Pathetic: Another Florida ethics officer violates ethics rules | Scott Maxwell
Ethics enforcement in Florida has long been a joke.
And not a funny joke, like: Why can’t you trust an atom? Because they make up everything.
Last year, for instance, the head of the state’s ethics commission made headlines for violating the state’s ethics rules — a sentence you just don’t see every day.
He wasn’t punished for it, either. Instead, after Gov. Ron DeSantis gave former Ethics Commission Chairman Glen Gilzean a $400,000-a-year job running the state’s new anti-Disney district, DeSantis then made him Orange County’s elections supervisor.
What’s more: The Central Florida Tourism Oversight Board has refused to say whether Gilzean was still being paid by the district after he started getting paid to run the elections office. Ah, ethics!
But that was just the beginning.
Last week, we also saw this headline: “Florida Ethics Commission Waives Fine for Its Own Member.” Keep in mind: This was another ethics commissioner. And here, we had a whole new layer of swampiness where the commissioner’s fellow ethics enforcers acknowledged the protocol violation, but gave him a pass anyway. What a message.
And now, Florida is poised to weaken ethics laws even further with legislators passing a bill that would make it harder to file ethics complaints in the first place. The law will soon go to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who should veto that bill.
First, though, let’s look closer at the most recent flap involving $1,500 worth of potential fines for ethics commissioner Freddie Figgers, who failed to file a timely financial disclosure when he served on another state board.
This issue seemed pretty clear. Figgers had a missed the deadline for filing the required paperwork by more than a year.
So why did the commission waive his fines? Well, a letter from the ethics commission noted it could make a difference if the noncompliance wasn’t “willful,” which Figgers said it was not. He said he thought someone else was filing the disclosure on his behalf.
Let’s stop here. Because this idea of politicians getting a pass for supposedly breaking the rules by accident is a crock.
We’ve seen it before, including when Orange County commissioners got off easy for deleting text messages that were public records after the prosecutor concluded they didn’t break the law “knowingly.”
That’s not how law enforcement usually works — for plebeians anyway. A car thief doesn’t get a pass by claiming he didn’t know auto theft was illegal. Speeding motorists can’t avoid tickets by claiming their 100 mph driving wasn’t “willful.”
Only when it comes to political corruption and white-collar crime do we have this ridiculous standard of proving the rule-breaking was intentional.
My father, an attorney, used to say: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it.” I grasped that lesson as a kid. Adults in public office should be able to as well.
One, lone ethics commissioner agreed. Former state attorney Bill Cervone told the Florida Bulldog that excuses shouldn’t matter, saying: “The IRS would not accept, ‘I thought someone else took care of it’ as a valid excuse for not filing a tax return on time.”
He’s right. It’s a shame he was alone in that sentiment, on the losing end of a 4-1 vote to waive Figgers’ fines.
Then we have the proposal to weaken the state’s already lax ethics enforcement. Among other things, the law would prohibit anyone from filing anonymous ethics complaints with local ethics boards, which erects an obviously problematic obstacle. If an employee who works for a public agency witnesses unethical or illegal behavior, she or he should be able to report that without fear of being punished. That doesn’t mean the ethics commission would take that complaint as the gospel truth, of course — only that the it should have the ability to probe the issue.
Another part of SB 7014 demands that anyone filing a complaint have “personal knowledge” of the alleged violation. That’s open to a lot of interpretation, but as the Sun Sentinel’s editorial board argued last month: Often, the only ones with “personal knowledge” of misconduct are those who commit it.
That part of the bill seems designed, in part, to make it harder for citizens to file complaints based on news reports that expose corruption.
Sen. Danny Burgess suggested in an op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times that journalists who expose corruption can just file the complaints themselves. First of all, that’s not how journalism works. More importantly, though: Again, what other violation of state law works that way? If a newspaper exposed a theft, would law enforcement look the other way unless the reporter who wrote the story personally filed a complaint?
Interestingly, the Seeking Rents website noted that the Legislature actually ignored some of the Florida Commission on Ethics’ suggestions for strengthening ethics laws, including providing better protections for whistleblowers. Instead, they passed a bill that the government watchdogs at Common Cause called “dangerous,” saying, “It undermines the will of the people and will allow corruption to go unchallenged if it comes into law.”
The only hope is that DeSantis vetoes the bill.
What he should really do, of course, is push the Legislature to beef up Florida’s laws. But at a minimum, he should refuse to weaken an ethics-enforcement system that’s already a bad, sad joke.
Scott Maxwell is an Orlando Sentinel columnist. Contact him at smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com.