Manatee School Board member vies for Florida House seat

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Although Lakewood Ranch’s Richard Tatem is running for the District 72 seat in the Florida House of Representatives, he said his priority will be to continue to serve as the District 5 representative on the School Board of Manatee County until the day before the November election.

With nearly two years of experience with the school board under his belt, Tatem said he sees the Florida House of Representatives seat as an opportunity to make all Florida public schools more financially responsible and administratively efficient.

The Florida House seat for District 72 will be vacant as Rep. Tommy Gregory has accepted the position as president of the State College of Florida. Although his new post begins July 1, Gregory said he is likely to serve out the rest of his term through the election unless he finds the college or his constituents want otherwise. 

Tatem was elected to the school board in August 2022. He will have to resign from the school board, with a designated final day of Nov. 4, because he cannot run for the House while holding another elected position.

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"I will be a true and faithful school board member until Nov. 4 because that is my first duty," Tatem said. "That is the office I'm elected to so I'm a school board member first and a House candidate second."

Florida statute states Gov. Ron DeSantis will need to appoint someone to fill the seat on the school board as the resignation will occur with less than 28 months remaining in Tatem's term. 

Elections to fill a vacancy only are required if the remainder of the term is 28 months or longer. 

Tatem said the decision to resign from the school board to run for the State House was not taken lightly. 

"I have mixed feelings because I know many people worked right alongside me to help me earn my school board seat," he said. "I am eternally grateful for all the efforts that those people did for me. I would hope they would understand that they put me in that position because of some shared values and I now have an opportunity to potentially expand the influence of our values and try to make our school system more fiscally and administratively streamlined."

Tatem said he appreciates the work the legislature has done for schools, including the improvement of school security and giving more local control to school boards. But his experience as a school board member could bring a new perspective to the legislature, he said. 

If elected, he said he wants the legislature to look at district's unfunded mandates as well as the affordability of the construction of schools. 

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Tatem said he would like to look at the possibility of aligning the construction of traditional public schools to that of charter schools. Charter schools do not need to follow the State Requirements for Educational Facilities and can often take less time to construct schools than traditional schools. For example, Lakewood Ranch Preparatory Academy was constructed in nine months while the construction of Barbara A. Harvey Elementary School took two years. 

“I want to see if we can streamline the process and make it quicker and more affordable,” he said. “We want children to be safe. But if it’s safe enough for charter school students, why is it not safe enough for traditional school students?”

In regard to unfunded mandates, Tatem said the state doesn’t always provide efficient funding to districts to be able to fulfill the mandates. 

He said the mandate that requires all entrances to school property to be locked or guarded any time a student is on campus is helpful to increase school safety and security, but without the funding that will be needed to support the mandate, it puts a burden on the districts and the local communities. 

Besides education, Tatem said he wants to “continue the good work” Gregory has done to lower property insurance rates. He also wants to work on eliminating “unhelpful taxes” such as the tax paid as rent by commercial tenants as well as striking a balance between protecting the environment with responsible growth. 

Age: 58

Current occupation: Manatee County School Board Member

How long have you lived in the district? 4.5 years

Why are you running for office? 

I desire to preserve the foundations of American society for future generations by defending the “ABCs of Being Just an American”:

America The Beautiful

Capitalist, free-market economy

Democratic, constitutional representative republic

English as the primary language

Firearms – right to bear

Greco-Roman Intellectual Heritage

Judeo-Christian values

Please go to: click the link to find the pamphlet I wrote on the ABC’s. 

What makes you more qualified for this House seat than your opponents? 

• Only candidate who has held elected public office, and therefore who has a in-depth and first-hand understanding of taxation and development issues affecting the community.
• Only candidate with a wide breadth of professional experience: higher education; K-12 education; aviation industry (former military and airline pilot); executive leadership training/development; federal planning/budgeting/execution experience at HQ USAF Reserve Command. The other candidates are experienced in their fields of expertise but lack a breadth of professional experience that is necessary to be an effective legislator for a broad range of issues.
• Only candidate who has been a professional leadership educator and executive coach for senior government and civilian leaders. This experience and its accompanying knowledge and wisdom cannot be matched by my opponents.

I have worked collaboratively with local legislators and local elected officials and have developed good personal and professional relationships with them. While my opponents may know the elected officials, they have not worked collaboratively with them as elected officials to further community priorities.

If elected, what three legislative initiatives would you champion? 

Reduce taxes to increase economic activity in Florida:

Reduce the cost of building traditional public schools by bringing their costs more in line with charter school building costs;

Stop unfunded/partially funded mandates from the state which drive up local taxes;

End the 2% commercial rent tax;

Raise the business tax exemption limit to at least $50,000;

Increase financial incentives for vocational training to be in line with college financial incentives;

Champion efforts to maintain green space in Florida:

Support funding for conservation easements;

Support tax structures and regulations that encourage agro-tourism.

What do you see as the some of the biggest public policy challenges facing Florida? 

Unbridled growth without regard to ensuring that adequate infrastructure is in-place.

Increased healthcare needs in the state because of an aging population, while many medical providers are leaving the state because of the high cost of doing business in the state and the lack of medical scholarship support in the state.

What is your position on Amendment 3, which would legalize recreational marijuana? 

I am not in favor of recreational marijuana. I know first hand that marijuana is a gateway drug. I lost a 19-year-old son to suicide  and drug use, starting with marijuana, which played a major role in his demise. Sheriff Wells is in 100% agreement with me on this issue.

What is your position on Amendment 4 — “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider”? 

I do not support Amendment 4. 

The cost of home insurance has transformed Florida into no longer being a low-cost state in which to live. What can the Legislature do to help make home insurance more affordable?

Rep. Tommy Gregory led the charge on legislative changes in this area, and those changes are having positive effects. Many insurance companies are returning to the state, and many insurance companies have petitioned the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation for stable of even reduced insurance rates. 

Future legislators need to hold the line on the recent insurance reforms to ensure they have adequate time to take effect.

What can the Legislature do to help increase the supply of work-force housing? 

The Legislature can reduce overall regulation and permitting requirements, which will lower the cost of residential building, thereby making housing more affordable.

The Legislature consistently has passed legislation in recent years to give “sales tax holidays” for a variety of special categories. In the 2024 session is approved sales tax holidays for disaster preparedness; back-to-school supplies; power tools; and summer-fun items and admission to museums. Do you agree or disagree with giving sales tax breaks to special categories as opposed to lower the sales tax rate for everyone? 

If there is going to be a sales tax holiday, it should be across the board. Government should not be in the business of picking winning and losing businesses — in this case driving customers to certain businesses, and not others, for a tax holiday.

Gov. DeSantis is committing at least $227 million of taxpayer dollars over the next five years to transform New College of Florida into a conservative, Hillsdale College-like liberal arts college. Is that a good use of taxpayer money, and if so, why or why not?

I do not agree necessarily with the assumption of this question — that New College is trying to become “conservative.” My educational background is in the humanities, and I have completed two-thirds of a Ph.D. in the humanities based on the Great Books of the Western World Series. 

New College is trying to revive a classical education model to seek The True, The Good and The Beautiful. That goal is not a conservative or a liberal (in the modern sense of the word) endeavor. 

A classical education model seeks to use the wisdom of thousands of years of the Western Intellectual Tradition to train students’ minds and hearts in the cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, courage and temperance. 

And, a classical education aims to expose students to the greatest works of literature, art and science, that have stood the test of time. New College’s goal of reviving a classical education model represents a step in the right direction for higher education because it seeks to cultivate virtue, truth, beauty and wisdom.

What taxes or tax rates should be changed in Florida? 

The commercial rent tax should be completely eliminated

The business tangible personal property tax exemption should be raised to at least $50,000, if not eliminated altogether. Once a business has bought tangible property and paid the sales tax, it does not seem just to continue to tax that property annually.

Is health care for all a right? 

This question depends on the definition of “right.” For me, a “right” is a legal protection against intrusion by the government into one’s affairs without just cause — for example, the Bill of Rights. 

The Bill of Rights restrains the government from acting unjustly against its citizenry, but it does not confer monetary benefits from the government. Therefore, healthcare is not a “right.” 

There is a debate to be had as to whether there should be government funded healthcare (I am opposed to that), but healthcare is not a right.

Lawmakers must make choices. Which would you rank a higher priority — expanding Medicaid or increasing the funding for Florida’s transportation needs? 

I would prioritize transportation needs. With exploding building and population growth, infrastructure is one of, if not the, biggest challenge in Florida at this time. 

Expanding Medicaid seems good at first, because the federal government covers most of the cost. But eventually, most of the cost of expanded Medicaid falls on the state, putting severe pressure on the state budget. 

What is your philosophy on taxation? 

Taxation should be the minimum necessary to fund the enumerated powers granted to government by a constitution. For Florida, that would include both the federal and state constitutions.

What is your philosophy on the role of government? 

I concur with what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness … That to secure these rights [emphasis added], governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The expansion of government beyond “securing rights” always leads to expanded needs for more and more taxation because governments always seem to want to “do more good things for people,” and the ever-growing government either requires higher and higher taxation or deficit spending, both very pernicious to the financial stability of society.