State Rep. Fiona McFarland, R-Sarasota, listed three priorities heading into the 2025 Legislative Session: child welfare, artificial intelligence, and transportation.

For years now, she has pushed to change a formula for distributing money to community-based care providers around the state. There’s a method in statute for awarding funds, but one based on dated methods like hotline calls when most reports come to agencies today through e-mail and internet communications. Because of that, the budget for groups over the last five years has been negotiated by the Florida Legislature each year, with the official formula largely ignored.

“If you are connected to a Senate President or Speaker of the House, you have a good funding year,” McFarland said. “That’s how we do a lot of funding but it’s tough when it’s child welfare. There’s nothing political about taking care of kids.”

She wants a change to how the Department of Children and Families and the state’s 14 contracted care providers receive funding, and for the methodology to be consistent and based on modern metrics. 

Similarly, she also wants the Legislature to re-evaluate the planning process for transportation projects. The state system sometimes rewards road planning that doesn’t always work for residents who use the roads daily, the lawmaker said.

As far as artificial intelligence, McFarland knows technological advances in content generation have created policy concerns across the country. She wants to look at transparency requirements on AI-generated content, including images, audio and video.

“What residents in Sarasota have spoken to is that fear of not knowing what they are looking at,” she said. “Whether it’s on social media or something in the news or in campaigns, people’s biggest fear is just being misled by an image or video that looks really convincing and it’s not real.”