Transcript: Minimum wage is on the ballot in this year's elections in Florida
A transcript of episode 7 of Seeking Rents — The Podcast, which initially aired on Oct. 28, 2022
This is Seeking Rents, a newsletter and podcast devoted to producing original journalism — and lifting up the journalism of others — that examines the many ways that businesses influence public policy across Florida, written by Jason Garcia. Seeking Rents is free to all. But please consider a voluntary paid subscription, if you can afford one, to help support our work.
Hello and welcome to Seeking Rents — the Podcast.
I’m your host Jason Garcia, the publisher of Seeking Rents, where we explore the ways big businesses bend laws in their favor in Florida.
The name “Seeking Rents” comes from a term in economics called “rent-seeking.” And “rent-seeking” is when someone with lots of money and wealth uses their influence to lobby lawmakers and regulators to twist public policy in a way that allows them to accumulate even more money and wealth — usually at the expense of someone else.
This is Episode 7.
And today we’re talking elections, because we’re now less than a week out from Election Day — and Florida voters are casting ballots as we speak.
So let’s get straight to it.
You know, over the last few weeks, as elections across Florida have headed into the homestretch, a St. Petersburg company called “Power Design” has made some pretty big campaign contributions.
For example, the company recently gave $10,000 to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who, of course, is running for re-election. And it just put another $25,000 into a political committee that its lobbyists can now hand out to lawmakers all over the state.
Power Design isn’t really a household name. But it’s a pretty big deal in the world of construction.
Power Design is one of the biggest mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering firms in the country. It rings up hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue, according to an engineering trade magazine I came across, and it does a lot of government work — on everything from affordable housing to convention centers.
Power Design has also recently become something of a player in the state Capitol.
Romy Ellenbogen, a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times newspaper, revealed earlier this year that Power Design was leading a lobbying effort to pass a bill in Tallahassee that would have — and this is 100 percent true — allowed government contractors like Power Design to pay their workers less.
Here’s how it would have worked: A bunch of communities around the state, from Miami-Dade County to the city of St. Petersburg, have passed local ordinances that require any company being paid on a government contract to pay its own workers something more than the minimum wage. Remember, the minimum wage in Florida right now is just $10 an hour. That’s just $21,000 a year. A little less actually.
These local ordinances don’t force contractors to pay a lot more. The city of St. Peterburg’s law requires contractors to pay their employees a minimum of $12 an hour. But when you’re trying to get by on such low pay to begin with — in a state that is becoming more expensive to live every day — even a little increase can make a big difference.
Now, again, these local laws only apply to contractors — companies making money directly off a local government. It’s part of the deal: If you want to bid on a job for the city of St. Petersburg, you know going in that you’re gonna have to pay your people at least a little bit more than $10 an hour.
Don’t like it? Don’t bid on the contract. It’s entirely up to you.
But Power Design apparently still wants these contracts — it just doesn’t want to pay its workers the extra bit of money. So the company — along with a bunch of big business brand-laundering groups like Associated Industries of Florida and the Florida Chamber of Commerce — lobbied for a bill last session that would have thrown out all of these local contractor minimum wage laws.
The entire goal of this bill was to let companies like Power Design save money at the expense of their own workers. In fact, during a debate on the bill this past session, the sponsor in the state House — a Republican from close to Ocala named Joe Harding — was asked directly if his bill would let businesses pay their people less.
“Sure,” Harding replied. “Because they’re not mandated to pay an exorbitant rate.”
Again, we are talking like $12 an hour here. That’s less than $25,000 a year. But that’s apparently Joe Harding’s idea of an “exorbitant rate.” Real man of the people stuff right there.
This bill ultimately failed to pass this year — something that probably had more to do with Romy Ellenbogen and the Tampa Bay Times pulling back the curtain on this stuff than a sudden swelling of pro-worker sympathy in the state Capitol.
But given the fact that Power Design is back out there cutting five-figure checks to state leaders, it seems like a pretty good bet that they’re going to try passing this bill again next session.
This is one of those issues that you never really hear about in political campaign commercials. But it’s the sort of thing that’s really on the ballot in so many of these elections, particularly in races for the state House and Senate.
Let me show you how. One of the closest Senate elections in Florida this year — maybe the closest — is in the northeastern suburbs of Orlando, in what is known as Senate District 10.
The incumbent in this race is Republican Sen. Jason Brodeur. And Jason Brodeur voted for Power Design’s bill to pay workers less. In fact, Brodeur could have actually killed this bill single-handedly: It squeaked through a committee he serves on by a single vote. If Brodeur had voted no, it would have died right then and there.
Brodeur’s opponent in Senate District 10 is Democrat Joy Goff-Marcil, a Democrat who is currently serving in the state House. Joy Goff-Marcil had to vote on this exact same bill this session — and she voted against it.
It’s hard to find a more clear and concrete difference between two candidates.
There are lots of issues like this — tangible economic issues that legislators are going to be voting on — that never get the attention they deserve during elections.
I’ll give you another example. It’s an issue we wrote about recently in the Seeking Rents newsletter.
There is a group of companies out there that specialize in making high-interest loans to consumers with lower incomes and spotty credit histories. A lot of people would probably call them predatory lenders.
Anyway, these lenders want the Florida Legislature to let them almost double the interest rate they can charge their customers.
So, right now, Florida generally prohibits lenders from charging more than 18 percent interest on a loan. But there are few exceptions to this limit — including for companies that make relatively small consumer loans. We’re talking about loans of no more than $25,000.
Like I said, the companies that do these kind of loans generally target lower-income folks who can’t get a better loan from a bank or a credit union. We’re talking about people who are often in a really vulnerable situation — like someone who doesn’t have any savings and whose car just broke down — a car they need to get to and from their job.
If this doesn’t describe you, it almost certainly describes people you know. And probably more than on person. Something like one-third of Americans say they don’t have enough savings to cover an unplanned expense of just $400.
Lending money to people like this at high interest rates is big business. One of the top companies in this market, OneMain, turned a $1.3 billion profit last year. And a lot of that profit came from Florida.
Anyway, under current law, lenders like OneMain are allowed to charge more than 18 percent.
Specifically, they can charge 30 percent interest on the first $3,000 of a loan; 24 percent interest on the amount between $3,000 and $4,000; and then 18 percent on any remaining amount remaining up to the $25,000 limit.
But OneMain and other companies like it — including Oportun Financial and Mariner Finance — want to charge a lot more than that.
They are planning to ask the Florida Legislature to change the law during next year’s session to let them charge 36 percent on the full $25,000 of the loan. That could nearly double the amount of interest their customers have to pay.
And just like Power Design, these high-interest lenders are right now pumping money into legislative elections.
OneMain, Oportun and Mariner are all part of front group called the Florida Financial Services Association. And the Florida Financial Services Association has been plowing money into candidates for both the state House and the state Senate.
In just the past month or so, the association has given more than $70,000 to Republican candidates for the Florida Senate. It’s also given more than $50,000 to Republican candidates for the state House.
It’s even given $25,000 to Florida Democrats — so be on the lookout next session for any Democratic legislators who suddenly think a great way to help people out of poverty is to get them into a higher-interest loan.
One of the Senate candidates these predatory lenders have given money to, by the way, is Jason Brodeur.
I’m singling out Brodeur a bit here because his Central Florida race is also where something else is on the ballot this year: Florida’s ghost candidate scandal.
I would bet that most folks listening to this podcast, know all about Florida’s ghost candidate scandal. But I’m going to recap it anyway, because we should not forget just how deceptive and dishonest this election scheme was — especially when there are so many politicians out there claiming to care about “election integrity.”
Here’s what happened: First, a group of Republican political operatives helped three people who had never run for office before get on to the ballot in three key state Senate races.
These people qualified as independent candidates. But they didn’t do any campaigning for office themselves. One of them was already planning to move to Sweden. The fact that they got their names on to the ballot and then essentially never showed their faces again after that is why they came to be known as ghost candidates.
But while these three ghost candidates didn’t do any campaigning themselves, another group of Republican political operatives featured them in a big advertising campaign that cost more than half a million dollars.
These advertisements were targeted at voters who were likely to vote for the Democratic candidate in each of these Senate races, and they were designed to trick those voters into supporting the allegedly independent candidates instead.
The goal was to peel off just enough support from the Democrats to allow the Republican candidates to win each race.
And it worked. Republicans took all three of these Senate seats — including one by just 32 votes. Two of those Senate races were in Miami. The other was in Orlando. It’s the Senate seat that was won by Jason Brodeur.
It’s hard to overstate just how deceitful this whole operation was.
For instance, these advertisements were technically paid for by a couple of political committees that had to file some public reports that were supposed to give everyone a few key details — like who was in charge of them. But one of the operatives involved paid two young women — including one who was pregnant and desperate for money — to put their names on that public paperwork.
I mentioned that the ads cost more than half a million dollars. Well, that money was filtered through at least two dark-money nonprofit groups before it was spent, making it impossible for voters to tell where the money actually came from.
And at least one other donor listed in a campaign-finance reports was fabricated.
One of those dark-money groups, by the way, was controlled by consultants working for electric giant Florida Power & Light and Big Sugar producer Florida Crystals.
This scandal has prompted at least two criminal investigations and led to charges against five people so far. One of those people has already pled guilty to accepting a bribe, and another was just convicted of making an illegal campaign donation. The other three have pled not guilty and are awaiting trial.
There’s still a lot we don’t know for sure — like who was coordinating all of this and where did the money ultimately come from. But investigators in both Miami and Orlando are still digging into it all.
Now, obviously, we can’t redo those three 2020 Senate elections. And one of the Republican senators who benefitted from this scheme — Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez of Miami — has already been re-elected without any opposition.
But the other two senators — Brodeur and Miami Senator Ileana Garcia — are both on the ballot again this fall. And Brodeur’s race, at least, seems to be very close.
It’s also worth noting here that of all three Republican senators who were helped by this scheme, Brodeur seems to have been especially close to the schemers.
Now, Brodeur has repeatedly ducked questions from the Orlando Sentinel about this stuff, other than once claiming it had nothing to do with his campaign.
But we know now who two of the operatives were that helped set up the ghost candidate in his race. One of them was a donor to Brodeur’s Senate campaign. The other one literally worked for Brodeur at the Seminole County Chamber of Commerce, where Brodeur is president.
And the ghost candidate has also told investigators that she was under the impression that Brodeur himself was helping her campaign.
And then there’s this: The guy who helped set up the two ghost candidates in the Miami races? He spent election night at Jason Brodeur’s victory party.
None of this means that Jason Brodeur broke any laws himself. But it’s becoming harder and harder to believe that he was just some sort of passive bystander in this scheme who happened to benefit from it.
I guess what I’m saying here is...if you want to exorcise a ghost from Tallahassee, Senate District 10 is the place to do it.
And I want to end with one last thought about these legislative elections.
I know it can sometimes feel like these races don’t matter. Tallahassee is a top-down place where a handful of leaders dictate virtually every decision.
And the vast majority of people who get elected to the Legislature, no matter how strong-willed or professionally successful they may be in their personal lives, ends up submitting to this system because they decide it’s the only way they can accomplish anything themselves.
And, of course, legislative leaders have so aggressively gerrymandered the state that Republicans command overwhelming majorities in both chambers.
But each individual race still does matter. This is especially true in the Florida Senate, where there are just 40 seats total, and it’s not at all that unusual for a controversial bill to pass a committee by a single vote or to pass the entire Senate by just two or three votes.
You know, there’s been a big controversy recently at the University of Florida, where a group of political appointees essentially picked the next UF president in secret. And of course, to run Florida’s most prestigious university, these political appointees chose a politician: Republican U.S. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.
They were able to make this decision in secret because of a new law that had just been passed during this year’s legislative session.
That law passed the Florida Senate by two votes.
And Jason Brodeur voted for it.
Alright, that’s our show for this week.
Hopefully, this helps get you motivated to vote. But if it doesn’t...vote anyway. And then make sure everyone you know has voted, too.
Seriously, if you have people in your life who don’t vote, probably the best thing you can do for democracy is to get them to pay attention and cast a ballot.
I don’t care if you’re Republican, Democrat or whatever. Just vote.
We are going through some stuff right now in this country. Let’s at least do it with our eyes wide open.
Alright that’s the show. Thanks for listening everybody. See you soon.