Florida
Florida Republicans Want to Ban Workplace Heat Protections
On the first day of 2023, a twenty-eight-year old vegetable harvester reported for his first shift on a farm in southeastern Florida’s Broward County. Later that day, having complained of fatigue and leg pain amid the ninety-degree heat, the unnamed man’s body was discovered by coworkers in a drainage ditch. Several months later, as the state’s temperatures reached the highest levels ever recorded, fellow farmworker Efraín López García, age thirty, met a similar fate and was found lifeless under a tree.
Republican lawmakers are trying to make these jobs even more dangerous. Rather than viewing these deaths as cause for new workplace protections amid rising temperatures, business groups and their GOP allies are pushing legislation that would prevent communities from establishing workplace heat-exposure standards or compelling employers to abide by them. It’s just the latest example of Republicans trampling on local government at the behest of their corporate benefactors. But in an era of worsening extreme heat, this particular attack on workers — connected to a coordinated and well-financed effort by big business and right-wing dark money — could be more deadly than ever before.
On Friday, Florida lawmakers passed a bill that would make it illegal for cities or counties to enforce the likes of mandated shade breaks or access to water on companies whose workers operate predominantly outside. If Republican governor Ron DeSantis signs it, the law — whose backers include the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the Florida Home Builders Association, and the National Utility Contractors Association — would also bar local governments from even asking companies with whom they contract about their heat-exposure standards.
The effort comes on the heels of a similar business-backed push in Texas, where both Austin and Dallas enacted guaranteed water breaks for construction workers every four hours, only to have the rules steamrolled by the state’s GOP-controlled government. Evidently hoping to stave off initiatives like a proposal for mandated shade and rest periods on farms and construction sites being considered by Miami-Dade, Florida’s most densely populated county, business interests seem hell-bent on making sure such protections never even see the light of day in the Sunshine State.
Such moves are in contrast to those in states like Washington and California, which have passed statewide workplace standards around heat exposure. And with heat-related fatalities in Florida already surging by almost 90 percent in the past several years alone, and the number of scorching days almost certain to increase, Republican lawmakers are effectively guaranteeing that more workers will be at risk in the years ahead.
To say that Florida’s business community has a long-standing and cozy relationship with Republican lawmakers would be something of an understatement. Its labor department was actually abolished by Governor Jeb Bush in 2002. More recently, documents obtained by one Orlando newspaper late last year revealed that two major industry groups — the Associated Builders and Contractors of Florida and the Florida Home Builders Association (which is also backing the new anti–heat standards bill) — quite literally drafted the text of a law to loosen child-labor protections.
Republican state representative Tiffany Esposito, who sponsored the new workplace heat bill, spent years as an operative in the business lobby before being elected in 2022. She still remains the head of a regional chamber of commerce. (Esposito’s official corporate bio describes her as “A 13-year veteran of the Chamber industry, [Southwest Florida] native and strong believer in Taco Tuesdays.”)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Esposito’s roster of campaign donors is a who’s who of organizations with a vested interest in eliminating workplace safety protections and keeping wages as low as possible. The Florida Chamber of Commerce PAC, for example, was high on the list of top contributors to Esposito’s 2022 campaign, having donated $10,000. The Florida House Republican Campaign Committee, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the same chamber PAC and boasts many more big contributions from corporate groups, similarly donated $10,000 to Esposito’s campaign.
“She is one of the most corporate legislators I have ever encountered,” remarked Jackson Oberlink, legislative director at Florida For All, a local coalition of progressive and labor groups, in an interview with us. “Her whole philosophy is just the Chamber of Commerce, deregulation, businesses first, profit over people.”
Oberlink notes Esposito also recently pushed to preempt all local housing protections for renters.
Affirming Oberlink’s point is the fact that the freshly passed heat-preemption bill was significantly expanded beyond its original form to include measures that prohibit “political subdivisions from maintaining [a] minimum wage other than [the] state or federal minimum wage” and “from controlling, affecting, or awarding preferences based on the wages or employment benefits of entities doing business with [a] political subdivision.” The resulting legislation essentially takes the same hostile approach to local wage ordinances as it does to shade and rest breaks.
As emails obtained by Florida-based investigative journalist Jason Garcia have revealed, a lobbyist for the Florida Chamber of Commerce quite literally sent the proposed minimum-wage ban to Esposito before it was added to the bill. The chamber itself, moreover, appears to have received this from a staffer at the Naples-based Foundation for Government Accountability — a conservative think tank that belongs to a national alliance of billionaire-financed right-wing groups called the State Policy Network that has been involved in various dark-money campaigns to suppress local democracy in states like Missouri, Ohio, and South Dakota.
While Esposito did not respond to requests for comment, she and her colleagues have barely even pretended this new legislation is about anything besides employers’ bottom lines.
“This is very much a people-centric bill,” remarked Esposito in response to concerns about its proposed elimination of local heat exposure ordinances. “And if you want to talk about health and wellness, and you want to talk about how we can make sure that all Floridians are healthy, you do that by making sure that they have a good job. And in order to provide good jobs, we need to not put businesses out of business.”
Joining the chorus was Esposito’s GOP colleague Webster Barnaby, who somehow managed to be even less subtle: “I understand the importance of us having compassion for our workers. . . . But we must continue to do the hard work . . . of making sure that our economy is an economy that’s growing, it’s an economy that is attractive.”
At both the national and the state level, Republican politicians often position themselves as proponents of small government who favor localized decision-making over blanket laws handed down from above.
Yet from Texas and Florida to Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware, the self-proclaimed “party of the working class” is proudly championing a race to the bottom in which local government is irrelevant and the priorities of business interests are seen as synonymous with the public good.
Whether it’s overriding county wage ordinances, banning measures designed to protect workers from extreme heat, or quite literally empowering corporations to sue municipalities over regulations and bylaws that might affect their balance sheets, Florida in particular has become a laboratory for legislation that runs roughshod over local democracy in the interests of private profit.
The symbiosis of right-wing dark money, big business, and Republican lawmaking is, of course, nothing new. But the heat provisions found in the new bill may be a canary in the coal mine for what the already familiar model of corporatist lawmaking and governance will look like when it collides with the realities of climate change.
Florida already boasts the hottest average temperatures in the United States. And, according to a new study by the Nature Conservancy, climate change has already made it unsafe for workers in tropical climates to perform manual labor outdoors in daylight hours throughout large swathes of the year. Even in the short term, exposure to extreme heat can quickly cause dehydration and reduce the body’s capacity to cool itself, in turn raising the possibility of heat stroke — particularly in the context of physically taxing work. Longer-term or repeated exposure, meanwhile, increases the risk of chronic heart and kidney problems.
According to data collected in 2021 by nonprofit advocacy group the Union of Concerned Scientists, nearly a quarter of Florida’s total workforce currently operates outdoors — with hundreds of thousands of people working in pivotal sectors like agriculture, tourism, and construction.
Calling the anti–heat protection legislation “inhumane,” the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Kristina Dahl told us that its effects will be most consequential for essential workers.
“These are the people who are planting and harvesting our food,” says Dahl. “They’re the people who are fixing our roads and homes and buildings, and often that work is unseen and underappreciated. But it’s some of the most dangerous work there is to do.”
Alongside several colleagues, Dahl coauthored a 2021 study that among other things closely examined both the health risks and economic implications associated with rising temperatures in Florida.
“Protecting workers from heat is relatively simple,” she told us. “They need water, shade, and rest.” But in the absence of urgently needed federal heat protection standards, she adds, it’s instead fallen to “states or countries or individual employers” to decide whether workers receive such protection and “in most places that just doesn’t exist at all.”
In that study, Dahl and her fellow researchers calculated that without significant action to reverse the pace of climate change, the exposure of America’s outdoor workforce to days with a life-threatening heat index will increase three- to fourfold by 2050. Without protections from such heat, she says there will be an inevitable and escalating “increase in heat-related illness and death among outdoor workers.”
The effects would be especially severe in Florida. In Lee County, which overlaps Esposito’s district and has a higher proportion of outdoor workers than the state average, the number of unsafe working days each year would increase to forty-one by 2050, barring major and successful action on climate change. The shift would pose a significant threat to the tens of thousands employed there in industries like farming, fishing, and construction.
In light of this, Dahl categorically rejects the binary division between workplace protections and economic prosperity offered by Republicans in defense of their heat-exposure legislation.
“Is a good job a job that requires you to work until you drop?” Dahl asked. “Is sustainable agriculture truly sustainable if people are dying in the field?”
Summing up the stakes of the new anti–heat protection bill in Florida and beyond was activist Laura Munoz — whose own father died in 2014 while working in extreme heat.
“The private market and private employers failed us,” Munoz remarked during her February testimony to the Florida House Commerce Committee: “And I’m here to ask you, did my father not deserve better? How much profit was worth his life?”
Gov. Ron DeSantis praised the World Cup for giving visiting fans from other countries a chance to see America directly.
“We do have a really great country. I know there’s a lot of problems. I know we see a lot of things that we wish we could change immediately. And I know there’s a lot of work to do, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” DeSantis said.
The visitors, he added, have gotten to see “firsthand both the generosity of the American people, but also that this is a good country.”
He is right.
But we’re pointing out these comments not just to show he is right, but also to show how he, like many of our leaders, are directly responsible for painting such a grim picture that leads to people’s negative views of this country to begin with.
DeSantis’ own political brand — the one that got him elected twice, launched a presidential campaign, and made him one of the most influential Governors in the country — is built substantially on the premise that a vast, organized internal enemy is destroying this country.
Teachers and school administrators who discussed gender identity in classrooms weren’t misguided or mistaken, they were “groomers.” Corporate executives who supported diversity programs were carriers of “the woke mind virus.” California is “a civilization in decay” leading “an attack on the American family.”
We could go on. This is not the rhetoric of someone who thinks America is a good country being pulled in the wrong direction. It is the rhetoric of someone who believes powerful forces within it are fundamentally opposed to everything good about it.
Trump has made the same argument in far more extreme terms. On Veterans Day 2023, at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, he declared: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Not misguided opponents. Not people with different values. Vermin — a word chosen with precision by Trump’s team and consistent with his repeated use of dehumanizing language toward political adversaries.
A month later, he described immigrants arriving in the United States as “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase with frightening historic parallels. These were not offhand remarks; they were delivered at rallies, posted to Truth Social, and repeated at subsequent campaign stops. Again, we could go on.
Democrats have found their own ways to corrode the thing they claim to be defending. The “threat to democracy” framing — once reserved for specific and serious institutional attacks — has been applied so broadly and so constantly that it now means approximately nothing. Every Republican appointment is an existential threat. Every policy disagreement heralds the end of constitutional order.
The World Cup has produced, almost accidentally, what American political culture cannot seem to produce on purpose: a setting in which people from wildly different countries interact with actual Americans and discover that the caricature is wrong. Fans from Scotland, Iran, Brazil, Morocco, and Australia arrived with whatever impressions their politics and media had given them, and found something different. They’re acknowledging that this is a good country, DeSantis said.
They are. The more interesting question is when the people who govern it are going to start acting like they believe the same thing.
In the meantime, sit back, have a drink with a stranger, and go Team USA.
Now, it’s onto our weekly game of winners and losers.
Winners
Honorable mention: Largo. Largo Mayor Woody Brown opened the June 2 Commission meeting by reading a Pride Month proclamation — a gesture the city had planned to drop from the agenda entirely before word got out and dozens of residents showed up to object.
Many of them arrived directly from the ribbon-cutting for Horizon West Bay, the $85 million mixed-use development anchored by the city’s new City Hall, and used their public comment time to make clear they hadn’t come just for the building.
That same Commission, it should be noted, recently passed an ordinance creating a new open-container entertainment district in the blocks surrounding that building — a program called “Sip and Stroll” that lets patrons walk freely through designated downtown zones with drinks purchased from approved local businesses.
Abner Morales, who owns Wepaa Puerto Rican Restaurant nearby, is already designing custom branded cups. “That’s awesome because we have like 16 employees. We want to keep running this business,” he said. One Cozy Smoke Shop employee told Fox 13 she sees the district becoming “almost like Bourbon Street in New Orleans.”
So the city is clearly looking to support its citizens. But on the Pride proclamation, the pressure the city was operating under was real.
In a June 1 online chat with residents, Brown explained that new legislation barring local governments from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion-related events and initiatives doesn’t technically take effect until Jan. 1. But with the budget still unsigned, Brown said the Governor could still cut off funding streams Largo depends on, including dollars for stormwater infrastructure.
“We’re trying to keep a relatively good relationship with our state folks,” Brown said, “and they’ve made some rules around that.”
Planning Board Chair Matthew Faustini, who is running for a Commission seat in November, pushed back, arguing a law that isn’t even in effect shouldn’t be tying the hands of local officials.
“You’re not willing to stand up for the residents of this city,” he said directly to Brown.
The most significant moment belonged to Commissioner Michael Smith, who is gay. Smith described spending 28 years of his life in the closet. He said the near-removal of the proclamation felt like “a real slap in the face.”
He acknowledged having considered ending his life when he was younger because of how different he felt. He said he cannot hold his partner’s hand in a restaurant without risking being called names or worse. He spoke of the proclamation as an act of faith toward residents who haven’t yet felt safe enough to be visible.
“There are many that are still afraid to come out and speak,” he said, “and many that are being shamed back into the closet. And that’s just wrong.”
Look, Florida has inserted itself into the center of the vulture war battle under DeSantis. Sometimes, they’ve pushed back against ridiculous things on the Left, but often, Tallahassee has overstepped. This proclamation isn’t hurting anyone and is a small thing in practice. But as Smith explained, it means a lot nevertheless to a significant portion of the community. They shouldn’t be feeling any heat from the state on this.
Largo didn’t do this perfectly — in fact, the city very nearly didn’t do it at all. But pushed by residents and remarks from some in charge, Largo ultimately chose its people over its political relationships.
Almost (but not quite) the biggest winner: Jared Moskowitz. Moskowitz joined forces with U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Pinellas Republican, to file a discharge petition that would force a floor vote on legislation capping federal student loan interest rates at 2%.
The bill does not attempt to cancel existing debt, a choice both Florida lawmakers described as deliberate. Rather, it’s aiming to put limits on future loans.
“There is broad bipartisan agreement that student loan debt is holding Americans back, yet Congress has failed to act,” Moskowitz said in a joint CNN appearance with Luna.
A discharge petition requires 218 signatures — a majority of the House — to force a vote bypassing leadership, and Luna has experience running them. She filed the first discharge petition of the current Congress in January over a remote voting accommodation for members on maternity leave, and it reached the required signatures before being withdrawn when Speaker Mike Johnson addressed the issue through other means.
Luna is a Republican representing a Trump-leaning Pinellas district. Moskowitz is a Democrat whose district includes Parkland. Neither one let partisan nitpicking stop them from addressing this week.
Also this week, Moskowitz hosted the fourth annual Sneaker Day on the Hill. Moskowitz has run the also bipartisan Congressional Sneaker Caucus since his first year in office. And his own connection to sneakers is personal: His late father used to take him to the mall on Air Jordan release days, and he wears them in the Capitol partly to carry that memory through the work.
Whether it’s a fun way yo bring more humanity to Washington, or reaching across the aisle to deal with a difficult policy problem, Moskowitz is making sure to build bridges in Congress in the hopes that it can break through the toxic and often absurd fake fights his colleagues, and the rest of us, spend way too much time on amplifying.
The biggest winner: FDACS. Florida’s agricultural community is already on its knees. Back-to-back freezes from late December through early February delivered an estimated $1.1 billion in damage to the state’s sugarcane crop alone. Ranchers have spent months contending with rising input costs, drought, and the lingering fallout from one of the most destructive winters in modern Florida farming history.
The last thing producers needed was a new invasive pest.
Enter the pasture mealybug, a small sap-feeding insect that specializes on grasses. It arrived in Florida in late May 2026, first detected on limpograss in South Florida. Since then, infestations have spread to multiple counties, with surveys still underway to determine the full extent of the damage.
Heavy infestations can degrade pasture quality quickly, open the land to weed invasion, and leave cattle without reliable forage. For the sugarcane industry, the pest is one more blow in a year that has already produced more blows than the industry can easily absorb.
“The rapid expansion of the infestation coupled with the quick deterioration of crop quality has taken farmers by surprise,” said Jarad Plair, a sugarcane farmer and past president of the Hendry/Glades Farm Bureau.
The situation was complicated further by the fact that as of this week, no insecticides were specifically labeled for mealybug control in pasture systems. Many common pasture treatments barely affect the pest because it spends much of its life cycle buried in thatch and soil, out of reach of conventional applications.
But the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS) wasted no time in acting, urging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to grant a crisis exemption for the use of the insecticide Sivanto Prime.
The Florida Cattlemen’s Association issued a statement crediting Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson directly. “Thanks to the dedication of Commissioner Wilton Simpson, FDACS is recognizing the importance of protecting herds and lands from invasive pests,” the group wrote. “While a long road lies ahead, we are grateful for the support and decisive action of FDACS.”
Simpson was able to move fast enough even as the ground continues to shift under Florida’s farmers.
Losers
Dishonorable mention: María Elvira Salazar. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is one of the most significant federal housing bills in decades — an expansive bipartisan package that touches more than 50 provisions aimed at expanding the housing supply, cutting red tape and limiting Wall Street investors from bulk-purchasing single-family homes.
Salazar recently took to Facebook to celebrate.
“In South Florida, housing costs are one of the biggest concerns I hear about,” she posted. “That’s why I supported this bipartisan legislation. We need to build more housing, cut through unnecessary red tape, and make it easier for families to achieve homeownership.”
The problem is, she did not vote for it, as she was absent due to the death of her mother.
To be clear, that is an entirely justifiable reason to be absent. In fact, it’s hard to come up with a more justifiable reason.
The problem is the Facebook post, which claimed credit for “supporting” legislation on which her name does not appear in the vote record.
Her Office’s statement tried pointing to her prior support — she voted for the bill in the House Financial Services Committee, twice on the floor to advance it to the Senate, and her own RESIDE Act, the Revitalizing Empty Structures Into Desirable Environments legislation she introduced in September, was incorporated into the final package.
That is a legitimate record. It’s also a different thing from the final passage vote, and using the word “supported” in a public statement about a bill you did not vote on in its final form opened her up to attack, justified or not.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) did not wait long.
“If María Elvira Salazar is misleading her constituents and taking credit for votes she couldn’t be bothered to show up for, then Miamians will replace her with a real leader who will fight for their ability to afford housing for their families,” DCCC spokesperson Madison Andrus said.
The DCCC has designated Florida’s 27th Congressional District as a “District in Play” for 2026 and has been building a file on Salazar for months. Salazar has won her district comfortably in recent cycles, taking more than 60% support in 2024. She is not in immediate danger.
But she has missed 212 of 2,820 roll call votes across her career, a 7.5% absence rate that is well above the median for currently serving House members. That number, combined with a pattern the DCCC has spent multiple cycles highlighting — instances of Salazar touting legislation she either skipped or voted against — could give the attack some credibility in the eyes of voters.
Almost (but not quite) the biggest loser: Brightline. More than 200 people have now been killed in collisions involving Brightline trains since the company began Florida operations in 2017, a milestone the railroad passed this year.
With 17 deaths recorded through late June, the overall unofficial count now sits at 214.
Brightline emphasizes, with some justification, that its safety picture is improving. The company says incidents — defined broadly as any contact a train makes with another object — have declined 30% in 2026 compared to the same period last year.
It is also midway through deploying $55 million in safety infrastructure: $45 million from a federal grant, another $10 million of its own money. The installations include fencing, warning signs and suicide prevention signage. An Orlando Sentinel analysis from late last year found that 27 months after opening, the route from Cocoa north to Orlando through more rural terrain with 6-foot fencing near the tracks had recorded zero fatal accidents.
That’s all encouraging. And perhaps over the long run it will be enough to rehabilitate Brightline’s reputation.
But that reputation remains relevant. Brightline carries the highest death rate per mile traveled of any railroad in the United States. The deadliest stretch is between Miami and West Palm Beach, where trains run through some of the most densely populated corridors in the state. Many crossings fall within “quiet zones” where trains do not sound their horns. Victims include people in vehicles who miscalculate the speed, cyclists, pedestrians walking on or near tracks, and suicide cases.
And Brightline may not have a “long run” to shed its long-standing image. Brightline lost more than $233 million in 2025. The company carries more than $5 billion in debt and interest.
Revenue reached $214 million in 2025, up from roughly $188 million the year before, but average fares in the first quarter of 2026 actually declined compared to Q1 2025. Ridership hit a quarterly record of more than 900,000 passengers, which is encouraging, though credit-rating agencies have concluded the company needs significantly higher fares or ridership volume — likely both — to reach solvency. A proposed Tampa extension remains on the distant horizon.
Will the train company get back on track before it’s too late?
The biggest loser: Tampa Sports Authority. Ye performed for the first time at Raymond James Stadium on Friday night despite weeks of escalating public pressure from politicians, community leaders and Jewish organizations calling on the Tampa Sports Authority (TSA) to cancel both the Friday and Sunday night shows.
As we spotlighted last week, the opposition was bipartisan, with both U.S. Sen. Rick Scott and former Gov. Charlie Crist leading the charge against the shows.
The TSA wasn’t moved, arguing that no taxpayer money is being used to stage the concerts.
That last claim is technically defensible in a narrow sense — Ye’s promoter is bearing the production costs — but it papers over the reality that the stadium itself is a publicly subsidized facility.
Whether the TSA legally could have canceled is a different question than whether it found itself in a bad situation, and the answer to the former is: probably not. The contract governing the shows includes an anti-cancellation clause that legal experts described as unusual and apparently inserted at the artist’s request, requiring either a federal terrorism threat elevated to Level 5 or a major public health emergency before the shows could be called off without triggering significant legal liability.
Clay Calvert, a First Amendment expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said Raymond James Stadium’s status as a public forum means a performer cannot be excluded based on what they have said or might say.
But the TSA signed a contract that locked in the performances under conditions almost impossible to break. A few miles away, the Florida Holocaust Museum announced free admission for three days in response to the concerts.
Ye published a full-page apology for his antisemitic statements in The Wall Street Journal in January. Whether that is sufficient is a question each attendee has to answer for themselves.
What is not a question is that the TSA is already under scrutiny for its governance of the Rays stadium process, and that it will likely spend the coming weeks answering for this decision.
In Switzerland ever since, Ignatavicius has steadily improved with each passing season.
Spending most of the 2025-26 campaign playing against professionals in the National League, he notched 13 points (7G, 6A) in 52 games with Genève-Servette HC. He also suited up in 11 games in the postseason, scoring two goals and dishing out an assist.
During a brief stint in Switzerland’s second-tier league, he was better than a point-per-game player, racking up 11 points (7G, 4A) in eight contests.
“That was a big there,” the 18-year-old forward said of his breakout season. “There we go, and here I am now.”
Catching the attention of scouts across the NHL, Ignatavicius was projected as a possible late-first-round pick by several outlets heading into this weekend.
Making history when the Panthers called his name, he became the fourth Lithuanian to be drafted, joining Darius Kasparaitis, Dainius Zubrus and Andrey Pedan.
“It means a lot to my family and to my country,” Ignatavicius. “It shows little kids that whatever you dream it’s possible. You’ve just got to work for it. When you get your chance, you take it. Don’t give up. Work hard.”
A veteran of 1,293 games in the NHL, Zubrus has been a longtime mentor to his young countryman.
“I’m pretty close with him,” Ignatavicius said. “We text a lot. I’m happy with that and think I can learn a lot from him.”
When it comes to future lessons, he’ll have no shortage of new teachers to work with in South Florida.
Priding himself on playing a physical, relentless style, Ignatavicius models his game after one Panther in particular.
“Matthew Tkachuk,” he said. “I try playing like him, his style. I think he’s a great player and I can learn a lot from him.”
Yet to commit to returning to Switzerland next season, Ignatavicius is still waiting to see where he’ll lace up his skates in 2025-26.
“I’ve just got to focus on my summer and getting better,” he said.
In the immediate future, Ignatavicius will soon board a flight to Fort Lauderdale to participate in his first development camp with the Panthers.
“Florida? Can’t complain much,” he said when asked about his impending trip. “Very happy.”
In between on-ice sessions, maybe Ignatavicius will even find some time to grab a pizza.
If he needs a recommendation, I’m sure Panthers fans will have a few suggestions.
“This is just the beginning,” he said.
A diver who was reported missing near the Fort Pierce Inlet has been found dead, according to the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office.
The U.S. Coast Guard received a mayday call around 11:30 a.m. June 27 about the missing diver. The Coast Guard then notified the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which deployed four boats to assist in the search, according to a social media post by the Sheriff’s Office. The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office marine unit also responded.
Friends of the missing diver joined the search, departing from Fort Pierce Inlet around 1 p.m.
The search, which included aerial support from the Coast Guard and FWC, focused on an area about six to seven miles north-northeast of the Fort Pierce Inlet, near Avalon State Park.
Around 4:10 p.m., the group of civilian divers entered the water and located the missing diver at the bottom of the ocean in about 55 feet of water. The diver was recovered and pronounced dead.
The body was transported to Coast Guard Station Fort Pierce. The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Investigations Division is investigating the incident.
No additional information is available at this time.
This story was created by Colleen Wixon, colleen.wixon@tcpalm.com, with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process. Learn more at cm.usatoday.com/ethical-conduct.
Colleen Wixon is the Indian River County government watchdog reporter for TCPalm and Treasure Coast Newspapers.
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