As legislative session opens, here are the top requests from county, city and schools

Alachua County

Alachua County Agricultural Center: $1 million request, with $9 million match from the county and city of Newberry to create a new agricultural center. It is expected to be an economic boost for Newberry and the county. Plan includes buying and renovating existing Canterbury Equestrian site as the new county Ag Center and buying and building a new UF/IFAS office and community center.

Eco-Industrial Park: $3.5 million request with $4.2 million match. Design and build a 20,000-square-foot anchor facility dedicated to research and business incubation for waste-based industries, part of a comprehensive waste-management strategy. The facility will include 37 acres of shovel-ready sites. The county has committed $1.6 million in land and engineering, in addition to $2.6 million in site work costs, to be completed in spring 2019.

Newnans Lake Improvement Initiative: $470,000 requested. Newnans Lake has a total maximum daily load (TMDL) for nitrogen and phosphorus, with nutrient-reduction goals set forth in the Orange Creek Basin Management Action Plan. The third phase of work includes enhanced water quality treatment, reduced nutrient loading to the lake from Gum Root Swamp, and further assessing nutrient loading from Hatchet Creek and locating potential areas for nutrient reduction.

City of Gainesville

Support for downtown Santa Fe College campus: City officials say they support Santa Fe College's $18.5 million request for its Blount Center, which offers GED and other adult education classes, as well as free meeting space for civic, professional and business groups.

Dockless bikes and e-scooters: City officials are asking the state to allow local governments to negotiate with prospective service providers on placement, prohibited areas, etc.

Homeless help: $1 million request to build a dormitory to transition homeless people from tent-style accommodations to a more permanent living structures in dorm-style transitional living.

Broadband service: The city supports local governments' ability to provide broadband services to rural and underserved urban areas in the form of economic development grants and legislative policies, specifically through GRUCom.

Food deserts: City officials support legislation addressing food deserts as well as compelling the state's Department of Health to research the feasibility of restaurants, grocery stores, and others to expand the donation of foods not bought by their expiration date.

Santa Fe College

Faculty/staff funding: College officials are asking for new operating funds to recruit and keep college faculty and staff.

Blount Center expansion: They want money to complete the capital outlay funding request for the center's expansion.

Performance-based incentives: College officials seek legislative support for performance-based incentives funding for the Florida College System.

Alachua County Public Schools

More taxing authority: School officials want the state to restore elected school boards' authority to levy up to 2.0 mills for building and capital maintenance purposes and to maintain authority for how to use local capital outlay.

Required Local Effort: Hold Required Local Effort constant to allow school funding to benefit from increasing property values rather than imposing the roll-back rate.

School safety: They're asking legislators to fully fund the recurring costs of maintaining and enhancing school safety, including the costs of having at least one law enforcement officer at each school, expanding mental health services and "hardening" school facilities.

Stop privatizing schools: Educators want legislators to halt the further privatization of public education through corporate tax credit scholarships and ending the use of public money for voucher programs that aren't held to the same accountability standards as traditional public schools.

HB 7069: Repeal parts of House Bill 7069 that infringe on school boards' authority to make local decisions, including the appropriate expenditure of 1.5 mill revenues and Title 1 funds.

Local authority: School officials want local-district authority over teacher evaluations and pay for performance, including removing Value-Added Modeling from teacher evaluations, particularly those who teach disadvantaged students.

University of Florida

Top 5: UF officials are asking for support of the university's goal to hire 500 new faculty members as part of its attempt to make it into national top five public university rankings. Those hires will reduce class size from 19:1 to 16:1.

Data Science & Information Technology Building: New experiential labs will prepare students for the 21st century workforce and the growing demand for tech-literate employees. Some 500 new students will be able to enroll in data science and related certificate program, and multidisciplinary faculty will tackle Florida’s most complicated problems.

Critical Maintenance for infrastructure: UF officials want more money to help UF address its most serious maintenance problems and begin to reduce the accumulated deferred maintenance backlog. Funding supports UF’s desire to address, plan for and prevent potentially serious problems that ultimately cost taxpayers and could damage research and negatively impact a student’s or a UF Health patient’s experience.

New Music Building: The university is asking for a new facility to address accreditation deficiencies cited by the National Association of Schools of Music Accreditation. They say with a new building, significant energy efficiencies and reduced operational costs will be realized and expanded teaching space will allow for new courses and a strengthening of community engagement through increased access to major UF cultural outreach events such as free concerts.

Center for Application of Artificial Intelligence: The center will be a statewide resource working with industry, the military, government and the community to build Florida’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Economy and become a world leader in applied AI research, education, technology and AI systems analysis.

Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences

Workload funding: UF/IFAS officials want funding to meet increased demand for programs, services and education through statewide research and extension services.

STEM, workforce and 4-H programs: They want to expand such programming to meet increased demand for youth participating in more than 50 programs including STEM projects and workforce development; critical renovations to 4-H Camp Cherry Lake. They say more than 200,000 students participate in 4-H, camps, after-school programs and day camps.

Upgrades, repairs to research fields in Immokalee: They want funds to replace outdated systems and to upgrade/repair the fields to better match what's being used by industry and to prevent future research loss. They want to upgrade the research fields and make repairs needed after Hurricane Irma.

Tropical Research/Education Center: Replace greenhouses and shade houses lost or damaged by hurricanes and to build a student dorm and lecture center at the TREC in Miami-Dade.

Horticulture, Aquaculture, Geomatics Research and Education: UF/IFAS is asking for money to provide resources for multiple programs across the state, including adding faculty in some areas, such as geomatics, ornamental aquaculture and fish food production.

UF Health

UF Health officials are asking to maintain Medicaid funding formulas from the last session and that legislators continue support for UF Health Cancer Center's quest for a National Cancer Institute designation.



