Jeff Brandes left the state Senate after serving 10 years there, following two years in the House. He returned to his Pinellas County home, filled with a sense of disillusionment about The Process in Tallahassee.
“My big takeaway is this: Everything in Tallahassee is tactical on most issues,” he said recently. “There’s no strategy. We go year to year and we change policy without thinking about what it is that we actually want to achieve. … Long term, what do we want to achieve?”
Brandes still wants to answer that question. To that end, he now leads the Florida Policy Project, a nonprofit, bipartisan think tank that works on four areas of public policy he championed as a lawmaker: transportation, criminal justice, property insurance and housing affordability.
The News Service of Florida’s Dara Kam recently spoke with Brandes on City & State Florida’s “Deeper Dive with Dara” podcast, released earlier this month.