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.
Meanwhile, as Pittman noted in his latest installment on the complex dealings, US Sugar is trying to get approval to develop the same acreage it agreed to sell to the state. If that plan is approved, the land could be worth much more and therefore cost the state much more to buy it. The state Department of Economic Opportunity, a new department set up by Scott to replace the Department of Community Affairs, which sometimes limited development, will have to approve US Sugar’s plan. As Pittman pointed out, the new department hasn’t rejected a single development plan.
Van Sickler and Pittman also wrote that Steve Crisafulli, the next speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and US Rep. Steve Southerland, were among Big Sugar’s guests at King Ranch. Crisafulli has vowed an overhaul of Florida water policy during the next legislative session while Southerland is pushing a bill that would limit federal authority over waterways and wetlands.
None of this proves a pay-to-play relationship between Florida’s sugar interests and state officials.
“What we were trying to show was paying for access and I think we did that,” Pittman told me. “[Big Sugar] got exclusive access to these people to talk about issues that are near and dear to their hearts, and important to taxpayers too.”
And exposing that secret access was worthwhile.
Pittman and Van Sickler started with a tip and not much more.
“We didn’t have much, just a couple lawmakers who went on the record and said ‘I went,’ and one who said ‘I went with so and so,'” Van Sickler said. “Everyone else we went to, we just couldn’t get anything. It wasn’t enough to hang a story on.”
So the two seasoned reporters got creative.
“There wasn’t an ah-ha moment,” Van Sickler said. “We were just spitballing, what sort of records are out there. We had a list. Texas hunting licenses were on the list.”
They asked Texas officials to check for hunting licenses for a hundred or so lawmakers, state officials and lobbyists and even had to check alternate names for a few.
“Every time we thought we got them all, we’d realize we hadn’t requested these guys,” Van Sickler said.
The hunting licenses pointed to who likely went on the trips, and gave the reporters dates to check against Republican Party of Florida donation records. Faced with proof they had gone hunting in Texas, Florida officials, including governor Scott, finally owned up to the trips, though several refused to discuss anything about them.
Pittman and Van Sickler’s investigation raises important questions, though both reporters are realistic about how many they’ll ever be able to answer.
“Is it legal? We don’t really know what they talked about,” Van Sickler said. “Does talking about water policy advance the Republican Party of Florida campaign?”
“You’re never going to get on the inside,” he added. “You’re looking through a keyhole.”
Kudos to both reporters for letting their readers peek through that keyhole.
Susannah Nesmith is CJR’s correspondent for Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. She is a freelance writer based in Miami with more than 25 years working for regional and national outlets. Follow her on Twitter @susannahnesmith.