MODERATOR: LaToya Dennis

Central FL Public Media, News Director and Managing Editor

LaToya Dennis began her journalism career as a general assignment reporter at WUWM in Milwaukee in 2006. Throughout her tenure, she has taken on many leadership roles from training and mentoring newsroom fellows to co-executive producing an Edward R. Murrow award winning series called Project Milwaukee. Dennis has been at the forefront of rethinking what news is and how to best deliver it to communities not traditionally well served by public radio. She holds both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in Journalism from Michigan State University.

Florida Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith

Carlos Guillermo Smith has been a trusted voice for our community in Tallahassee, previously serving in the Florida House of Representatives from 2016 to 2022 before his election to the Florida Senate in November 2024.

A graduate of the University of Central Florida, Carlos is a respected civil rights leader who has championed affordable housing, gun safety, Tourist Development Tax reform and funding for the arts.

Carlos serves as senior advisor at Equality Florida, an LGBTQ civil rights organization. He also is a member of the board of directors for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra.

In the 2025 legislative session, Senator Smith championed legislation allowing for the use of local hotel tax revenue for the expansion of SunRail and LYNX bus service (SB 1114) and to limit public spending of those dollars at Visit Orlando (SB 1110).

Frank Santos, CEO of Rosen Hotels & Resorts

Born and raised in Fall River, Massachusetts, Frank Santos got his start in hospitality as a teenager, working as a busboy at the local Holiday Inn. He ascended along the way with multiple promotions under the tutelage of his mentor, Chris Tustin. As he was climbing the ranks at the Holiday Inn, Santos was studying culinary arts at Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School. Cooking had always been one of Santos’s passions and that remains the case to this day.

Santos encountered his first real-life crossroads when he was offered a full scholarship at the Culinary Institute of America. At the same time, Tustin offered Santos the opportunity to follow him to Merritt Island and be part of the opening team for a new Holiday Inn. Like most success stories, Santos took a chance on himself and his future by moving to Florida.

He thought he would spend two, maybe three years in Florida and then move elsewhere, but in 1975 he was offered the opportunity to be the controller of the Red Carpet Inn on International Drive, as well as the Altamonte Springs Inn and Racquet Club and Lord Chumley’s restaurant. Several years later, Santos became regional controller of five Central Florida hotels.

In 1982, Hilton Hotels sought out and appointed Santos as regional controller for Hilton Hotels Orlando/Kissimmee.

In September of 1985, a young, rising hotelier named Harris Rosen was looking for someone to fill his Chief Financial Officer (CFO) position at his Orlando-based company. Rosen called Santos, told him about the position and asked for a meeting. Their bond was practically cemented from the start. Santos started the position in January of 1986 and the rest, as they say, is history. In late 2024, Santos was named CEO of Rosen Hotels & Resorts.

In the decades that followed, Santos worked hand in hand with Rosen to build the company into the Southeast’s largest independently owned hotel chain. Santos helped oversee the construction and openings of four hotels (Rosen Inn Lake Buena Vista, Rosen Plaza, Rosen Centre and Rosen Shingle Creek), along with multiple renovations and expansion projects. The company has been debt-free for years and years, an achievement few can boast.

Santos played a pivotal role in spearheading additional key initiatives such as RosenCare, the company’s award-winning healthcare program, the Tangelo Park and Parramore preschool programs serving families in underserved communities by providing free early education and college scholarships and a decades-long commitment delivering water, medical supplies and housing to the people of Haiti.

Santos also worked with Rosen to create the UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management, which is now the nation’s leading hospitality school, the Adam Michael Rosen Foundation, which helps cancer patients and their families and twice, he helped save what is now the Rosen Aquatic &Fitness Center from permanent closure. These efforts further diversified the company’s impact and earned him notable industry recognition, including receiving the first-ever CFO of the Year (Large Company) award from the Orlando Business Journal in 2009.

Santos is well known for his community service, his generosity and his longstanding commitment to philanthropy, receiving the Kenneth F. Murrah, Esq. Award as Central Florida’s Outstanding Philanthropist in 2023. He currently serves on the Dr. Phillips for the Performing Arts Board of Directors, as an Emeritus Board member for the Orlando Shakes and the Orlando Family Stage, and as a Diman Bengal Foundation Board member. He has previously served on the boards of directors at the Orlando Philharmonic, Canine Companions, The American Cancer Society and Runway to Hope.

Jane Healy, former managing editor of the Orlando Sentinel

Jane Healy’s 40-year newspaper career took her from writing stories for a University of Maryland journalism class to the Pulitzer Prize 17 years later. She began as a “copygirl” in 1971 at the New York Daily News Washington bureau. Assigned occasional stories by the bureau editors, she compiled enough clips to be hired by the Orlando Sentinel in 1973.

In her early years there, Jane was a metro reporter covering everything from the cops beat to government and politics, including the initial years of the Tourist Development Tax. In 1981 she was promoted to the editorial board as an editorial writer. She quickly acclimated to that role and was named editorial page editor in 1985. That year she was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her Florida’s Shame editorial series, which exposed politicians who were caving into developers and destroying the environment of rural areas in Seminole and Orange Counties. Jane won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for the ongoing series, which resulted in the rescue of the Wekiva River and Orange County’s eastern rural area. It was the Sentinel’s first Pulitzer. She was a Pulitzer finalist again for the Florida’s Shame series in 2007.

In 1994, Jane was named the Sentinel’s managing editor, supervising a newsroom of 380 staffers. After that experience, Jane returned to her love of the editorial page and was again named head of the editorial board and the editorial pages. During that time, the Sentinel branched out to television. That resulted in Jane co-hosting a Sunday show called “For the Record” for six years. In 2008, Jane retired from the Sentinel full time and began a Sunday political column that ran until 2010.

In 2023 Mayor Jerry Demings named her co-chair of his task force on the county’s Tourist Development Tax (TDT). At Jane’s urging, the task force recommended that the county support a tourist impact tax, a 1 percent hotel tax that would go toward affordable housing. The mayor and the commission unanimously made this a part of their legislative agenda, the first time they had ever supported expanding use of the tax. It now is an issue in the Legislature.