The Hillsborough County legislative delegation heard from a handful of elected officials and dozens of members of the community in a virtual meeting on Friday, with many speakers touching upon the need for criminal justice reform.

The delegation’s chair, Tampa Democratic state Rep. Dianne Hart, has been championing such measures since she entered the Florida House in 2018, without much success as such efforts have been resisted by the GOP majority in Tallahassee.

“Our state offers not very much hope for people who are put in Florida’s prisons,” said Kim White, encapsulating the thought of others who said they had loved ones in prison.

Several speakers spoke specifically in support of Hart’s attempts for gain-time reform. Florida inmates are mandated to serve 85 percent of their sentences. The gain-time measure would allow prisoners through good behavior to have a chance to earn early release after completing 65 percent of their sentence. An economic analysis conducted by the Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research conducted in 2019 determined that such a proposal could save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars over a five-year period.

There were many other issues that the delegation heard about.

Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren said that while he was grateful that the legislature has recently added six new judicial positions to the county’s bench, there is no funding for those positions.

“We’ve done everything we can with our budget to be creative,” he said. “There is just simply no more ‘give’ to give in terms of finding additional resources.”

Kate Parker, a volunteer with the group Florida Death with Dignity, urged the legislature to consider a physician-assisted dying law that ten other states have passed. “Too many Floridians suffer because they do not have a death with dignity option,” she said. “Simply put, death with dignity does not result in more people dying. It results in fewer people suffering.”

Advocates for restoring tax credits for film and television productions have been unsuccessful over the past several years in Tallahassee. John Lux, the executive director for Film Florida, said that the Sunshine State had lost more than 100 major film and television projects that would have spent more than $1.5 billion in the state in recent years.

“It’s time to get Florida back on the map,” he urged.

Central Florida Republican House member Anthony Sabatini has recently said that he will file legislation calling on Gov. Ron DeSantis to appoint an independent third party to conduct a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in every county with a population of more than 415,000. Secretary of State Laurel Lee has previously rejected Sabatini’s request for an audit in Florida’s five biggest counties, all of which are Democratic strongholds who supported Joe Biden (Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Orange).

One citizen picked up on that request during the meeting.

“Florida was the crown jewel for election theft in 2020, except Florida literally broke the fraudulent algorithm by un-anticipating an overwhelming support for Donald Trump,” Charles Kay with Florida First Audits posited. “Plan B kicked in and six other states stopped counting, resulted in unexpected Biden wins,” he speculated, while calling on state leaders to “demand a full and independent forensic audit.”

The first committee meetings begin a week from Monday. The beginning of the next legislative session begins Jan. 11, 2022.