve heard on the news that I watch/read, they know absolutely nothing about it.
The ability to cover/not cover stories is one of the main ways the mainstream media slants their coverage.