Speaker: Limit terms to 12 years
By STEVE BOUSQUET
Published February 9, 2005
TALLAHASSEE - Eight may not be enough after all.
Support is building in the Florida Legislature to ask voters to stretch term limits for lawmakers from eight years to 12.
The problem: inexperienced lawmakers.
House Speaker Allan Bense said Tuesday that eight years isn't enough time for lawmakers to learn the ropes and wants to ask voters to extend the limit to 12 years.
There has been talk of doing that for years, but not enough support to get it passed. But Senate President Tom Lee already supports the idea, and Bense's support gives it significantly more momentum.
"Sometimes, experience is good," Bense told reporters. "I also like fresh faces, so I'm not willing to trash the term limits concept. I think that maybe 12 years is reasonable. It's a tough process to learn."
Bense said he would favor a vote on legislation being drafted by Rep. Baxter Troutman, R-Winter Haven, and Rep. Dudley Goodlette, R-Naples.
The new limit would not apply to current legislators to avoid criticism that they are trying to prolong their own careers.
The proposal must be approved by three-fifths of both legislative chambers to get on the November 2006 ballot.
Florida voters approved term limits in 1992 by a 77 percent margin after a campaign labeled "Eight is Enough."
It led to a big turnover among legislators. But today fewer incumbents face opposition because potential opponents wait for them to leave and more rookie lawmakers jockey for leadership posts, sometimes before they cast a single vote.
Political strategist John Sowinski, who ran the "Eight is Enough" campaign, said eight years was chosen because it matches the limit for president and Florida's governor and was the right number to "break the cycle of incumbency." Voters would reject longer terms, he said.
Lee said limiting terms was the wrong answer to a problem that still needs fixing: the power of special-interest campaign money to protect entrenched incumbents from serious challenges.
The eight-year limit has been especially harmful to the House, Lee said. The Senate still has many experienced hands, he said, because many members already spent eight years in the House. "Anything that arbitrary is not good public policy," Lee said in a speech last month.
Lee, who was elected to the Senate in 1996, said term limits allowed young lobbyists to cash in on their relationships with the new leaders.
"People just fell off a turnip truck yesterday, and now you go hang a shingle somewhere and say you're a lobbyist because you happen to know me, or somebody that's emerging in the leadership," Lee told Tallahassee's Tiger Bay Club. "And I think it's hurt the process a lot in that respect."