Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed two more pieces of legislation Friday night.
One bill (HB 325) would have expanded training for commercial drivers licenses to nonviolent inmates with two years or less remaining on their sentences, expanding eligibility already available to work-release inmates.
While it passed unanimously in the Senate and House, DeSantis said legislators missed unintended consequences. He deemed the program “unnecessarily burdensome” to the Department of Corrections.
This diverges from the take of legislators, who believed the bill wouldn’t impose new impacts or costs on the prison system.
He also said the prospect of driver training for inmates creates “significant public safety concerns.”
According to the House bill analysis, a prime driver for the bill was the shortage of commercial truck drivers in this country, which is estimated to be 80,000 currently but is expected to rise with an anticipated need to replace 1.2 million retiring drivers.
The lack of American citizens willing to drive trucks has led to foreign born drivers behind the wheel. Sometimes the results have been deadly, as allegedly was the case with Harjinder Singh.
The immigrant, who was trained and licensed outside of Florida, is alleged to have made an illegal u-turn on the Florida Turnpike, leading to charges of triple vehicular homicide and drawing national coverage for a time while Singh was somehow allowed to leave the state. Lt. Gov. Jay Collins went to California to extradite the suspect (with the assistance of State Troopers who in every other circumstance would do the job without the LG’s involvement).
DeSantis also vetoed legislation (SB/CS 688) that would have created the Board of Naturopathic Medicine within the Department of Health, setting guidelines for practitioners.
He said doctors and dietitians can already prescribe or recommend naturopathic remedies, and that the bill could impact current practitioners of naturopathic medicine by imposing new “bureaucratic hurdles,” including post-graduate education not available in the state currently.
DeSantis previously vetoed a bill that would have tracked e-bike and scooter crashes, along with a measure that would have made it easier for high school students to volunteer as poll workers.
More vetoes are coming, specifically regarding line items in the budget that he is expected to sign Monday, just ahead of the beginning of the new fiscal year on July 1.