Away from floor, little interest

Electric chair’s end? The race issue Away from floor, little interest How it works

By JULIE HAUSERMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 7, 2000

TALLAHASSEE -- There was something eerie in Florida's Capitol on Thursday, and it wasn't just the non-stop gruesome talk about death.

It was the emptiness. On the House and Senate floor, lawmakers were debating execution, arguably the gravest government action, and their words rang through spectator galleries with mostly vacant seats.

Any other legislative session, you'd find those seats full of citizens and special interest lobbyists, craning their necks to make sure their favorite legislators saw them watching.

"It's incredible," mused Buddy Dyer, the Democratic Senate leader from Orlando, who walked out of the Senate chamber into a cavernous, vacant rotunda.

In any other legislative session, Dyer would be mobbed by lines of lobbyists wielding cell phones and handwritten amendments.

On Thursday, only a few lobbyists sat in the rotunda, some representing the state's public defenders and some representing the state attorneys. They slumped in chairs, watching the House and Senate members make impassioned speeches about crime and punishment on television monitors.

"Frankly, what are the issues here?" mused Will McKinley, a veteran Capitol lobbyist who represents big business. "They are issues of law and order and fairness."

Not much room for special-interest amendments or political favors there.

"The only special interest here is justice," quipped another lobbyist, Jeff Sharkey.

Even though they weren't part of the official action, plenty of lobbyists roamed around lawmakers' offices, hoping to discuss other legislative issues. Few of them paid much attention to the action on the House and Senate floors.

Political rhetoric rang through the empty seats around two Floridians, 73-year-old Lynn McHugh and 71-year-old Beverly Baird, tourists from Ocala who stopped in Tallahassee to see the Capitol.

"Do you know who our representative is?" Baird asked.

By the time the Senate adjourned at 6 p.m., there was nobody left watching but a handful of reporters, typing away in the press section.

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