Witbracht Rachel

By Andrew Meacham

In a way, our final honoree has been preparing for her current responsibilities her whole life. She didn’t know it, but growing up in a military family can do that for you.

Rachel Witbracht has moved quickly since her final semester of undergraduate school, during which she helped manage the successful campaign of her hometown state House candidate. In the final months, and with Alex Andrade, of Pensacola, comfortably ahead, she joined Rep. Frank White as District Secretary during his run for Attorney General.

White lost that race to Ashley Moody, and Witbracht returned to Rep. Andrade, who had campaigned in part on “pro-military” values. Thirteen months later, Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, who chaired the State Affairs Committee and would soon chair Commerce, lured Witbracht onto his own staff, a move that benefited both the Representative and the aide.

“She’s a rock star,” said Ingoglia, now a Senator. “She was with me when I was in leadership, and being in that position offered me the opportunity to carry a lot of very substantive bills with a lot of impact on the state of Florida. And she was right there with me doing the research, making sure the language was right. Quite frankly, I couldn’t have done it without her.”

Today, Witbracht serves as Director of Government Relations for the University of West Florida, her alma mater. At 27, she is the youngest member on the cabinet of President Martha D. Saunders by a few decades. She acts as the university’s lobbyist while contracting with outside lobbyists and consultants, contributing to strategic planning and much more.

“In just a few short years, she has really grown,” said lobbyist Rich Heffley, who, with partner Kelly Horton, has seen that evolution from aide to managing external relations for a university. “The fact that she has pre-existing relationships with legislators, with staff, with lobbyists and with the university folks makes her particularly valuable.”

Witbracht believes her formative years prepared her for Tallahassee’s quick shifts and redrawn allegiances. “I spent my entire childhood moving from place to place,” she said, “and learning how to adapt. So I think that (state politics) wasn’t quite as much a challenge for me, just because I am so used to having to learn new experiences, and where to fit in and how to pivot to get things done, no matter what the circumstances are.”

The daughter of a Coast Guard engineering officer and a teacher, Witbracht was born in Key West. Her father’s duties would take the family to Jacksonville, also to California and Hawaii. Sometimes after school, her mother took her to a pristine beach near Base Honolulu.

“Those are some of my most cherished memories,” she said.

They resettled in Pensacola when Rachel was around 10, this time for the long term. A peripatetic childhood yielded to a cozy mooring spot with an underrated beach. The University of West Florida was just 20 minutes away. There, she double-majored in journalism and legal studies, edited UWF’s chapter of Her Campus, an online magazine for female college students, and directed government affairs for the Student Government Association.

On an SGA trip to Tallahassee, Witbracht pitched causes alongside her peers and entertained a new thought.

“It dawned on me that, ‘Wow, this might be really fun to do in real life,’” she recalled.

That journey started almost immediately and then picked up speed. By November 2019, she was joining Ingoglia’s office and preparing for grad school at Florida State University. “I got to work on a lot of the Governor’s priorities,” she said. “It was an honor for me to be able to collaborate with people at such a high level who know policy so well.”

With an eye for exactitude, she helped refine legislation to its clearest elements. For example, a professional deregulation bill she worked on in 2019 (HB 27) was at least a hundred sections thick, relaxing licensure requirements critics saw as anticompetitive (say, for out-of-state landscape architects who were licensed in other states) and repealing others altogether (auctioneers, boxing time keepers, talent agents who only work with adults).

“It was rewarding to work on policy that uplifted our industry workers and made employment more accessible for Floridians,” she said.

Along the way, she learned to master subjects she had known little about before they came up in the House.

“Rachel loved diving into complex policy issues, which is one of those things, I think, that set her apart,” nowSen. Ingoglia said. “The bigger the task, the more focused and better she got.”

Witbracht undertook this work while completing FSU’s Master of Applied American Politics and Policy program. In September 2021 she returned to the University of West Florida, now as Director of Government Relations.

Her accomplishments since include helping to secure last year a $6 million increase in UWF’s base budget. The school, which has an enrollment of around 14,000 students, had not previously seen an increase since 2016.

“That will go a long way to ensuring students’ success is at the top of our priorities,” she said.

She’s glad to be back on campus as a staffer, now advocating for students. “The biggest thing for me right now,” she said, “is that I got my start in politics at the University of West Florida. And now I’m doing this professionally for the university. So it feels like a full-circle moment for me, that I get to effect some good for a school that I know is amazing, that has amazing teachers and administrators and does a lot of good for the region.”

There is another kind of preparation, an ongoing one, words from Aristotle she uses to challenge herself: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

She likes to spend downtime reading or listening to 1970s music. Pensacola Beach, with its sugary white sand and emerald waters, is a good place to bring a blanket and a book.