DeSantis ends 50 years of ethics oversight by hobbling state and local investigators

By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org

The late Gov. Reubin Askew, who helped fashion the Sunshine Law and ethics rules for state government, recalled in an oral history that when Florida politicians saw this major reform brewing in the mid-1960s, “it just scared them to death.”

Now their successors have little to fear. Effective ethics oversight is almost gone and unlikely to revive in the near future, watchdog groups say.

“We’ve basically lost any safeguard that we had in the past to hold public officials accountable for breaches of our ethics laws,” said Ben Wilcox of the nonprofit Integrity Florida.

The Code of Ethics for Public Officers and Employees, an offshoot of the 1976 Sunshine Amendment to the Florida Constitution, reads quite differently than Senate Bill 7014 on ethics by this year’s Republican Legislature. The tone has gone from aspirational to belligerent.

“It is essential to the proper conduct and operation of government that public officials be independent and impartial and that public office not be used for private gain other than the remuneration provided by law,” the ethics code begins.

“The public interest, therefore, requires that the law protect against any conflict of interest and establish standards for the conduct of elected officials and government employees in situations where conflicts may exist.”

‘BAD ACTORS’ MISUSE ETHICS LAW?

This year’s ethics law revisions, courtesy of Senate Bill 7014 and Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signature, say only sworn complaints — nothing anonymous — can launch investigations at the Florida Commission on Ethics (FCE). The updated law also requires firsthand knowledge of violations; it suggests that media scoops about corrupt politicians are worthless hearsay, just “public relations stunts” to quote Senate President Kathleen Passidomo.

Critics of the bill scorned the personal knowledge requirement. “Generally, people who violate ethics don’t exactly invite friends or members of the public to attend their bad behavior,” Jacksonville City Council member Matt Carlucci noted to the Tallahassee Democrat.

And as usual the state is big-footing local rules. Now the law prohibits county-level ethics boards from running independent investigations, mandates fly-on-the-wall accounts of violations, and prevents local boards from doing anything about obvious breaches that the state can’t do.

Removing the anonymity option will cripple county ethics commissions, Wilcox said. “Especially at the local level of government, people are reluctant to come forward because they may face retaliation in their jobs, so the commissions must allow anonymous complaints.”

DeSantis signed Senate Bill 7014 on June 21 without fanfare or even releasing a statement. But when the bill passed, his Republican ally Passidomo gave a blunt explanation.

“I believe that state and local ethics boards should be able to spend their time investigating serious violations of our ethics laws, not politically motivated public relations stunts designed to generate headlines,” she said. “All too often the current process is weaponized by bad actors.”

MORE TROUBLE THAN FINES

The state-level ethics commission and local bodies like the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust can only impose fines and prompt public censure. Still, they’ve managed to stir up some trouble for tricky politicians over the years.

In 2019 Andrew Gillum, the former Tallahassee mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, agreed to pay a $5,000 fine for accepting a boat ride around the Statue of Liberty during a trip to New York City.

The seven-member FCE voted 5-2 to drop more serious charges against Gillum related to a trip to Costa Rica and multiple gifts from lobbyists valued at more than $100, the approved ceiling. One of them was a ticket to see the Broadway hit “Hamilton.”

Ethics board probes occasionally lead to criminal prosecutions. In June 2022 federal authorities indicted Gillum on charges he illegally sought campaign contributions in exchange for political favors. They dropped the corruption case in May 2023 after a jury found him not guilty of lying to the FBI.

In the case of Republican Alex Diaz de la Portilla, a former Miami city commissioner, county ethics regulators discovered that a lobbyist for the private Centner Academy had paid for his vacations. For his part, Diaz de la Portilla voted to help the controversial school acquire a large section of a public park.

Last September DeSantis suspended Diaz de la Portilla from office when he was arrested on multiple felony charges including money laundering and bribery. A political action committee he controlled allegedly accepted $245,000 in exchange for his support of the school’s expansion plan.

Diaz de la Portilla pleaded not guilty and his case is pending in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. In November he lost a run-off election to reclaim his city commission seat.

REPEAL IS ‘OUR ONLY HOPE’

The new rule that ethics regulators may not open investigations based on media reports or other “hearsay” seems to target investigative outlets such as Florida Bulldog. Ethics boards get a lot of complaints based on published reports that they see as tips and follow up with their own investigations.

“Fortunately we have members of our community who feel a real sense of outrage when they read something in their local paper that describes unethical behavior,” Wilcox of Integrity Florida said. “They take the trouble to fill out a complaint and swear it out, but they’ll no longer be able to start an investigation.”

Sometimes a complaint isn’t necessary to goad a public employee into action. On Aug. 22, 2023 Florida Bulldog disclosed a conflict of interest involving the chairman of the Florida Commission on Ethics, Glen Gilzean.

While in that position he also held a $400,000-a-year job as executive director of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. The DeSantis administration had created this special taxing body to disempower the Walt Disney Company, the governor’s political foe at the time.

A week after the Florida Bulldog story broke, Gilzean resigned from the ethics commission.

Wilcox wants the revamped ethics law repealed. But he knows that won’t happen “until we have a situation where there’s an obvious violation and the FCE won’t be able to investigate it because no one has personal knowledge of the violation.

“I think that’s our only hope,” he said. “This law has got to be repealed or we send enforcement of ethics laws back to the dark ages before passage of the Sunshine Amendment in 1976.”