The best outcome
JetBlue’s commitment to preserving all jobs at Spirit’s new Dania Beach corporate campus, and their dedication to keeping and enhancing operations at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport for JetBlue Travel Products, are substantial reasons why the City of Dania Beach supports the merger between Spirit and JetBlue.
This merger presents an extraordinary opportunity for fostering job growth, developing and training successful employees, and supporting a thriving workforce in South Florida. Notably, the combined airline will employ about 6,000 residents in the Fort Lauderdale area, which will make it one of Broward County’s largest employers. Most important, it has committed to bringing at least 1,000 new, high-tech and high-paying jobs to South Florida.
I wholeheartedly support this merger, which I’m sure will help pave the way for a prosperous future for the talented workforce of our beloved city and surrounding region.
Ana M. Garcia,
city manager,
Dania Beach
Kids are strong
I was born in Germany before the end of World War II. When I was about 10 years old, we were shown at school the documentaries made by the Allied Forces when they liberated the concentration camps.
We were not spared anything, not the heaps of corpses, shoes, hair or the emaciated survivors. It was very difficult for us, especially because we were told that it was our parents’ generation who did this.
But we accepted our country’s guilt and eventually overcame the shame.
Why does Gov. DeSantis assume that Florida’s children are less resilient and cannot accept the truth about slavery?
Birgit Ladet,
Miami Shores
Fashionable again?
With an unprecedented heat wave affecting not only the United States but also other countries, we must find ways to reduce the impact of climate change. I grew up in South Florida, and our Westchester house had a bright white-pebble roof that reflected the sun’s rays and reduced the heat impact.
A recent New York Times article, “White roofs catch on as energy cost cutters,” pointed to studies that showed white roofs reduced air-conditioning costs by at least 20% in hot and sunny climates.
Recently, a Key West resident asked the city for permission to paint her historic home’s roof white. She sued when the city refused. Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal upheld a prior decision solidifying that white roofs are indeed considered an energy-saving device. Florida law prohibits any municipality from banning energy-saving devices, so the white roof was given the green light.
I guess we had it right more than 60 years ago, when Old Florida built homes with white roofs.
Who knew we were ahead of the times?
Jacqueline Gutstein,
Miami
Reeducation unit
Florida’s Republican Party can spin history however it wants, but if teaching that slavery was some kind of job-training program, the party had better also say that the program included kidnapping, family separation, human trafficking, rape, whippings, lynchings and torture.
Republicans — all of them — should be ashamed of themselves.
Meg Livergood Gerrish,
Palmetto Bay
Woke beer
Much has been said about Gov. Ron DeSantis’ war with The Walt Disney Company. Recently, he has thrown InBev (maker of Bud Light beer, among many others) into the mix, calling for an investigation of the firm for pursuing “woke ideology” that affected its stock price and therefore, its fiduciary duty to shareholders. Florida’s state pension holds shares of InBev and this decline, in DeSantis’ words, “absolutely hurts” the $180 billion fund.
At $50 million, this represents about a third of 1% of the fund, so once again, knowing that his base takes everything he says at face value, DeSantis only seeks political points with them. His sputtering campaign will collapse under the weight of his nonsense.
If anything is harmed, it will be Florida’s taxpayers, who will have to pay the army of lawyers he has in place to fight all the inevitable challenges to his threats and legislation. DeSantis clearly doesn’t care because it’s a win-win in his eyes.
He continues to chip away at culture wars’ red meat, and when he is challenged, his base will likely think he did his part and the liberals are at fault for creating these challenges.
DeSantis also does not care about the quantifiable damage he is doing to Florida’s economy.
Alex Jimenez,
Winter Park
No benefits
The premise that anybody but slave owners “benefited” from slavery is ridiculous. Yet, that is exactly what the Florida Department of Education’s newly adopted African-American Studies Standard contains in its “Social Studies for 2023” benchmark.
Fact-checking the few examples provided by the creators of the standard is counter-intuitive and unnecessary; it may even seem to lend some legitimacy to the claim.
Depriving people of having any kind of autonomy over their own lives and subjecting them to being owned and traded like property cannot, under any circumstances, be beneficial.
Clara Vertes, Miami
