Tallahassee Legislative Days 2012
January 24th and 25th, 2012
To all FMCA members,
We hope everyone returned safely from the recent FMCA meeting in Jacksonville
and found the meetings both informative and productive. As promised, we
wanted to provide you some of the documents referenced during the FL
Legislative presentation. The following documents are attached for your review:
After a 40% reduction in state aid for the current year, DACS and DEP are both
proposing to completely eliminate funding for mosquito control for FY 2012‐13.
Their proposal next year is to eliminate all funding for the mosquito control
programs and for mosquito control research. This will have a major impact on
our programs to perform our mandated duties and essentially eliminate the
important mosquito research in Florida. Although we recently heard at the
FMCA meeting from DACS that the State Aid Funds to mosquito control programs
were ranked low in their schedule to cut, we don’t consider #6 of 32 scheduled
cuts a low ranking. This is a disturbing message to hear and we cannot let this
further attempt to gut our program occur.
FMCA’s Tallahassee Legislative Days has been scheduled for Tuesday evening
(Jan. 24) for dinner and Wednesday (Jan. 25) for the day at the capitol. The 2012
Florida legislative session is scheduled to begin on January 10th, two months
sooner than normal, because lawmakers need to work through state and federal
redistricting. Please place this important date on your calendar. Your
participation is critical this year to help deliver our message to the legislators.
Budgets are tight and travel money even tighter, but if you can find the time and
funds to attend this all important event, it would go a long way toward keeping
mosquito control issues and needs in the forefront of our legislator’s minds. If
you can only make it for the day, come Wednesday, January 25th to visit your
legislators. It cannot be stressed enough how important your participation is in
this event.
Hotel Information:
We appreciate your support and interest in the Florida legislative process and
hope you can find the time to join in our efforts. Additional information for
dinner/lunch, talking points, etc. will be available next month. There are a
number of important issues coming up, including the complete loss of State Aid
funding, elimination of special districts and other issues that could have an
enormous impact on FMCA, so we implore you to show your support to help to
maintain what we currently have. Don’t sit back and assume others will carry the
ball for you!
We sincerely hope to see you in Tallahassee on Jan. 24/25.
FMCA’s Legislative Committee Co-Chairs
Dennis Moore – dmoore@pascomosquito.org
Doug Carlson ‐ doug.carlson@irmosquito2.org