Thought for the Day

By: Sandy Walters

Ed Kelly, recently elected mayor of Ormond Beach, was publicly very Anti-Four. He told Suzanne Steiner that "businesses are lined up at Florida's borders, waiting to see what happens with Amendment Four." Suzanne says she wished she'd asked him, "where have all these businesses been for the last 30 years?"

There are many successful and expanding businesses in Florida. We just don't hear about them. I am familiar with one in Pinellas County, a high-tech defense contract business. They picked Pinellas as their start-up location because the county was very supportive of them and so was Sen. Bill Young.

Pinellas Co. provided space in a "business incubator" facility that was an empty county building sitting unused and also gave them many tax breaks and perks to grow their business. When it reached a certain size, the company had to move out of the "incubator" to give room for the next fledgling business, which they did.

I don't know about all of their equipment, but I know their spectrometers are built here in the US -- in Pinellas County, in fact!

If you look at the economies of some cities in the north you can see why they're not hurting like Florida. My hometown, Pittsburgh, has an economy of which only 4% is made up of construction.

The future is "meds and eds" but Florida still only wants to focus on "rooftops and strip malls."