State Sen. Don Gaetz this afternoon sent out this email to his constituents. The Anti-Corruption has been passed by all the appropriate House and Senate committees. The Government Accountability Act still must pass the Senate Appropriations Committee and the House State Affairs Committee. Then, both bills will be on the Senate floor where “watering down†amendments have to be resisted.
Dear Neighbor,
New York has a year-around Legislature. In the Empire State, being in the Legislature is a full-time job with a bigger-than-full-time salary. Terms are unlimited.
Florida, by contrast, limits the Legislature to a sixty-day session preceded by committee meetings. Our part-time, citizen legislators are among the lowest-paid state workers, as they should be, and their terms are limited.
If you give politicians unrestricted time in session, unrestricted terms and nearly unrestricted taxing power including a state income tax, the results are predictable. New York spends tens of billions of dollars more than Florida on its state government even though our state has more people. Meanwhile, Florida is gaining jobs, businesses and a thousand new people a day, many of them moving here from New York.
I’m glad we’re Florida, not any other state and surely not New York.
Even so, Florida scrapes the bottom in at least one category – public ethics and governmental accountability. Maybe it’s what theologians call “the Old Adam†in all of us, the force that sucks good people into bad things. Maybe it’s the part-time nature of our Legislature that seduces politicians to take “no show†jobs from special interests in return for favors at the public’s expense. Maybe it’s the never-ending need to draw brighter lines in law between public interest and private gain. Whatever the cause, corruption is no respecter of party lines or geography. And the effect, according to the Statewide Grand Jury, is a “corruption tax†that extracts hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers in bid-rigging, fraud, payoffs, golden parachutes and less-than-arms- length transactions between politicians and contractors. The boundary between crony government and gross mismanagement is as porous as the US-Mexican border.
Lifting the standard of private conduct in public office is the reason for Senate Bills 582 and 686. When it comes to ethics bills in the Legislature, there are two sure realities: (1) everybody’s for improving somebody else’s ethics, but all of us get squirrely when our own rice bowl is being chipped and (2) like Jeb said about education, reform is never finished and success is never final. In other words, sewage will always seep to its own level.
SB 582 makes it a crime for contractors to take or give inducements to do business with state or local government or to attempt to influence the bid or procurement process. Under current law, a prosecutor has to not only prove that a bribe was paid, but that it was paid with “corrupt intent.†SB 582 says that “knowingly and intentionally†violating the law is, in and of itself, a corrupt act without having to read the mind and heart of the perp. According to all twenty state attorneys, that seemingly legalistic difference will throw the net of prosecution over plenty of smarmy transactions.
SB 686 was inspired, in part, by the infamously labeled “Scandaloosa†tourist development council outrage. In my home county, the County Commission, county attorney and clerk of courts snoozed through more than a million dollars in theft and fraud and were gigged by the Auditor General with 82 findings of mismanagement, lack of fiscal controls and poor to zero oversight.
The bill requires state and local governments to implement internal financial controls, identify and stop fraud and waste, verify financial reports and safeguard public assets. The bill also mandates public disclosure of the findings of independent audits of local government and a requirement to actually take corrective actions. If the bill passes, municipal officials have to make public their personal financial statements, including their sources and uses of income, and local governments have to disclose who is paid to lobby them.
The bill also limits severance payments from public funds, forbids hush money, requires that bonus plans not play favorites, but be open to all qualified employees and requires state and local agencies to recover prohibited compensation or stolen funds.
One of the taints of impropriety that hangs over Florida is the revolving door between office-holding and lobbying. This bill restricts former officials, including Enterprise Florida officials handling economic incentives, from rolling out of office directly into lobbying their former agencies.
Importantly, the bill closes a gaping loophole dealing with legislators’ outside employment. Legislators could not accept employment or promotions for which they aren’t qualified or as a quid pro quo for their legislative influence. The Ethics Commission is charged with enforcing this ban and can levy fines against wrongdoers.
It’s been slow and tough going, but SB 582, the Anti-Corruption Act, has passed through all of its Senate and House committees. My House partner, Rules Chairman Ritch Workman of Melbourne, has the chops and the commitment required for heavy work like this. SB 686, the Government Accountability Act, sponsored in the House by Representative Larry Metz, still must pass the Senate Appropriations Committee and the House State Affairs Committee. Then, both bills will be on the Senate floor where “watering down†amendments have to be resisted. It will be a close run thing all the way to the Governor’s office.
As you can imagine, there are no lobbyists for anti-corruption and government accountability legislation. No well-funded special interest group prowls the halls in the Capitol lining up votes for higher standards of ethics. There are no high fives in the legislative lunchroom for telling your colleagues what they can no longer do. But, I still believe that citizens won’t trust us to deal with taxes, education, health care, the environment and the economy until they trust us period.
If you’d like to read SB 582 and SB 686, please go to the following webpages: http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2016/0582 and http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2016/0686. And, as always, let me know what you think. Whether it’s a bouquet or a brickbat, your guidance makes me a better senator.
Respectfully,
Senator Don Gaetz