Secret voter data bill, on shaky ground, gets tabled again

Facing likely defeat, a Republican senator tabled his own bill Tuesday to make most public information on Florida voters secret. It was the second time that Sen. Thad Altman's bill was pulled from consideration before a vote in the Senate Ethics & Elections Committee.

Altman's bill (SB 702), a priority of county election supervisors, would make all 12 million Florida voters' home addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses secret. The information has been public for decades, but supervisors say that because of the Internet, voters are shocked to find that the data is all over the web, making them potential targets of identity theft. The voter data is also used by Tom Alciere, a former New Hampshire legislator, who has for-profit websites that display states' voter databases.

"Whatever party you choose to join, whether you choose to vote or not vote, or when you were born is your personal information," Altman told senators. "The public doesn't need to know your voter history."

Individual voter histories that show in which elections they voted or didn't, or when a voter changed parties, is public information but it is not on the Internet. It must be provided in response to a public records request.

Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth, said the news media has a legitimate use for the information, and Altman's bill was headed for serious trouble when Republican Sen. John Legg of New Port Richey joined the opposition.

The Senate panel has six Republicans and four Democrats, all four of whom were expected to vote against the bill. But one Republican was absent, which made Legg's vote pivotal.

Legg said he was troubled by what he said was "too broad a swath" of exemptions in Altman's bill. For example, under the bill, candidates could still access the voter data, so Legg suggested someone could be a write-in candidate for public office, get the data and then withdraw from being a candidate. Legg's hometown election supervisor, Pasco's Brian Corley, is a strong supporter of the bill. The ACLU and Common Cause registered their opposition.

Altman said he plans to modify the bill and seek a vote at the panel's next meeting.

Ethics deadbeats: Debt collectors seek $500K in outstanding fines from Florida public servants

@cveiga

Under Florida law, public servants have to submit financial disclosure forms every year. And every year, there are elected and appointed officials who blow deadlines and ignore mounting late fees to file them.

It’s gotten this bad: The state ethics commission has hired debt collectors to chase $487,549.96 in late fees that have accumulated, in some cases, for more than a decade.

“I think it reflects poorly on the people who have been fined for not complying with the law,” said Ben Wilcox, research director of Integrity Florida, a nonprofit government watchdog.

The two-page disclosures — which list net worth, sources of income, real estate holdings and debts — have been the repeated source of trouble or controversy for politicians over the years.

Last election cycle, for instance, Gov. Rick Scott was sued by an opponent who claimed the governor’s disclosures hid $200 million in assets. For not listing interest he made on a loan to an infamous Ponzi schemer, Hialeah Mayor Carlos Hernandez faces a $1,500 fine over his financial disclosure. And in a notorious Miami-Dade case that ended with a federal criminal trial, financial disclosures recently helped unravel ringer candidate Justin Sternad’s run for congress.

More here.

Rep. Grant the winner in Florida ethics commission ruling

In a closed-door session, the Florida Commission on Ethics ruled in favor of Rep. James Grant, R-Tampa, after an investigation into whether he misused his position to benefit a company that allegedly funded a grant awarded to his personal business venture.

The nine-member panel also decided there was no probable cause concerning an allegation that Grant had a conflict when he voted on legislation that related to excise taxes on phosphate mining.

The decision was announced Wednesday after the commission's investigator spent more than a year examining a complicated case stemming from complaints filed by Henry Kuhlman, a retired military pilot from Hardee County.

"My reaction is that they missed the mark and politics are involved," Kuhlman said.

Senate passes bill banning local officials from moonlight as legislative lobbyists

Former Senate President Ken Pruitt is among an elite group of people.

He is not only one of a handful of legislators who have held the coveted job of Senate president, he is also one of a handful of people being targeted by a high-priority ethics bill passed unanimously Wednesday by the Florida Senate.

Pruitt served as Senate president from 2006 to 2008 but, like many former legislators, parlayed his clout as a top-dog lawmaker into a high paying career as a lobbyist. He has 15 clients, including Florida Crystals Corp. and the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office, and his firm has reportedly earned as much as $150,00 a year in lobbying fees from Florida Crystals alone.

Pruitt’s full-time job, however, is serving as St. Lucie County’s elected property appraiser, a position that increases the value of the retirement benefits he earned as a long-time legislator.

Under the bill (CS/SB 846) the Senate passed, Pruitt and other constitutional officers – such as sheriffs, state attorneys and property appraisers – would be banned from lobbying for compensation. The restriction does not take effect until after the next election so Pruitt buys some time. His term ends in 2016.

Special districts handle millions but lobbyists are shielded from disclosure rules

By Dan Christensen

Nearly 1,000 special-purpose governments across Florida that raise and spend billions of dollars in public funds every year do not require lobbyists who appear before them to register, pay fees or disclose any information about themselves or their clients.

Lobbyist registration and disclosure has been mandatory for years in Tallahassee and in many city and county halls across the state, where lawmakers found it necessary to preserve the integrity of the decision-making process. Violators can be fined and barred from lobbying for up to two years.

But Florida’s independent special districts are a separate class of government — a hodgepodge of obscure taxing and other authorities that, with few exceptions, offer the public no information about lobbyists or what they’re up to at their agencies.

BrowardBulldog.org, supported by a grant from the Washington-based Fund for Investigative Journalism, spent months documenting that sweeping lack of government accountability, a free ride enjoyed by lobbyists at independent special districts around Florida with the power to tax, assess fees and/or sell low-interest bonds to finance government spending. Story here. 

 

 

Lobbying group wants a say in auditing process

With a joint legislative committee planning to discuss auditing lobbying firm compensation on Monday, the organization that represents Florida lobbyists has asked to add its voice to the discussion.  

In a letter to Senate President Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, and House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, the board of directors for the Florida Association of Professional Lobbyists, requested that the group be allowed to "provide input and offer our assistance."  Download FAPL lobby comp ltr-4 (1)

The letter also states that the association's 350 members "have gone above and beyond what is required by Florida law and created and pledged to abide by a self-imposed code of conduct that is signed by and adhered to by each member of our organization." 

State law requires lobbying firms to file quarterly reports that list dollar ranges for how much they pay each client , but a requirement that reports get audited has never been enforced.

Expert: Ethics bill's 'blind trust' provision would 'blind the public' but protect officials

Tucked into a bill hailed by Senate leaders as the “most sweeping ethics reform” in decades is a provision that could shield elected officials from disclosing conflicts of interest or questionable assets.

Under SB 2, which passed the Senate on the first day of the legislative session, any public official who wants to avoid disclosing embarrassing financial information on their financial disclosure forms could create a blind trust to hold their assets.

“This really would be a wolf in sheep’s clothing,’’ said Phil Claypool, the former director of the Florida Ethics Commission who retired last year. “The whole idea is to protect both the public official and the public from conflicts of interest” but under the Senate bill “you’ve just got room for all kinds of mischief.’’

The Senate bill — for the first time in Florida — provides for “blind trusts” for elected officials and was promoted as a way to help public officials “avoid potential conflicts of interest” by allowing them to hand off responsibility for investing their assets to a trustee. The idea is that an elected official would be “blind” to what he owned because the trustee would be banned from disclosing how the assets are invested.

The measure is part of a larger ethics reform package that includes new laws that would force public officials to disclose conflicts and face new restrictions on who they can work for while in office or when they retire from office.

But Claypool believes that the Senate bill essentially “stands the concept of a ‘blind trust’ on its head’’ by creating a “cloak of invisibility” in which elected officials simply “pay a lawyer to draw up a trust” and hide behind it. Story here. 

 

Digital Domain CEO hits back at damning IG report, blames Scott-Crist politics

Digital Domain debacle, take two.

The former CEO of Digital Domain is hitting back with an alternative script after an Inspector General report slammed the process that helped the now-defunct Port St. Lucie film studio get $20 million in taxpayer grants. 

John Textor said the claim by Gov. Rick Scott and Enterprise Florida that the Digital Domain deal was some kind of widely discredited proposal that had been blacklisted by Enterprise Florida, only to be slipped into the budget later by aggressive lawmakers and Gov. Charlie Crist—is complete fiction.

In fact, Textor said, Enterprise Florida actually recommended that Florida taxpayers chip in about $11.4 million to help Digital Domain bring jobs to the state.

An email Textor provided to the Herald/Times shows that an Enterprise Florida representative wrote Textor on March 18, 2009, saying that the organization would “present to [the Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development] relative to a one-time award of $6.1 million” and other awards for a “total potential FL economic incentive package” of $11.4 million. The email, not included in the IG report, said Digital Domain would be required to create 300 jobs. 

EFI never went through with a recommendation to OTTED (which is required for  economic incentives grants to be awarded), but Textor has a very different explanation for why that did not happen.

According to Enterprise Florida’s account, the organization refused to support funding because Digital Domain’s finances were “extremely weak” and its business model was suspect.  Textor has a different story, and questions Enterprise Florida’s credibility by pointing out that the organization believed Digital Domain’s business plan was strong enough to receive an $11.4 million incentives package. 

Textor believes that he and others are being thrown under the bus as a way for Gov. Rick Scott to attack the Crist administration, which was in charge when Digital Domain received funding by getting special language tacked onto the state's budget.

House revises its ethics bill, allows for revolving door lobbying of exec branch

The Florida House Subcommittee on Ethics unanimously agreed to make some revisions to its high profile ethics bill on Tuesday, tightening some rules and loosening others. The biggest change: exempting all legislators from the two-year ban on executive branch lobbyists except the House speaker and the Senate president. 

The decision to allow legislators who leave office to return the next year to lobby the governor and executive branch underscores the delicate dance legislators engage in. Many of them run for office to serve the public and others use the process as a ticket to lobbying.

A Herald/Times report found that as the state's budget has increasingly become dependent on steering contracts to private sector vendors, the size of the lobbying corps has exploded. There are now more people registered to lobby the governor, the Cabinet and their agencies — 4,925 — than there are registered to lobby the 160-member Legislature — 3,235.

The House bill adopts much of the Senate bill which passed the Senate on the first day of session, but makes some significant changes. 

On ethics reform, 'one step forward and two steps back'

A leading ethics expert in Florida said Monday that the Legislature's efforts to strengthen state ethics laws are
"one step forward and two steps back" and in some cases would make things more lax than they are now.

Attorney Phil Claypool, the retired executive director of the Commission on Ethics, appeared at a news conference with Integrity Florida, the Tea Party Network and Progress Florida -- all groups that say the current ethics proposals before the Senate and House are not strong enough. They critiqued the legislative proposals on the eve of a scheduled vote Tuesday in the House Ethics & Elections Subcommittee.

"It's not progress," said Claypool, who worked for the ethics agency for more than three decades. He said he was especially troubled by these proposed changes:

* Providing for blind trusts for elected officials that "blind" the public from holdings that could be conflicts of interest, by excluding the ethics commission's recommendations, such as requiring public disclosure of the
assets that are in the trust.

* Giving public officials a 60-day grace period to file amended financial disclosure forms to avoid being prosecuted for improper filings.

* Prohibiting the ethics commission from investigating cases if an official's mistakes were "immaterial or inconsequential."

"Does this protect us, the people of Florida, or does it protect the interests of public officials?" Claypool asked. In all his years as an ethics watchdog, he said, "I did not hear from the public that we were being too aggressive
against public officials. What I regularly heard from the public and the press was that we were toothless tigers, we were ineffectual, and we didn't have enough power."

Claypool said there are some positive aspects to the ethics proposals, such as requiring financial disclosure forms to be posted online, giving the ethics commission up to 20 years to pursue scofflaws who don't pay fines, and
broadening "revolving door" restrictions on legislators who become lobbyists. But it's not enough, he said.

-- Steve Bousquet