U. S. Senator Bill Nelson has been traveling the state during this August Congressional recess, giving speeches about the sequester, partisan gridlock, and threats to natural Florida. In West Palm Beach, the veteran Democratic politician found a way to bring them all together.
The Forum Club is friendly turf for Nelson. It's a regular meeting of hundreds of politically savvy news junkies in a mostly Democratic county. But it’s here, he said, in Palm Beach County, that many of the issues of his standard luncheon club speeches converge. It starts with the sequester - the big, blunt budget cuts that resulted from Congress' failure to find smarter ways to trim the deficit.
"And if these cuts continue, I didn’t say spending cuts, I said the sequester, then we’re going to be in serious trouble", Nelson warned.
According to Nelson, the sequester will block hundreds of millions of dollars in medical research grants to Scripps, Max Planck and other components of Palm Beach County's biomedical research hub. And he said it will limit air traffic control at general aviation airports such as the one in Boca Raton. That's the sequester. Gridlock, says Nelson, has kept the House from passing a water resources bill that would kick start Everglades restoration and protect the Indian River lagoon.
"You are suffering because important legislation has stalled in congress", said Nelson.
In the Forum Club crowd of several hundred, Palm Beach Shores mayor John Workman was a rare Republican. He said Nelson may have a point about managing the sequester, but not about eliminating it.
"My goodness, if we can't cut one, two percent off the top of the federal government, then we’ve got issues", exclaimed Workman.
In short answers to questions from the floor, Nelson repeated he has no plans or intention to run for governor in 2016.