Florida lawmakers took instructions from a landowner's lobbyist. Now Florida taxpayers will pay $83 million for four acres.
Records show a lobbyist wrote a law enabling a controversial land deal in which Florida will pay more than $20 million an acre to buy a tiny parcel of property from a politically connected seller.
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In mid-June, just a few hours before Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature finalized this year’s state budget, GOP leaders in Tallahassee slipped a sentence into the spending plan authorizing state officials to acquire a piece of property in the Panhandle through a popular land-preservation program.
Three months later, the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis used that little line in the budget to spend $83.3 million in taxpayer money on a tiny spit of vacant land in Destin that records show is majority owned by a prominent real-estate developer and Republican Party donor.
And the state’s GOP-controlled Cabinet — Attorney General James Uthmeier, Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson — quickly signed off on the extravagant purchase price, which, at more than $20 million an acre, is more than 10 times the price the developer and his partners paid for the land less than a decade ago.
That sentence buried deep inside the budget — the line that enabled Florida’s top politicians to pull off a land deal that a longtime conservation leader called “a sham” — came, emails show, from a lobbyist for the developer.
The email trail was unearthed by Seeking Rents through a public records request that we made near the end of this year’s legislative session. We shared the records with the Tampa Bay Times, where reporters Max Chesnes and Emily Mahoney have been digging into the suspicious transaction for weeks.
This is about as gross as it gets in Tallahassee. And it’s even uglier than you may realize.
But first a quick bit of backstory: Two years ago, Florida lawmakers set aside $850 million to spend buying land for a project known as the “Florida Wildlife Corridor” — a bipartisan effort, backed by everyone from conservationists to hunters, to stitch together a massive swath of undeveloped land extending nearly the length of the Florida peninsula that can be used as contiguous habitat for panthers, black bears and other animals.
It’s an enormous amount of money, and not all of it has been spent yet. So this year, the Legislature included a provision in the budget authorizing state officials to continue spending down the funding for the Wildlife Corridor.
But lawmakers threw in some new instructions this time around.
Specifically, the Legislature ordered that a portion of the remaining Wildlife Corridor funds be used to buy a particular piece of property in Okaloosa County. Though the exact parcel was never spelled out by name, the instructions were written to refer to a four-acre property next to a park in Destin.
Few people noticed at the time. But then the DeSantis administration used the budget provision to agree to an $83.3 million deal with the property owners: A pair of limited liability companies, Pointe Resort LLC and Pointe Mezzanine LLC, that records show are majority owned by Robert Guidry, a developer who does business in both Florida and Louisiana.
Guidry is also a large donor to Florida Republicans. Campaign finance records show that he gave $250,000 to Ron DeSantis during DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor, for instance.
He has more recently cozied up to members of the Florida Cabinet. Records show that another LLC managed by Guidry gave $25,000 in February to James Uthmeier, the DeSantis-appointed attorney general. Yet another LLC managed by the developer gave $25,000 in June to an obscure political committee that immediately turned around and gave $25,000 to Blaise Ingoglia, the DeSantis-appointed chief financial officer.
DeSantis and this Cabinet formally approved the $83 million deal on Sept. 30. Guidry has not responded to requests for comment from a number of Florida news outlets, including the Tampa Bay Times and the Orlando Sentinel.
This has exploded into a statewide controversy. One former director of the state parks system — a guy who worked for Ron DeSantis — told the Times that “money was being stolen from the Florida Wildlife Corridor to enrich a donor.”
And it was all made possible by budget instructions given to lawmakers by a lobbyist for Guidry
The records obtained by Seeking Rents show that a lobbyist representing one of Guidry’s land-owning limited lability companies sent an initial draft of the budget provision to an aide to Sen. Jay Trumbull, a Republican from Panama City.
“Attached is the same budget language that I handed you yesterday,” the lobbyist, Rhett O’Doski, wrote in a March 26 email to Trumbull’s aide.
The lobbyist wasn’t working alone. The records show he had support from the DeSantis administration itself, via the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the Wildlife Corridor program.
“We sent this over to DEP and they are good with how it reads,” O’Doski wrote in a follow-up email to Trumbull’s office sent April 8.
Trumbull, whose district includes Destin, is quickly becoming one of the most powerful people in the Legislature. That’s because he is lined up to become president of the Florida Senate in 2028 — provided that Republicans win enough legislative elections over the next two cycles to retain majority control of the chamber.
The future Senate president personally had the language from Guidry’s lobbyist inserted into the budget, he later acknowledged to Politico Florida.
This is all especially unseemly for a few reasons.
For instance, campaign-finance records show that Guidry’s lobbyist sent the proposed budget instructions to Trumbull, the aspiring Senate president, just two weeks after another of Guidry’s LLCs put $200,000 into political committees controlled by Republican strategists who help run campaigns for legislative leaders.
What’s more, this budget language not only directed DeSantis and Cabinet members to buy the land — it enabled them to pay that astronomical price for it.
While the provision itself doesn’t specify the price, it gave the DeSantis administration permission to avoid obtaining an independent appraisal of the land and instead use an existing appraisal commissioned by the seller. And one of Guidry’s companies already had an appraisal for $83.3 million in hand, according to the Times.
And then there’s the fact that Jay Trumbull and the rest of Senate leadership hid this proposal from the public until it was too late to do anything about it.
Here’s what I mean by that: The emails show that Guidry’s lobbyist first gave Trumbull the language on March 25. That was three days before the Florida Senate published the first draft of its budget.
But Senate leaders didn’t put this provision into their original budget. Nor did they add it over the following few days of committee hearings and floor sessions, even as they made nearly 200 other tweaks to their version of the spending plan.
Instead, the Senate waited to spring the language until the final day of what is called “budget conference.” That’s the frenzied period at the end of every session in which the Senate and the House of Representatives — which also writes its own initial version of the budget — get together to negotiate a final plan.
If you’ve never been through a budget conference, it’s about the least transparent process there is in Tallahassee. A small circle Republican leaders make decisions in secret and then publicly ratify them in a series of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them meetings.
These meetings are more Kabuki theatre than public hearing. Lawmakers race through reams of tiny-font spreadsheets, usually without any substantive discussion or debate.
The conference meeting in which the Senate finally proposed the budget language that led to this land deal took less than 10 minutes. The House agreed to it without ever asking a single question.
This is a process that leaves everyone on the outside — journalists, activists, even rank-and-file legislators who aren’t a part of the inner circle of leadership — little time to track down details of the many new issues and funding shifts that suddenly surface in those spreadsheets.
And that’s critical. Because when budget conference ends and the final deal is done, it cannot be changed. Nothing — no matter how controversial it may turn out to be — can be amended out of the final “conference report.”
Which makes it the perfect way to sneak a shady land deal into law.
This needs to be reported and shared everywhere.
Keep us updated. Much appreciated!!