Putnam pushes vocational training in public schools

Florida Agriculture Commissioner and GOP gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam made a campaign stop at Scenic 90 Café last Friday.

A recent Mason-Dixon poll showed Congressman Ron DeSantis, who has President Trump’s endorsement, with a double-digit lead over Putnam, 41-29 percent. The crowd at Scenic 90 didn’t care, and Putnam told Inweekly that he believes his campaign’s ground game will win the Republican nomination for him.

Putnam had his stump speech down Friday morning and sprinkled it with down-to-earth humor. He said when he became agriculture commissioner the state was at the bottom of the abyss of the great recession.

“The Wall Street Journal wrote our obituary, said Florida’s not coming back,” he said. “Tourism’s broken. The growth model’s broken. And it’ll take 20 years to clear the inventory of condos in south Florida.”

He continued, “Well, it took three years to clear the inventory of condos in south Florida. Our unemployment rate then was almost 12%. Today it’s less than four. Eight years ago more people were moving out of Florida than moving in. Today a thousand new ones are moving here every single day. Folks, conservative leadership does matter and we’ve proven it for the last eight years.”

He said the state of Florida needs be more than a pro-business state. Putnam said, “I’m sayin’ we need to be a pro-small business state. If you take care of small business, big business is going to be fine. Because I’ve never met a big business that was born big. But we have to have a culture in Florida that’s pro-small business—which means keeping taxes low and regulation light.”

Putnam pledged to bring back vocational and technical education.

“I will put back into our middle schools and high schools, vocational and career and technical training,” he said. “We are going to stop treating our state colleges, what we used to call our community colleges, like a red-headed stepchild.”

He shared a joke to make his point about the importance of vocational training: “Y’all heard about the lawyer who called the plumber out on Saturday and the plumber fixes his problem. And the lawyer hands him a bill. I mean the plumber hands the lawyer a bill, and the lawyer says, ‘My God, you make more per hour than I do.’ And the plumber said, ‘Yeah, I make more per hour than I did when I was a lawyer, too.’”

Putnam said he doesn’t want to undermine higher education.

“I’m describing a world where we have great, world-class universities that meet the needs of their students,” he said. “And we have a great community college system and state college system, and a vo-tech system that takes care of all of our students, not just the top 1 percent So they are welcoming into adulthood with a pay check, not with student loan debt.”

He pointed that Florida young men and women can have opportunities to find good careers in the financial services, construction, aviation, logistics, cybersercurity and healthcare and call Florida home, raise their families here, and find their piece of the American dream here.

“All of those things can be accomplished in this economy that has been so disrupted and that has less interest in what the piece of paper is hanging on your wall and more interested in what your skills are,” Putnam said. “We have to produce students who have the skills to be successful in this economy.”

He continued. “That’s why I’m going to put workforce training back into our schools. And that’s why we are going to support our community colleges. And that’s how we are going to diversity our economy and make the I-10 corridor an advanced manufacturing corridor, so that our state is more strong and more resilient for the next down turn in the economy.”