Miami lawmaker wants more scrutiny for economic incentives

Rep. José Javier Rodríguez, D-Miami, is pushing for more accountability from the state's tax incentive program, which provides tax breaks for companies who agree to create jobs in Florida.

Under a bill field by Rodríguez, the state would have to provide detailed information about the type of jobs created by companies receiving taxpayer incentives. Florida would also have to launch an online database to allow taxpayers to track the progress of the companies receiving incentives. An online database was launched last year, but it has only limited information.

The tax credit program is facing renewed scrutiny this year, as lawmakers look more closely at the pros and cons of giving companies tax deals to lure them to Florida. Last year, one of the companies went bust after receiving $20 million in taxpayer funds from the state.

While Gov. Rick Scott and his top officials in charge of the incentives program say the tax incentives are helping to create thousands of jobs, several bills filed by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seek additional transparency. Sen. Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, is pushing a bill that would require an independent review of all incentives, providing information about the return on the state's investment.

“Our state’s economic development programs are a major strategy for diversifying our economy and making it more competitive for the future” said Rodríguez, in a statement. “Evaluating taxpayer-funded incentives with maximum transparency is important for all Floridians but particularly for those Florida businesses whose competitors are receiving tax dollars to deliver on jobs or investment promises.  This bill seeks to restore credibility to economic development programs which have recently come under fire for failing to fulfill their missions.”

@ToluseO

 

Will botched transparency contract spawn reforms of how legislators govern themselves?

A botched $5.5 million state contract for a transparency web site, signed in secret by the chief of staff of a former Senate president, may have an unintended consequence: forcing legislators to follow the rules they require of everyone else.

Members of the Senate Government Operations and Accountability Committee declared the Transparency 2.0 web site an unlikely survivor as the committee moves to merge nine transparency web sites. The Senate let the contract lapse Dec. 31 and the committee is working to find a replacement. But the committee said the secretly-signed contract could force the Legislature to change its ways.

“We need to go a step further and make sure this doesn’t happen again,’’ said Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, referring to the no-bid contract signed in 2011 between Spider Data Systems and Steve MacNamara, the former general counsel and chief of staff for former Senate President Mike Haridopolos.

Bondi, lawmakers take on state's surging foreclosure problem

Lawmakers in Tallahassee are renewing their focus on Florida’s foreclosure problem, after the state ended 2012 as America’s foreclosure capital.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, Senate President Don Gaetz and House Speaker Will Weatherford held a press conference Thursday to discuss a newly approved $60 million program for housing aid.

The program—which includes money for homebuyer assistance, legal aid and foreclosure prevention—is part of last year’s multibillion dollar national settlement that included cash payments to states.

Bondi reached a deal with Weatherford and Gaetz after an initial disagreement over who had authority over the $334 million in funds allocated to Florida. In the end, the groups compromised to allow the Legislature to direct the money during the 2013 legislative session, with $60 million carved out for release prior to the session.

Bondi’s office organized a press conference Thursday to discuss the details of the $60 million program. The deal includes:

• --$35 million for Down Payment Assistance (Florida Housing Finance Corporation)
• --$10 million for Foreclosure Counseling (Florida Housing Finance Corporation)
• --$5 million for Reducing the Foreclosure Backlog  (State Courts System)
• --$5 million for Legal Aid (Various providers)
• --$5 million for Attorney General’s Legal Fees (Attorney General’s Office)

Transparency developers say Senate leaders had access to site for more than a year

It remains one of the most perplexing questions surrounding the tug of war over the Senate's now-defunct Transparency 2.0 web site: Why would Senate leaders pay $5 million for a budget transparency web site for members but let it sit idle for more than a year until the contract expired?

Now, a letter from the developers of the web site to Senate President Don Gaetz reveals that user names and logins were provided to 58 Senate members and staff in 2011, including Gaetz himself. It doesn't answer the question but sheds some light on the he-said/she-said nature of this kerfuffle.  Download Mattson Response to Senator Gaetz

Gaetz told the Herald/Times in December that he had no recollection of ever getting a log-in for the web site that was set up under previous Senate President Mike Haridopolos to offer unprecedented access to state budget documents and accounting. He said he was underwhelmed by the performance of the web site, when he saw it demonstrated, and disappointed in its cost.

"I was a senator a year ago,'' Gaetz said. "I don’t remember anybody ever saying: ‘here’s your access code.’ I’ve asked for a list of all those who used the data and how often they used it so I could get a sense of the utility.”

The company, Spider Data Systems, provided Gaetz with the list of users earlier this month. It not only includes Gaetz but five other Senate leaders, including Sens. John Thrasher, Andy Gardiner, JD Alexander, Lizbeth Benacquisto and former Senate President Mike Haridopolos. So, why didn't the Senate use this high-priced tool?

Tax breaks flow to gun manufacturers, violent films and games

What do violent video games, gory movies and high-powered assault weapons have in common?

They have all been blamed for tragic mass shootings, including last month’s at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — and are all subsidized by Florida taxpayers.

With Florida’s tax code more business-friendly in recent years, economic incentives and tax breaks have flowed to companies and industries currently under fire for their roles in America’s gun violence.

Meanwhile, the state has cut funding for mental healthcare and school safety programs, two areas at the forefront of the national gun-control debate.

While it has become more difficult and expensive to access mental healthcare in Florida, it is getting easier and cheaper to obtain high-powered weapons.

Read more here: 

WHO GETS WHAT

 

Guns
Colt Manufacturing	$1.6 million subsidy
Adams Arms	$208,8000
Kel Tec CNC	$14,675
Violent movies/TV
Pain & Gain	$4.2 million
Parker	$424,820
I am Number 4	Amount unknown
Spring Breakers	$814,695
Burn Notice	$11.4 million (2011/12)
Alguien te Mira	$1.1 million
Video games
Electronic Arts (Medal of Honor, other games)	$9.1 million
Digital Domain (Assassin’s Creed, Halo)	$135 million
n-Space (Call of Duty 3: Modern Warfare)	$126,206
Mental health funding vetoes
Seminole Behavioral Health	$350.000
345 8 Pinellas Receiving Facility	$250,000
Baptist Health Care Lakeview Center	$1.5 million
Manatee Glens County Crisis Stabilization	$750,000
Indigent Psychiatric Medication Program	$500,000

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Senate files sweeping ethics reform package, deemed 'most significant' in decades

Senate leaders filed a sweeping ethics reform package late Friday that attempts to close dozens of loopholes in state ethics laws from addressing voting conflicts and shutting down slush funds to halting the revolving door between legislators and lobbying.

"This proposal will be the most significant ethics reform in 36 years -- since the Sunshine Amendment,'' predicted Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, chairman of the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee which filed the draft legislation. 

The committee first discussed most of the provisions of the proposed committee bills, SPB 7006 and SPB 7008, earlier this week in a workshop and has scheduled the first hearing for Tuesday, Jan. 22. 

Many of the provisions take aim at the ethical questions that have arisen in recent months, including the decision by former House Speaker Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, to open a lobbying firm a block from the Capitol to start lobbying the executive branch.

“It's a revolving door,'' Latvala said. "When you have a presiding officer of one house or the other and one day you're supervising agency budgets as speaker or president and the next day you're a lobbyist, I don't think that's good public policy."

Senate starts over in quest to build a transparency website

Determined to prove that legislators are committed to government transparency, a Senate committee convened Thursday to explore ways to give the public more details about the state’s $70 billion dollar budget.

The Senate Government Operations and Accountability Committee took up the issue after rejecting a $5 million budget transparency program — known as Transparency 2.0 — that was negotiated in secret.

The committee heard a staff report that nine state-run web sites portend to offer a level of transparency, but require the public to go to several of them to get a complete budget picture.

Dan Krassner, executive director of Integrity Florida, an independent ethics watchdog group, told the committee that even with numerous web sites there are elements of the budget that remain off limits to the public. Among them: the Legislature’s contracts, budget planning documents of state agencies and legislative salary data.

The solution, Krassner said, is for the state to move to open data, allowing the public access to many of its information databases.

“Let’s free the data,’’ Krassner said. “That doesn’t involve significant cost. In fact, it probably involves cost savings…You have all these web sites powered by the same types of databases, but the databases are not public.” Story here.

Game on, again: Court to hear challenge to Senate redistricting map

Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis denied a motion by the Florida Legislature today to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the lawsuit challenging the state Senate redistricting plan.

Legislators argued that the trial court should not hear the case because it should be handled exclusively by the Florida Supreme Court. Lewis disagreed and concluded that argument "flies in the face of case law."  Download 2013 01 17 Order Denying Motion to Dismiss

The lawyer for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Adam Schachter, released the following statement:

“Judge Lewis’s order means that Floridians will have their day in court. This ruling gives our citizens the right to scrutinize the conduct and motives of those who drew the map.” 

 

Three out of four $$ this election cycle went to no-limits committee accounts

Florida’s sputtering economy did not stop interest groups and donors from spending $306 million this election cycle on state political campaigns, according to final election year tallies released Friday.

The number is lower than the $550 million reported in the 2010 election cycle and does not include the massive amount of federal cash spent in the presidential race. But it points to a new trend: more dollars are going to campaign committees rather than individual candidates.

Three out of every four dollars were unlimited checks to political committees, while the rest went into the campaign accounts of individuals, which are capped at $500 a check.

The shift is a sign that Florida’s $500 limit is outdated and dysfunctional — and ripe for reform, said Dan Krassner, executive director of Integrity Florida, which did the analysis of the campaign finance data released by the Florida Division of Elections.

“Candidate accounts have become nearly irrelevant,’’ said Krassner. The current system allows corporations to write unlimited checks to political committees with loose affiliations to candidates but require them to give no more than $1000 to individual candidates for both the primary and general election. The result is, he said, “the public cannot easy follow the money.’’

House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, who has called for an overhaul of the state’s campaign finance reforms said Friday the numbers prove his point that the political committees – known as Committees of Continuous Existence, or CCEs – have gotten out of hand. Story here.

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Legislature wants budget transparency but exempts itself from the rules

Florida's lawmakers say they want to make the state's $70 billion budget process more transparent but when it comes to handling contracts and disclosing state salaries, neither Senate President Don Gaetz nor House Speaker Will Weatherford is quite ready to require the legislature be held to the same standards that it imposes on state agencies.

State law imposes strict rules for no-bid and sole source contracts in state government, requiring any contract over $250,000 be put out to bid and any sole source vendor to meet strict requirements. But the legislature has exempted itself from those rules.

There are nearly 33,400 contracts listed on the Chief Financial Officer's website with data on who gets paid for them and how much each vendor collects from taxpayers. The legislature does not list any of its contracts on the public site.

Anyone working for state government in an agency or state university has his salary posted for all to see on Gov. Rick Scott's FloridaHasARighttoKnow.com website. But there is no salary information for the legislature and its 1,530 employees.

Gaetz, R-Niceville, and Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, who each became presiding officers in November, make it available only upon request. This doesn't please Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater, himself a former Republican Senate president from North Palm Beach.

"I don't think the legislature should be exempting itself from the laws it is placing on other agencies,'' Atwater said last week. Story here.