Rep. Andrade highlights local projects included in state budget, future goals

PENSACOLA, Fla. – Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, spoke about his accomplishments during Florida’s 2024 Legislative Session, as well as his goals for future legislation moving forward.

The Panhandle representative told Florida’s Voice that his work on multiple budget-related issues gave him the opportunity to push through various appropriation requests for northwest Florida and the entire state as a whole.

The governor has not yet signed the $117 billion state budget for fiscal year 2024-25 that the legislature passed at the end of session.

“One big thing that I was proud of was just how much we funded for the second year in a row to address the cost of housing in Florida,” he said. “For the second year in a row now we’ve put more than $700 million towards programs that help people stay in their homes and harden their homes to protect them from hurricanes and catastrophic damage.”

Andrade also talked about some of the funding that the state’s budget consisted of for Pensacola, including $7 million for the city to repurpose existing infrastructure for an affordable housing program and $5 million for the local airport to build a new terminal.

“I think the infrastructure stuff that I got to oversee allowed me to really focus on getting a ton of money for roads, drainage and infrastructure for northwest Florida,” he continued.

Something that Andrade said was important to him was the statewide funding he was able to secure for the second time, directed towards the Florida Debate Initiative.

“I firmly believe that we have to teach kids how to debate and how to argue both sides of an issue,” he explained. “Too often we see teachers telling kids what to think instead of how to think.”

“I think the more kids that learn how to debate, that learn how to gather facts and argue from both sides and not argue from being intrenched in one political viewpoint, the better off our future is going to be,” he added.

Andrade said that he was open to various types of legislation in the upcoming years related to healthcare and property insurance issues.

“Florida’s got a ton of historic homes that have survived every hurricane for 120 years,” he said. “But because they’re not built to today’s building code standards, a lot of times they get dinged on property insurance.”

“I want to try and allow for our historic homes that are built like tanks to be recognized for the quality of craftsmanship that they were built at, especially in places like Pensacola where there’s a ton of historic homes,” Andrade added.

Something that the representative said he has encouraged for a while has been the idea of an “open and honest debate” about the death penalty.

“If we’re going to have the death penalty I’m going to vote for bills saying that a child rapist deserves the death penalty,” he said. “But at the same time, I don’t know if the death penalty has a real deterrent effect and I know how much it costs our state attorneys across the state to pursue the death penalty just because of how much due process people deserve.”

“So it’s extremely costly for taxpayers, it’s cheaper to sentence somebody to life in prison then to sentence them to death in Florida, it has very little deterrent effect, and when you couple those two things with the fact that you run the risk of potentially putting an innocent person to death, or someone who’s not guilty of that crime to death, I’d like to have that debate at least once in the open,” Andrade said.

He also emphasized how it’s important to bring the issue of being pro-life into the topic of death penalty discussions and debates.

Andrade filed to run for reelection in 2024, hoping to complete his final term of eligibility in the state House.