Is Scott the 'jobs governor' he promised to be?

TALLAHASSEE Gov. Rick Scott spent the last week in Canada, hawking the Sunshine State to business leaders he hopes will send jobs here.

It’s his second trade mission -- the previous one was to Panama -- and he heads to Brazil in October. It’s all part of his plan for creating 700,000 new jobs in seven years, he says.

The hundreds of state employees now losing their jobs, apparently, are not.

Scott, a former corporate executive, who calls himself the “jobs governor,” and Florida’s “chief economic development officer,” says he’s only interested in creating private sector jobs.

The state budget he signed on May 26 will help him accomplish that, he said, by reducing taxes, regulation and the size of government.

But that eliminates 4,500 state jobs, 1,300 of which were filled -- people who pay mortgages and rent and otherwise contribute to Florida’s economy. Some reside in the Bay area, like the 53 losing jobs because of the shuttering of a juvenile detention center in Tampa.

That doesn’t count the thousands of public school teachers receiving pink slips around the state, including in Pasco and Pinellas counties, or the estimated 8,400 construction jobs lost by spending $150 million from a transportation fund elsewhere in the budget.

The governor has urged Floridians to hold him to his promises. Even Scott’s critics acknowledge that job growth doesn’t happen overnight -- but at what point will voters decide whether Scott is truly putting Florida back to work?

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Scott announced on Wednesday that Garda, a Montreal-based security corporation, will move its U.S. headquarters from Pasadena, Calif., to Boca Raton. Net job gain: 100 by 2014, with salaries averaging above $65,000.

It’s not the only company setting up shop in Florida on Scott’s watch. Among the comers:

• Toronto Sky Aviation is launching a new aircraft repair company in Opa-Locka. Job gain: 100.
  In March, aerospace company Chromalloy announced it was building a technology center in Palm Beach Gardens and moving its headquarters there from Orangeburg, N.Y. upon receiving more than $1 million in state and local support. Job gain: 52.
  Two months earlier, Vision Airlines announced it would make Northwest Florida Regional Airport in the Panhandle its hub. Job gain: up to 4,200. Also in January, Bing Energy built its headquarters in Tallahassee. Job gain: 244.

Company officials at Garda, Vision and Bing Energy all publicly credited their decisions, at least to some degree, to Scott -- though in all three cases, negotiations began well before the governor took office.

Dean Minardi, Bing Energy’s chief operating officer, said his company liked Florida’s low cost of doing business, and was partnering with a Florida State University scientist on fuel cell technology.

But lured by venture capitalists, working hard to sway the company to Massachusetts, the company was “within a single stroke of the pen” of heading to Massachusetts -- until the election of Scott and pro-business GOP supermajorities in the state legislature.

“You’ve got a new governor saying, ‘I’m going to eliminate the corporate income tax,’” Minardi said. “They’re looking for more jobs; we want to create jobs. It became a no-brainer.”

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Scott’s pledge to phase out the corporate income tax won’t lure most companies, since Florida’s tax rate is already one of the country’s lowest, said Tony Villamil, who was a top economic adviser to former Gov. Jeb Bush but endorsed Democrat Alex Sink against Scott in last year’s election.

More important is a skilled workforce -- a factor that Scott and lawmakers are dangerously underestimating, said Villamil, by jacking up university tuition rates as much as 15 percent and cutting K-12 spending by 7.9 percent.

“How low can you go?” asked the economist, now St. Thomas University’s business school dean. “With the new budget in July, we will be last in the nation -- lower than Mississippi -- in education spending.”

Companies do care about education, said Niceville Republican Sen. Don Gaetz, who oversees his chamber’s economic development budget. But they’re more concerned about the kinds of skills and training a state’s workforce has.

“I don’t remember going into 27 states and expanding my company saying, ‘before we expand to Illinois, let me see if the K-12 budget went up or down compared to last year,’” said Gaetz, a future Senate President who sold the hospice company he co-founded for more than $400 million in 2004.

Villamil praised Scott for reaching out to business executives, and said the governor and lawmakers rightly slashed state regulation of development, insurance and other industries.

But shredding the state workforce will not help create private-sector jobs, he said; Florida already ranks last in spending per-capita on government. In fact, he said, those cuts jeopardize the infrastructure on which businesses rely.

“In terms of saying ‘Florida’s government is too big, let’s shrink it’ -- the facts are not there,” he said. “It’s more ideology than sound public policy.”

Not every private sector job is more valuable economically than a public job, Gaetz said.

But “if we really believe government jobs are the way to prosperity, I wonder why societies built on that premise haven’t done so well. I recall the Soviet Union had a going-out-of-business sale.”

When it comes to assessing job creation, said David Denslow, a University of Florida economist, “there’s a real problem there between the short-term and the long-term.”

Cutting regulation, combating fraud and protecting companies from lawsuits -- as Scott and lawmakers have -- ultimately enhances the business climate, he said.

But Scott vetoed spending to build higher-education facilities that would have created both construction and research jobs, Denslow said, and the cuts to government clearly add to the unemployment rolls. “That’s going to slow the state’s recovery.” 

“A lot of these were in the I-4 area, which is as close as Florida comes to having a high-tech area. We ought to foster that.”

Denslow also criticized Scott’s veto of millions of dollars for higher education facilities, which the economist said would have created both construction and highly-skilled research jobs.

Overall, though, there’s little that state leaders can do to combat the business cycles that have wrought such havoc in Florida, said Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness.

“The best you can do is to prepare the state to facilitate growth -- when, in fact, it returns again -- by taking a look at regulation and other things that may inhibit job creation, which this budget does,” Snaith said.

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Since Scott took office, state unemployment has fallen from 11.9 percent to 10.8 percent, the lowest it has been since September 2009. With just five months of governing under his belt, Scott and his staff have been treading a delicate line, pointing out the trend while not claiming too much credit it for it yet.

Scott’s newness may not be the only reason. Measured in jobless benefit claims, the falling rate may also indicate that long-term unemployed have given up the job hunt, Denslow said.

“The unemployment numbers are simply a statement of fact,” said Scott spokesman Lane Wright. “Florida’s unemployment figures have been steadily trending downward at a faster rate than the country as a whole …The people of Florida will ultimately hold the governor accountable.”

So at what point do voters decide whether Florida’s “Jobs Governor” is keeping his promise?

“No governor creates jobs,” Villamil said, noting that state analysts have predicted that Florida’s economic recovery should generate at least 1 million jobs over seven years, irrespective of anything Scott does.

Asked to confirm that Scott means to create 700,000 jobs above normal growth, Wright said, “How would you tell the difference between the two? Governor Scott committed to creating 700,000 jobs in seven years and we are on track to meet that goal.”

Politicians usually get more blame or credit than they deserve for the economy, said Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competitiveness.

“In this case, the governor’s timing is perfect,” he said. “Going forward, these policies may have some stimulative effect on hiring.

“More importantly, it sends the signal about Florida becoming more business friendly,” Snaith said. “It may be more of a marketing benefit than anything else.”