Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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April 25
The Tallahassee Democrat on Andrew Gillum’s ethics probe:
“Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?”
Early in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Cassius asks Brutus what’s so hot about the Roman leader, who appears to have an ego trait that’s afflicted politicians through the ages.
The higher they go in public office, the more they become convinced that they can accept favors from lobbyists and courtiers surrounding them without being influenced.
And when caught taking extravagant favors, the reflex reaction of all public figures is to admit as little as possible - and then commend themselves for taking responsibility for the mistakes they minimize.
We saw it for years in the Florida Legislature, which finally clamped a “gift ban” upon itself, vowing its members would no longer accept so much as a ham sandwich or cup of coffee from the lobbyists clamoring for their attention. That ban, unfortunately, does not apply to city and county officers.
And so it is that former Mayor Andrew Gillum was able to persuade himself that he could have a good time in New York - taking a Statue of Liberty cruise in the harbor and seeing the Broadway smash “Hamilton” - with a lobbyist pal and a couple guys who were posing as business investors wanting to set up shop in Tallahassee. He was similarly incurious about actual costs when his buddies invited him on a little vacation at a villa in Costa Rica, at bargain rates.
It all came back to bite him when Gillum was nominated for governor by the Florida Democratic Party, losing by a margin so close it went to recounts. The Florida Commission on Ethics found probable cause for an investigation and, on Wednesday, Gillum reached a settlement with the commission to avoid a public hearing in which the commission sought testimony by his brother, Marcus, and an undercover FBI agent who had posed as one of the businessmen so generous to the mayor in his vacation travels.
He agreed to pay a $5,000 civil fine for accepting an unspecified gift.
“Today is vindication,” Gillum said in a statement afterward. “The results confirm what I’ve said all along - the facts matter and I never knowingly violated any ethics laws.”
Not quite.
Vindicated people don’t pay $5,000 fines. And if Gillum, as mayor, didn’t “knowingly” accept expensive favors from people seeking favors from his city, it’s because he didn’t try to know. And certainly, nothing says “trust me” like delaying a public hearing for a couple hours while lawyers confer privately with the Ethics Commission staff.
The negotiated settlement no more vindicates Gillum than the Mueller Report absolves President Trump of ethical culpability for his official actions or personal conduct. To keep their actions just barely this side of the law, remaining technically not prosecutable, is not a standard to which we expect our leaders to aspire.
The Ethics Commission settlement is still subject to ratification by the nine-member panel, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Gillum is out of office and his prospects of a political comeback will be severely hampered by the ethics investigation and its negotiated outcome.
We don’t necessarily think Gillum acted corruptly. We think he was blind to the obvious reason behind the blandishments of business interests trying to butter up the mayor of a city that had something to offer them - or to withhold. He’s certainly not the first high-ranking public official to think he could dine at their table and still fairly consider their business proposals.
We’d have more confidence that Gillum, and other local politicians, had learned from this experience if he forthrightly took responsibility for his own actions, rather than claiming the deal he struck with the Ethics Commission amounts to “vindication.”
Online:
https://www.tallahassee.com
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April 25
The Orlando Sentinel on open government in Florida:
Lawmakers’ contempt for Florida’s Sunshine Law was on full display late Wednesday night.
Reporters for the Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald began tweeting that House Democratic lawmakers were meeting behind closed doors, ostensibly to discuss electing the party’s leadership. While we would prefer such discussions were held in the open, the law doesn’t require it. That’s what Democrats said they were talking about in private.
Not true. The reporters - the Sentinel’s Gray Rohrer and the Herald’s Elizabeth Koh - discovered lawmakers were talking about the state budget and other bills in violation of the state’s open meetings law. Once the tweeting began, the doors suddenly opened and the reporters were welcomed into the meeting.
A couple of lessons are important here: Democrats fancy themselves as occupying the moral high ground. And sometimes they do. But as Wednesday’s episode demonstrated, when it comes to open government and respecting the Sunshine Law, they’re just as bad as the state’s Republicans.
Every year Democrats happily join Republicans in the rush to create new exemptions to the Sunshine Law, even though this is one area where Democrats could make a difference, even as the perpetual minority party. Florida’s Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate to create new exemptions for public records or open meetings. If Democrats chose to, they could stop any new exemption in its tracks.
But they don’t.
For example, this year’s bipartisan effort to restrict information includes a bill that expands the definition of home addresses for those who already are able to have that information withheld.
Under the new law (SB 248), a home address means “the physical address, mailing address, street address, parcel identification number, plot identification number, legal property description, neighborhood name and lot number, GPS coordinates, and any other descriptive property information that may reveal the home address.”
The First Amendment Foundation is appalled. In a letter urging Gov. Ron DeSantis to veto the bill, the foundation’s Barbara Petersen wrote, “This information is of critical importance to the business community, particularly title companies and realtors … Property records are not only public records; property records are also official records and an exemption of this magnitude is simply unwarranted.
How did this sweeping new exemption come to pass? Through a unanimous vote of the House and a 39-1 vote in the Senate. (We salute that lone voice for open government - Democratic Sen. Lori Berman of Boynton Beach.)
The new address exemptions apply to an existing and stunningly long list of current and former positions: police officers, corrections officers, firefighters, code enforcement officers, judges, investigators, probation officers, public defenders, state attorneys, EMTs and paramedics, nurses at certain facilities, human resource and labor relations directors, even elected tax collectors.
Another bill to cloak university presidential and provost searches in secrecy passed a House committee last week by a 14-3 vote. Another bill sailing through the House would automatically seal criminal records of those who are arrested but not convicted, which sounds OK until you consider someone with a lengthy arrest record but no convictions might be applying to become a nanny for your child.
If, like Republicans, Democrats feel no passion for open government, that’s how you get secret meetings that violate the Sunshine Law.
Democratic leaders wave off the incident as a misunderstanding, and that once they realized the press wasn’t in the room they opened the door. Alternatively, lawmakers in the room might have noticed the tweets and realized they had been busted by diligent reporters.
Either way, Wednesday’s events illustrate these are dangerous times for open government in Florida, and that in this instance neither party can claim the high ground.
Online:
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/
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April 24
The Palm Beach Post on offshore drilling:
U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Matt Gaetz on Monday introduced legislation to permanently ban any expansion of oil and gas drilling along Florida’s coastlines.
The Marine Oil Spill Prevention Act, also co-sponsored by U.S. Reps. Vern Buchanan and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, is a not only an example an issue bringing together strange bedfellows but is just the right kind of message that needed to be sent to President Donald Trump that drilling for oil off Florida’s coast is unacceptable. And it doesn’t matter your political or geographic persuasion.
But Florida Republicans Gaetz and Buchanan, and Democrats Wasserman-Schultz and Mucarsel-Powell should also know that it’s time to stop beating around the political bush here. Because the reality is that exposing our state’s 1,200-plus miles of shoreline to drilling risks devastating our environment, economy and way of life.
Their bipartisan legislation is a good start, but it’s not enough.
It’s time for a Republican intervention. Especially when the Trump administration is moving toward allowing much greater offshore oil exploration. Worse, it has yet to officially take Florida off the table.
Gov. Ron DeSantis - like Gaetz, a Trump acolyte - may be in the best position to make Florida’s case. DeSantis is proving himself to be a more environmentally friendly Republican than his climate change-denying predecessor, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott. For example, DeSantis signed an executive order to resist any offshore oil drilling plans that include Florida, and said he’d be “raising Cain” if Florida were included in any proposals that further exposed our state’s coasts to oil exploration.
But while DeSantis has talked the talk, whether he can truly walk the walk on offshore drilling remains to be seen. His confidence derives primarily from the belief that keeping Florida exempt from any offshore oil expansion will help him and President Trump politically.
It’s a belief we don’t readily share.
The Trump administration has already given his Republican allies in Florida the bum’s rush by, thus far, shortchanging the state in its request for federal funding to restore the Everglades. Where’s the evidence the president will care any more when it comes to an equally important environmental concern of offshore drilling?
He should, of course. The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster scarred Panhandle beaches, polluted wetlands and crippled tourism - most of it Gaetz’s backyard. The oil rig explosion killed 11 crew members and the fireball was reportedly visible from 40 miles away. Its effects can still be felt today, nine years later.
Off-shore drilling is the equivalent of a political “third rail” here. Last November, voters amended the Florida Constitution to ban drilling in state-controlled waters. And last month, a Quinnipiac University poll showed a whopping 64 percent of Florida voters continue to oppose offshore drilling; with 29 percent supporting it.
And there’s little evidence that new industry initiatives or technologies will provide any better safeguards than the BP tragedy. In fact, a just released study by the environmental think tank Oceana found that industry practices still face very lax government oversight, that oil-spill clean-up methods remain inadequate and unchanged since the 1980s, and that blowout preventers, the last line of defense against a major oil spill, are often unreliable and untested in real-world, undersea conditions.
“Coastal communities face unacceptable risk if President Trump’s plan for offshore drilling moves forward,” Diane Hoskins, Oceana campaign director, said in a statement.
Yet given the renewed push from the oil and gas industry to expand offshore drilling, the president seems poised to circumvent a 2006 federal moratorium that prevents oil drilling in Florida and auction off vast sections of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts for oil and natural gas exploration.
Florida has been here before. Just last year, former U.S. Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke announced plans to open up all coastal waters to offshore drilling. He quickly exempted Florida, a move many saw as more of a favor to Scott in his bid to win a U.S. Senate seat than anything else. This exclusion was never made official. The Trump administration had an opportunity to set the record straight during the recent confirmation hearings of new Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil industry lobbyist. He remained non-committal about both exempting Florida and extending the 2006 moratorium.
The state’s Republican leadership hopes the threat of losing the 2020 election is enough to squelch any talk of including Florida in future offshore oil exploration plans. Trump, after all, barely carried the state in 2016.
Again, that’s not enough.
We deserve a federal commitment to protecting our environment and economy. And if DeSantis, Gaetz and their ilk can’t convince the president do what’s best for our state, they will have shown that perhaps the best argument for electing them in the first place - that they possess some special pipeline into this White House - is worth exactly nothing.
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Online:
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/
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