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Collier County is a wealthy county. According to data from the financial technology company SmartAsset, Collier County is the second wealthiest county in Florida. But, alongside that wealth many country residents are struggling. According to the Collier County Community and Human Services Division nearly 53,000 people commute to work every day from outside the county, and 35% of jobs in the county pay less than $35k a year. We talk with the Collier Community Foundation’s President & CEO to go over the highlights of a new community assessment that identifies the challenges county residents are facing, and the challenges the community foundation faces in trying to support them.

New legislation passed during the 2024 session modifies the rules by which the state commission, and local ethics boards, can operate. Critics say these changes will gut the effectiveness of the state commission and local boards. Supporters say the changes will prevent the state and local ethics boards from having to spend their time investigating politically motivated accusations. We dig into the details on Senate Bill 7014, which has yet to be signed by the governor, with two people who have spent their lives focusing on politics in Florida and its ethics system.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022 and made it accessible to the public for free, a new season of AI began around the world. But, what it all means for individuals, our communities, our countries, and the world remains to be seen. There will undoubtedly be benefits in many fields, but there is also great concern that such power could bring problems that we may not even be able to imagine yet, including job and industry disruptions. We get some context from Dr. Chrissann Ruehle, She is an Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Researcher, and Strategist, and she is a Management Instructor in Florida Gulf Coast University’s Lutgert College of Business, and she is Provost Faculty Fellow for AI at FGCU.

Bertha Vasquez spent most of her career in the classroom teaching science to middle schoolers in Miami-Dade County. She’s a passionate advocate for the scientific method and the many ways it’s made life better for humanity. And she’s a strong believer in skepticism when it comes to understanding the world around us, especially when extraordinary claims are made. These days Ms. Vasquez has taken on the role of Director of Education at the The Center for Inquiry, and Director of its Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science. The CFI’s roots go back to the 1970s when Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and other critical thinkers began seeing the need to mitigate growing belief in pseudoscience and paranormal claims using rational means and methods.

Technological advances have brought much good to the world. But as ways to communicate have diversified and led to anyone being able to get their message out to the entire world, it seems undeniable that society has taken a turn toward hyper-polarization and partisanship – and the number of people – especially young people who are experiencing mental health issues has increased and the trendline is heading in the wrong direction. Our guests are part of a cross-partisan political reform group comprised a wide range of people, from elected officials and national security experts to mental health professionals and technologists who are trying to encourage change and find ways to address the negative effects of our online world.

In March of this year, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB1 into law — expanding the voucher program and significantly increasing taxpayer funding for private schools. The new law eliminates the current financial eligibility restrictions and allows any student who is a resident of Florida and eligible to enroll in K-12 public schools to participate. The new universal voucher program is estimated to cost $4 billion in the first year of implementation alone, according to a cost analysis by Florida Policy Institute and the Education Law Center. We get some context on the new law, and the history of how vouchers work in Florida, with Dr. Norín Dollard, Senior Policy Analyst and KIDS COUNT Director at the Florida Policy Institute; and Damaris Allen, Executive director of Coral Gables-based Families for Strong Public Schools.

Toni Westland joined the federal workforce as a ranger with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers giving lock and dam tours on the Mississippi River. She then had a stint in north Georgia at Lake Lanier, then moved on to Lake Okeechobee and then Manatee Park in East Fort Myers. At some point she had vacationed on Sanibel Island so knew she loved the J.N. “Ding” Darling Wildlife Refuge, so when the opportunity arose in 2002 for her to join their team as an education specialist, she jumped on it and has been at Ding Darling ever since. Now, she's taking an early retirement as part of the federal government's downsizing DOGE efforts.

Legislation is moving through the Florida legislature during the 2023 session that would enact an exemption to Florida's robust public records laws to hide details of travel by the governor and his immediate family, and numerous other government officials including the Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court. It would also exempt visitor logs to the Governor’s mansion, and would apply retroactively, meaning details of past travel and visits also would be shielded. Critics say it’s the most aggressive assault on our public records protections ever.

On one day every January, a Point-in-Time — or PIT — Count is conducted in counties to document the number of people who are experiencing homelessness on a single night. The PIT Count in Collier County this past January found a 230% increase in the number of people over the age of 60 who were homeless as compared to the previous year. So, we check in with the CEO of St. Matthew’s House in Naples, to get a sense of what they’re facing.

The new book, “La Florida: Catholics, Conquistadores, and Other American Origin Stories” opens with the story that takes place in what’s now Florida in the fall of 1565 when Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés celebrated a ‘feast day of commemoration’ with his men after their successful landing at the future site of the town of St. Augustine. This celebration had many of the same trappings as what we think of when we recount the story of the first Thanksgiving, celebrated 56 years later in the fall of 1621, by Pilgrims in Plymouth Plantation. But, it’s not considered the “first Thanksgiving.” Why is that?