Oversight turns ominous in Tallahassee

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Photo credit: Kim Seng

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

So we’re still 10 days away from the start of Florida’s 2025 legislative session. But it’s already clear that this is going to be an annual session unlike any Ron DeSantis has faced before.

Republican leaders in the Legislature have repeatedly demonstrated in recent weeks that they are done playing a submissive second fiddle to Florida’s domineering governor and shown a willingness to assert themselves in ways we haven’t seen in Tallahassee for 15 years or more.

It has, admittedly, been quite a bit of fun to watch a guy who made a presidential campaign out of punching down suddenly get stuffed in a locker. And it’s led to some promising changes, too.

Like last week, when a bipartisan group of senators suddenly began the process of stripping power from one of Ron DeSantis’ most radical recent appointees.

That appointee is Scott Yenor, a fellow at the far-right Claremont Institute who has some especially ugly worldviews. DeSantis recently gave Yenor a seat on the board of trustees at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, where Yenor was quickly installed as board chair.

This particular legislative pushback kind of came out of nowhere. The Senate’s Postsecondary Education Committee was holding an early morning hearing on a small bill about the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a research institute affiliated with the University of West Florida, when senators decided to rewrite the legislation to yank Yenor from the institute’s board of directors.

The move was orchestrated by Brevard County Republican Sen. Randy Fine, who called Yenor “a flat-out misogynist and bigot” and proved, yet again, that he is the most effective Ron DeSantis antagonist this side of Susie Wiles. (Although, my goodness: My kingdom for, like, just a shred of self-awareness.)

“How on earth this idiot got appointed to be on the board of trustees of a university is a question worth considering,” Fine said during the hearing. “I believe we, as a Legislature, should be taking every bit of power away from this person that we can.”

But there are other places where the Florida Legislature’s newfound willingness to flex its muscle feels much more ominous.

I’m thinking here of Senate Bill 7002, a proposal rolled out recently by Republican leaders in the Florida Senate that would overhaul oversight of the state’s five water management districts — powerful agencies run by political appointees of the governor that collectively raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in property taxes.

There’s a lot to like in this bill, which appears to be a priority for Senate President Ben Albritton (R-Wauchula).

It would, for instance, prohibit board members and district executives from taking gifts from lobbyists. It would also force districts to do more detailed public accountings of their spending, particularly on big public works projects. And it would compel more reporting around the multi-decade, $20-plus billion program to restore the Florida Everglades, which is being led at the state level by the South Florida Water Management District.

But Senate Bill 7002 would also give the Legislature far more authority over the districts generally and Everglades restoration specifically — including the power to veto construction projects that legislative leaders don’t like.

That’s not an inherently bad idea. But it comes amid continuing battles between environmentalists and the state’s sugar industry over water-management projects like the 80-billion-gallon EAA Reservoir in the Everglades Agricultural Area. It’s a project that clean-water groups say is crucial to reviving Florida’s famed River of Grass but that sugar companies have been trying to stop.

And Ron DeSantis has pretty consistently chosen the interests of environmentalists over that of Big Sugar. (At least when it comes to Everglades restoration, specifically. DeSantis chose to side with Big Sugar in a battle over the industry’s “black snow.”)

Three years ago, for instance, the Florida Legislature passed a sugar-backed bill that would have changed water-management rules for Lake Okeechobee, a key part of the Everglades ecosystem. Environmentalists opposed the legislation, and DeSantis vetoed it.

The lawmaker who sponsored that vetoed bill? Ben Albritton.

At least one environmental group thinks Senate Bill 7002 is a “precursor” to Everglades spending cuts.

But the Florida Senate makes the point that lawmakers have had to put hundreds of millions of dollars of general revenue into the South Florida Water Management District in recent years, and that they’ve done so with little additional oversight. And they note that every dollar of general revenue that goes to the water district is a dollar less available for other important needs around the state.

That’s all true. (Although if the alternative is going to be burning the cash on more tax breaks for businesses — rather than investing it in true needs like, say, childcare or health insurance — than I say just let the water managers cook. Also: How about closing corporate tax loopholes?)

It’s also important to remember that the political circumstances in Tallahassee can change. It wasn’t all that long ago that Florida had a governor in Rick Scott who marched in lockstep with Big Sugar and a legislative leader — former Senate President Joe Negron, a Republican from the Treasure Coast — who muscled the EAA Reservoir into reality.

So it may turn out that Senate Bill 7002 really is another healthy example of the legislative branch exercising some more independence. (Provided, of course, there isn’t an ugly amendment lurking in the shadows.)

But it may also be a reminder to be careful what you wish for.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

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