St. Petersburg-based attorney Scott Orsini says he's used to people asking him why he wants to be a member of the Florida House of Representatives, since Democrats are vastly outnumbered by Republicans in the Legislature."Nothing changes if nobody tries," says the Titusville native, who moved to St. Pete some 18 years ago. "If Democrats don't run for office, than that [GOP] supermajority is never going to change."
Orsini is challenging Republican incumbent Kathleen Peters, running for her second two-year term in the seat held for the previous six years by Democrat Rick Kriseman.
He's running on a three-pronged platform: getting money back into the public school system and away from the emphasis on vouchers/charter schools; repealing the Duke Energy nuclear cost recovery fee; and accepting the Medicaid expansion plan offered by the Obama administration that Governor Rick Scott said he supported, though of course he never pushed the Legislature to accept the deal.
His stance against Duke Energy is a theme shared by other Pinellas Democrats running in competitive elections this fall like Dwight Dudley and Judtihanne McLauchlan. "It's anti-consumer, anti-small business, and I don't see why we still have it, " he says of the law that allows Duke to charge its customers to build nuclear power plants which increasingly will never be constructed.
"We should be doing everything we can to promote solar, mass transit, get cars off the road. We're doing nothing with that!" he says about the state's overall energy policies, and specifically castigated the refusal (by GOP House Finance and Tax Committee Chairman Ritch Workman) to approve a constitutional amendment on this fall's ballot that would have given tax breaks to businesses that install solar panels.
Orsini is also with his party in supporting raising the minimum wage in the state to $10.10 from the current $7.93 rate. He says the minimum wage "constituency" has changed over the years from high school and college kids working for pocket change at McDonalds and other fast-food outlets to adults who've lost their jobs and rely on minimum-wage jobs as their sole source of income.
Orsini praises Kathleen Peters as a good person, but given her support of important issues like homelessness and mental illness, he doesn't understand her rejection of Medicaid expansion.
"I'm not at cross purposes," he says. "I don't have any party calling the shots — saying I have to vote a certain way even though I voted for something else. When you get Scott Orsini, you get Scott Orsini the person, not Scott Orsini, the lockstep Democrat."
We'll know whether or not the people of HD 69 will "get" Scott Orsini on November 4.
District 69 includes west St. Petersburg, Gulfport, South Pasadena and beach communities from the Redingtons to St. Pete Beach.