Editorial: Gov. Scott’s job promises missed most Floridians

Tampa Bay Times reporter Steve Bousquet noticed something interesting last week. Two of Florida’s top Republicans are touring the state to talk about jobs — and they’re not saying nice things about Gov. Rick Scott’s record on them.

Bousquet wrote, “In recent trips to small-town Florida, Republican candidate for governor Adam Putnam and a likely rival, GOP Sen. Jack Latvala of Clearwater, sounded a similar theme: that amid all the boosterism about new jobs, much of the state has been forgotten.”

Indeed, despite almost 8 years of the governor’s persistent public rhetoric about job-creation, a report from the Florida Chamber found that 36 of 67 counties have actually lost jobs since 2007, before the Great Recession. And according to the data, many of Florida’s rural counties are worse off today than when Scott first won election in 2010.

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The economic alarm from Putnam and Latvala was previously sounded by Florida Chamber of Commerce chief economist Jerry Parrish back in June. Parrish warned state leaders about how uneven Florida’s economic growth has been. He also warned that projections show that Florida will produce 54,000 fewer jobs in 2017 than it did in 2016, according to coverage from Miami Herald reporter Mary Ellen Klas. And the jobs that have been gained have primarily been centered near Orlando, Tampa or South Florida.

Just look at Escambia County. Despite new construction and development and the huge economic impact of Navy Federal, metrics from the Florida Chamber show that we’re still headed in the wrong direction. Our unemployment rate is increasing and we’re actually losing gross income due to people migrating out of the county, as our poverty rate of 15.4 percent shows no signs of improvement.

Santa Rosa County is also showing negative trends in both unemployment and poverty, according to the Chamber metrics. And the same is true for most of other rural Panhandle counties. They’re tough numbers with no easy solutions. But it’s an example of how entire regions of the state have continued to struggle, even as elected officials have proclaimed victory in their campaigns for economic health, wealth and happiness for all.

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So what’s the answer? Part of it is getting serious about metric-driven, long term thinking, according to Florida Chamber President and CEO Mark Wilson. He visited the PNJ last week to show how the Chamber is making state and local data visible to the public at www.thefloridascorecard.org. It’s a real-time dashboard of metrics that offers a detailed look at counties’ present and future needs for economic health.

Wilson understands that communities need to hold themselves accountable to this nexus of data — reading scores, graduation rates, health metrics, job readiness — in order to flourish economically. In other words, the problem is a lot more complex than campaign-promise solutions of limiting government, lowering taxes, increasing “incentives” or killing “corporate welfare.”

It’s good that the Chamber is forcing state leaders to look at the hard numbers about Florida’s economic future — even if they don’t paint the same rose-tinted pictures that the governor so often does.

And it’s good that leaders like Putnam and Latvala are acknowledging that rural counties have been left behind. More than half the state simply hasn’t seen what Gov. Scott promised to deliver.

The truth is that politicians like the governor have little power to create jobs or the businesses that generate them. What they can help create are strong schools, healthy communities, clean environments, smart kids and intelligent infrastructure.

Do that and the jobs will follow.