Politicians weakened state ethics laws. Investigators are now closing cases.
After Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature hobbled the state's ethics commission, the agency charged with probing corrupt politicians has begun halting some investigations.
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Florida’s ethics police may drop parts of a case against state Rep. Randy Fine, the Brevard County Republican and candidate for U.S. Congress accused of threatening state funding for the Special Olympics amid a personal spat with a political opponent.
The Florida Commission on Ethics is set to vote next week on whether to abandon some of the allegations against Fine, who is also accused of trying to obstruct a public-records request with embarrassing information about him.
It’s some of the first known fallout from a far-reaching new law that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted last year weakening the state agency that investigates potentially corrupt politicians.
The controversial legislation, known as Senate Bill 7014, hobbled the Florida Commission on Ethics by restricting the agency’s power to investigate complaints. The new law says the commission can only act upon complaints filed by someone with “personal knowledge” of a violation or “information other than hearsay” — a high bar that prevents the agency from probing allegations based on sources such as news reports.
The “personal knowledge” requirement — a change that Florida lawmakers kept hidden from the public until it was too late for anyone outside the Legislature to ask questions or testify against it — drew sharp criticism from good-government groups, newspaper editorial boards, and ethics-law experts.
And it may be even worse than some of them realized.
That’s because Ethics Commission lawyers have concluded that the “personal knowledge” standard doesn’t just affect new complaints filed after Senate Bill 7014 became law in June 2024. It also applies retroactively to complaints filed long before DeSantis and the Legislature decided to rewrite the rules.
Ethics Commission staffers are now going through their active investigations to see which probes may now need to be shut down — even in cases where the commission has already concluded that a public officially likely broke the law.
“We’re in the middle of conducting that audit,” Steven Zuikowski, the Ethics Commission’s general counsel, said during an Ethics Commission meeting in December. “We’re looking at our entire inventory.”
Zuikowksi also told the state’s ethics commissioners — who are appointed by the governor and legislative leaders — that he has been approached by “at least two or three attorneys” with cases before the commission who argue that the changes imposed by Senate Bill 7014 are retroactive.
Kerrie Stillman, the ethics commission’s executive director, said the agency believes it is bound by a nearly 20-year-old court ruling in case involving the Florida Elections Commission.
That case centered on a former member of the city council in Sanibel who was accused of breaking campaign-finance laws. But former Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature then changed the law to restrict what the Elections Commission could and could not investigate — changes that the Second District Court of Appeal ruled applied even to cases that were already under investigation.
“It makes no difference that the Commission had completed the investigatory stage of its proceeding against Jennings before the 2004 law took effect,” the court wrote in its opinion.
“The statute does not distinguish violations unearthed by the Commission before its effective date from violations discovered thereafter,” the court added. “If the legislature had intended its restriction on the Commission's power to apply only to the latter, it easily could have said so. Just as easily, the legislature could have exempted pending proceedings from the operation of the statute. It did neither.”
The Commission on Ethics has already ended one investigation because of Senate Bill 7014 — a case involving the leader of a local water control district in a rural part of Florida who had been accused of using district employees and property for personal reasons. The commission said it could not determine whether the original complaint was based on personal knowledge or information other than hearsay.
Now Randy Fine may be next. Commission staffers have drafted a proposed order for the state’s ethics commissioners to consider at their Jan. 24 meeting that would dismiss three of six allegations against Fine that have already been investigated.
To be fair, this particular case has always seemed a little bit silly, at least to me. The short version of the story is that Randy Fine got angry about a Special Olympics fundraiser organized by the West Melbourne Police Department that featured a local politician Fine personally despised: Jennifer Jenkins, a former member of the Brevard County School Board.
So Fine, like he so often does, lashed out in petty and childish ways. He sent text messages in which he appeared to threaten state funding for the Special Olympics and a local flood-control project in West Melbourne. He tried to stop the city of West Melbourne from releasing those messages, which Fine had sent to a local city council member. And he called Jenkins a “whore” while spreading sexual innuendo and personal smears.
Fine, for his part, told investigators that his text messages were not meant as threats and that he disagreed that they qualified as public records. He acknowledged personally attacking Jenkins. “I’m not a big fan,” he said, according to the Ethics Commission’s investigative report.
But while there’s plenty of evidence here to suggest that Randy Fine may be a misogynistic bully, the actual legal claim — that he abused his position for personal benefit — strikes me as pretty weak.
In fact, the commission attorney assigned to review the case initially recommended it be dismissed for lack of probable cause — only to be overruled by the Ethics Commission’s politically appointed commissioners, some of whom were likely quite familiar with Fine and his behavior. (Lesson: Don’t be a jerk to, like, literally everyone.)
Those appointed commissioners will ultimately decide whether to dismiss some of the allegations against Fine now because of Senate Bill 7014. And Stillman — the commission’s executive director — emphasized that any pending complaint potentially affected by the new law will ultimately go before commissioners for a final decision.
Look, there’s some darkly funny irony here.
Ron DeSantis and his senior staff were among the people who most wanted to weaken the ethics commission, partly because they were furious at commission staffers for investigating claims that DeSantis aides squeezed lobbyists for cash for DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign. But now those changes may end up helping a politician who has become one of DeSantis’ loudest critics in Florida.
But this stuff isn’t a joke. Ethics enforcement in Florida was already notoriously lax even before Senate Bill 7014 undercut things even more.
And the new law didn’t just hamstring the state ethics commission. It also handcuffed local ethics agencies, too — both by imposing the same “personal knowledge” hurdle on any complaints local agencies can act upon and by prohibiting local agencies from accepting anonymous complaints or independently initiating probes.
It's not clear whether Florida lawmakers realized the changes they made last year in Senate Bill 7014 would wind up dissolving cases that were already underway. But even if they didn’t, it’s probably pretty unlikely that they would turn around and immediately undo any of the legislation now (though they should).
But there are other changes Florida’s elected leaders could make that would mitigate some of the damage they did a year ago.
For instance, the Ethics Commission has, for several years now, been asking the Legislature to pass a law granting whistleblower-like legal protections to people who file valid complaints. Lawmakers have repeatedly ignored the idea.
But shielding folks like state employees or contractors who reveal wrongdoing from retaliation is even important now that Florida has imposed such sharp limits on who can file complaints at all.
Some supporters of Senate Bill 7014 claimed they were simply trying to stop frivolous complaints that waste everyone’s time and free the Ethics Commission to focus on serious and substantive cases.
If that’s true, they should also want to make damned sure that folks who can bring serious cases forward are well-protected.
“In light of the personal knowledge requirement that we now have, that one seems particularly timely in adding some protections to those folks who do have that personal knowledge on those real, viable allegations of ethics violations,” Stillman, the Ethics Commission executive director, told the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee during a presentation earlier this week. “Having that type of protection in there might help the commission receive the kinds of complaints that I think people in the public, as well as members of the Legislature, would expect the work of the commission to be.”
This commission has been toothless for a long time. Heree in Lee County, the Charter Commission, at the behest of the County Commissioners, decided that everyone in Lee County is above reproach; that we do not need an ethics commission.
This is the typical crap that hurts people because there’s no accountability. If he wins who will he call a whore in DC and send out text messages to others.