LEE COUNTY, Fla. – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday morning held a news conference at Miceli’s Restaurant, a dockside eatery near Pine Island.
At the event, DeSantis announced $1 million from the Florida Disaster Fund would be disbursed among five organizations to help support first responders displaced by recent hurricanes Ian and Nicole, as well as that millions more would go to career and technical education (CTE) programs at Florida colleges and workforce groups.
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According to DeSantis, the $1 million will go to the National Guard Foundation, the Florida Emergency Preparedness Association, the Collier County Community Foundation, the Charlotte County Community Foundation and The Collaboratory.
“So, these funds can help people for basic living essentials — housing, food, transportation — (they) also can help with rebuilding and repair efforts, and so we appreciate all the folks who’ve been working hard, we understand guardsmen, EMT, all these people, they’re not immune from having some of these effects. So this hopefully this will help out, we’re going to be doing a lot more with this and the first lady is working really hard to get as much money out as possible,” DeSantis said. “We may want to look at some of the organizations that are eligible under Florida law because I think there’s some that are doing good work here that may not fit what the statute says, I think that’d be an easy thing to kind of tweak.”
DeSantis said the disbursement of the $7.7 million for workforce education would go as follows:
- $2.9 million - State College of Florida
- $2 million - Florida Southwestern State College
- $618,000 - South Florida State College
- $973,000 - Fort Myers Technical College
- $200,000 - Cape Coral Technical College
- $1 million - CareerSource Florida (disbursed across South Florida region’s three local boards)
There was not much of an update on what DeSantis and the state Legislature plan to do during an upcoming special session on property insurance.
”So we understand this is a very multifaceted recovery process, we’re going to look to do everything we can across all the different ranges. I know we’re going to be in a special session of the Legislature in December, we’ll announce those dates shortly but it is going to happen, we’re going to do the property tax relief for the people whose homes were were destroyed, we look forward to being able to do that,” DeSantis said.
The event also featured State Sen. Kathleen Passidomo (R-District 28) and Florida Department of Economic Opportunity Secretary Dane Eagle.
DeSantis on Tuesday rebuffed recent barbs from former president Donald Trump, who announced a third run for the White House that day after taking several digs at Florida’s governor in the lead-up, in part referring to him as Ron “DeSanctimonious.”
“One of the things I’ve learned in this job is when you’re doing, when you’re leading, when you’re getting things done, you take incoming fire. That’s just the nature of it,” DeSantis said. " We focused on results and leadership and, you know, at the end of the day, I would just tell people to go check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday night.”
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