More than $6 billion in DeSantis ‘emergency’ contracts are missing legally required public documentation

By Daniel Ducassi, FloridaBulldog.org

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared that “transparency is no longer optional,” and vowed to expose any government entity misusing taxpayer dollars. But his own administration has been repeatedly violating a state transparency law, awarding companies billions of dollars in “emergency” contracts while failing to publicly post copies of the agreements as the law requires.

The Transparency Florida Act says state agencies must publish contracts to the state’s contract tracking website within 30 days of being signed. However, a Florida Bulldog analysis of nearly a thousand emergency state contracts worth $1 million or more identified 719 eligible contracts – many inked years before – that are not publicly posted on the Florida Accountability Contract Tracking System.

The total value of the missing contracts is more than $6 billion.

All of the contracts examined originated from the Executive Office of the Governor, which includes the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and the state’s own data indicates they were all no-bid deals awarded without competition.

Many companies receiving these contracts have provided significant financial support for the governor’s political ambitions. They include Miami’s CDR Maguire, which describes itself as providing engineering, financial and emergency management consulting services, along with healthcare and lab services, and Deerfield Beach-based AshBritt, a rapid-response disaster recovery and special environmental services contractor.

While Florida’s contract tracking database lists entries for the 719 state contracts – with some limited information like the name of the contractor and the contract value – the actual contract documents are missing. Without the contracts themselves, details about how the DeSantis Administration spent those billions of taxpayer dollars are unavailable for public inspection – making it difficult, if not impossible, to scrutinize the terms to see if taxpayers got a good deal or got ripped off.

FLORIDA ‘EMERGENCY’ DEALS WITH NO POSTED CONTRACTS

State officials marked all of the 719 contracts as awarded through “emergency procurement” per various emergency declarations by DeSantis, citing the law that gives the governor the power to suspend competitive bidding requirements. Further, state officials did not link the contracts to any pre-existing competitively bid state term contract.

The 719 contracts without legally required public documentation are part of the administration’s response to hurricanes, the pandemic and the “emergency” of “mass migration” that the governor declared in 2023. They include massive, multimillion dollar deals for things like setting up base camps, aircraft, staffing, software subscriptions, consulting and debris removal. The value of the contracts just since the start of DeSantis’s second term in January 2023 amounts to nearly $2.4 billion.

Roughly three out of every four high-value, “emergency procurement” contracts the governor’s office has awarded are missing the legally required public documentation, with no document uploaded at all into the state’s contract tracking database.

Selecting companies for such large contracts typically requires using competitive, public bidding in order to prevent waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer money. But the state’s failure to upload contract copies or any supporting documentation also obscures the origins of these deals.

MIAMI’S CDR MAGUIRE GAVE BIG TO DESANTIS & GOP, GOT FAT CONTRACTS

The contract tracking database uniformly lists the contracts as “emergency procurement” instead of competitive methods like a “request for proposals,” effectively labeling them as no-bid deals. However, the limited information available suggests the reality may be more complex. A separate state bidding portal where vendors can find opportunities to bid for state contracts, My Florida Marketplace, contains bidding documents that appear related to some of the same projects and contractors. In one case, the entry in the state contract tracking system for a $111 million deal for debris removal explicitly references a competitively bid contract for the Department of Environmental Protection.

But without publishing the contract documents, there’s no easy way for the public to verify if any of these “emergency” awards were truly the result of competitive processes or no-bid deals like the administration indicated.

One of the biggest winners of these emergency contracts is Miami’s CDR Maguire. CDR Maguire and its affiliated companies racked up contracts valued at more than $537 million.

The married top executives, Carlos Duart and Tina Vidal-Duart, and their companies have given nearly $2 million to political action committees (PACs) supporting the governor and to the Republican Party of Florida, the Miami Herald reported in July. Duart and Vidal-Duart also sat on the national finance committee to support DeSantis’s failed presidential bid and donated the legal maximum of $6,600 each to his presidential campaign.

The couple’s connections to DeSantis go even further. DeSantis appointed Duart to the Florida International University Board of Trustees, where he serves as chairman. Vidal-Duart sat on the board of the troubled Hope Florida Foundation, launched by DeSantis’s wife. The governor appointed her to the board of Florida Atlantic University for a five year term that ends in January 2030.

Despite state data indicating the 45 CDR contracts were awarded without standard competitive bids, CDR spokesman Steve Vancore provided Florida Bulldog with documents suggesting some of the contracts were the result of bids won by the company, raising questions about the accuracy of the data the DeSantis administration has been giving the public.

Vancore said the company had no concern about the missing contracts preventing public scrutiny because “they were public bids and CDR won them.”

However, the majority of CDR contracts – valued at more than $340 million – predate the bids the company said it won, while others appear unrelated to the bid documents the company provided. Further, the state did not upload any procurement documents in the state’s contract tracking system for the 45 CDR contracts, despite also being required by the Transparency Florida Act.

BROWARD’S ASHBRITT GAVE & GOT, TOO

Other major recipients of emergency contracts with financial ties to DeSantis’s political career include Deerfield Beach’s AshBritt and affiliated companies, like AshBritt Management & Logistics, or ABML. Such companies have received more than $286 million in contracts that are missing legally required public documentation.

AshBritt’s founder, the late Randal Perkins, as well as his wife and two of his daughters, AshBritt CEO Brittany Perkins Castillo and AshBritt executive Sara Perkins, together donated $13,200 to DeSantis’s failed presidential bid, each giving the legal limit to the campaign for the primary. AshBritt also gave $3,000 to DeSantis’s first gubernatorial campaign in 2018, along with $50,000 to the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) shortly after DeSantis was elected governor.

Besides the RPOF, Gannett’s Florida newspapers uncovered another backdoor route to financing DeSantis’s political career, reporting in June 2022 that AshBritt had given $270,000 to the Republican Governors Association (RGA) while CDR had given another $105,000 since 2020. The newspapers reported the RGA doled out more than $13 million to DeSantis’s reelection campaign.

Another big winner has been Garner Environmental Services, which secured contracts valued at more than $607 million. Russell Allen, CEO of Garner’s Houston-based parent company, K-Solv Group, also gave a $6,600 donation to DeSantis’s doomed presidential campaign.

The DeSantis administration can’t claim ignorance of the law. Florida Bulldog has asked the administration multiple times about the lack of public copies of contracts since 2020, pointing to the Transparency Florida Act and what it requires, but administration officials have refused to answer, even while responding to other questions in the same email.

The governor’s office did not answer questions for this article about the lack of compliance with the Transparency Florida Act. Representatives for Garner and AshBritt did not respond to Florida Bulldog requests for comment.

Former state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez was a sponsor of the 2013 legislation that created the contract posting requirement. Rodriguez, who is running as a Democrat for Florida Attorney General, lamented the “abuse of emergency powers” by the DeSantis administration.

“The state government in Tallahassee got drunk on emergency powers in the pandemic and they just haven’t stopped,” Rodriguez told Florida Bulldog. “It’s a feast for politically connected donors that want to get their hands on no-bid contracts.”

He said one thing he wants to do as Attorney General is review all contracts over $1 million in value. But he said that kind of accountability work isn’t being done now.

“We don’t have an attorney general with any independence,” Rodriguez said, referring to DeSantis appointed Attorney General James Uthmeier.

“The attorney general is at the center of this corruption,” Rodriguez said, highlighting Uthmeier’s role in the Hope Florida scandal, which has spawned a criminal investigation.

Representatives for Uthmeier, who served as general counsel and chief of staff for DeSantis when the administration awarded many of the contracts, did not respond to Florida Bulldog requests for comment.

DESANTIS: CFO INGOGLIA ‘OUR FISCAL WARRIOR’

Meanwhile, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer is responsible for maintaining the state’s contract tracking website. DeSantis appointed former Republican Party of Florida chairman Blaise Ingoglia to the job in July, calling him “our fiscal warrior.” Since then, CFO Ingoglia has spearheaded efforts to improve government efficiency by what he often refers to as the “Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight,” officially known as the Florida Department of Government Efficiency task force (DOGE), while touring the state to shame local governments for what he deems wasteful spending.

But while Ingoglia has been targeting local governments, there’s little evidence he’s working to ensure fiscal transparency and accountability by the governor’s office, where billions of dollars in government spending have evaded public scrutiny.

Though his office is also responsible for auditing state contracts, it’s unclear what effect the widespread lack of public documentation is having on such efforts. The most recent report from the Bureau of Auditing indicates that since Ingoglia took office, the bureau has only audited three governor’s office contracts, collectively worth less than $600,000. The CFO’s website also indicates that the last time the office audited the contract management practices for the Division of Emergency Management was in 2013, and that it has never audited contract management practices for the Executive Office of the Governor.

Ingoglia’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

But Rodriguez smells hypocrisy.

“I think it’s corruption, abuse of power and frankly politicians saying one thing and doing the exact opposite,” Rodriguez said.