Former Jeopardy Champ Joins DeSantis’s Central Florida Tourism Oversight District

Charbel Barakat, a former Jeopardy! champion and Tampa attorney has been chosen by Govenor Ron DeSantis to join the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. Barakat will fill in for a spot on the Board of Supervisors that Michael Sasso once held until recently, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

The announcement comes a week after Michael Sasso announced his resignation from the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. The reasons for Sasso leaving the board were unknown, but given that the board was so new, he hardly had time to contribute much.

Hopefully, Barakat will stay on longer; however, it is unclear if the position will affect his role in D.R. Horton, Inc. According to the Tampa Bay Business Journal, he is the VP and chief counsel of the home-building company’s Florida region.

It should come as no surprise that since DeSantis appointed Barakat, he appears to share the governor’s political leanings. The attorney is also the VP of the Federalist Society’s Tampa chapter.

In its own words, the society is “a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.  The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.”

On what appears to be Charbel Barakat’s YouTube channel, he has posted the episode of Jeopardy! he appeared on. It aired on December 24th, 2018.

In other news, U.S. Rep. Darren Soto spoke out regarding the Walt Disney Company’s decision to nix the pricey Lake Nona project. Soto, a Democrat, represents Florida’s 9th District and is not enjoying Ron DeSantis’s battle with the Mouse.

In a story from the Orlando Sentinel, we learned that Soto put the blame for the cancellation of the $1B campus on DeSantis, stating, “DeSantis singling out the company is a blow to the local economy, and there’s no doubt about that.”

I want to take a moment to correct Representative Soto. Disney decided to shutter the project due to several issues, but none had anything to do with the DeSantis feud. Disney is worried about financials, and moving several employees from California to Florida was not popular among those asked to make a significant life-changing trip.

Right up until the day it was announced, the construction industry was prepping for the Lake Nona campus to move forward. While I agree that the decision is a blow to Osceola County’s potential future, blaming this on the governor is a cheap political move.

I had a stake in the project becoming a reality, but we see this happen constantly in construction. Over my past twenty-five years in the construction industry, spending a lot of time engineering a project for it to evaporate without notice suddenly was not uncommon. This was very common during the Great Recession of the late 2000s.

[Source: Orlando Sentinel]

[Source: Orlando Sentinel]