Well, Well: At Least A Dozen FL Pols, Including Rick Scott, Enjoyed Sugar-Industry Funded Junkets
MIAMI, FL — The Tampa Bay Times has been rolling out an impressive expose of secret hunting trips to Texas taken by more than a dozen current and former Florida lawmakers and officials including Gov. Rick Scott, who is in a tight race for reelection. While the findings may strike some readers as business as usual in politics, the story involved some clever public records reporting and good follow-up by the Times’ Craig Pittman and Michael Van Sickler. “I was thinking, I don’t have a lot of faith in Texas public records,” Van Sickler told me. “I shouldn’t have thought that. The people over there were very helpful.”
Pittman and Van Sickler discovered that the Florida officials had found a way around the state’s gift ban, passed in 2006 to prohibit lawmakers from accepting meals, drinks and trips—once a common practice in Florida. The trips, all to go hunting at the fabled King Ranch in Texas, were at least partially paid for by the sugar industry and also attended by lobbyists for Big Sugar. But the politicos, all Republicans, managed to hide them by having the costs routed through the Republican Party, Pittman and Van Sickler found. As the reporters explained, “current law lets donors give unlimited contributions to parties and political committees, as long as the gift serves a vaguely defined ‘campaign purpose.’ Parties can then turn around and bestow the gifts on politicians who need not tell taxpayers what they received or who paid for it.” The story also noted that the law does not require much detail when it comes to these contributions—gifts of air travel need not specify a destination, for example.
“By not disclosing their King Ranch trips, officials and sugar lobbyists have avoided any scrutiny of their private dealings with each other and whether their relations influence decisionmaking on state agricultural issues, including the future of the Everglades,” they wrote. Simply untangling the relationships between King Ranch and sugar interests in Florida is complicated. The ranch owns thousands of acres of sugar cane farms in Florida. And US Sugar leased 30,000 acres of King Ranch three years ago. Big Sugar’s interest in the Everglades and Florida’s water policy is equally tangled. The sugar plantations dump fertilizer-laden run-off into Lake Okeechobee, a practice a federal judge ruled illegal in 2008. Scott’s predecessor and opponent for governor, Charlie Crist, hatched a plan to solve the problem, and finally move forward the state’s efforts to clean up the Everglades. Florida would buy all of US Sugar’s 187,000 acres, making it possible to clean up the lake and restore the natural flow of water to the Everglades. Recession-era budget tightening meant the state was only able to buy a small portion of US Sugar land, however.
Shortly after Scott went on one of the trips in February 2013, he appointed the executive in charge of King Ranch’s Florida holdings to the board of the South Florida Water Management District which, among other things, is in charge of Florida’s efforts to clean up the Everglades.
EDIT
http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/tampa_bay_times_exposes_sweet_deal_for_state_politicians.php
