Transcript: Seeking Rents — The Podcast (Ep. 4)

This episode originally aired Aug. 18, 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, to help support our work.

[00:00:00] 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 influence public policy in Florida. The name Seeking Rents, by the way, comes from a term in economics called rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is what happens when the super rich or big corporations use their influence to twist the political process in a way that makes more money for them at the expense of everyone else.

This is episode four. Today, we're going to tell the bipartisan tale of how Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried both used the power of their offices to protect one of the state's most politically influential interests: the sugar industry. It's especially interesting because DeSantis and Fried might just end up running against each other this fall if Fried can win the Democratic nomination for governor. We'll unpack that more in a bit.

But first a few notes. If you haven't already, [00:01:00] please sign up for the Seeking Rents newsletter, where we're producing some of the state's best corporate- accountability journalism, and lifting up the work of all the other great journalists out there doing the same thing. Subscriptions are free. But there's also a voluntary option to pay monthly or annually, if you can afford it. That money helps me pay for expenses like public-records requests.

And more importantly, don't forget to vote. Florida's primary elections are Tuesday. That's less than a week away. Early voting polling stations are already open around the state.

There are a lot of important races on the ballot this month, whether you're a Democrat or Republican or independent. Remember: because the Florida Legislature has so badly gerrymandered the state's House, Senate and Congressional districts, most of these races are decided in the primary. That means if you live in one of these rigged seats, your only meaningful chance to weigh in on your next state [00:02:00] representative, state senator or member of Congress is right now.

To that end, I'd like to flag what I think can actually be a pretty helpful resource for all of us: Associated Industries of Florida, the big-business lobbying group that represents the interest of companies like the sugar growers US Sugar and Florida Crystals, electric company Florida Power & Light, and theme park giant Walt Disney World. Seriously, more than half of the money in AIF's political committees — the money it gives to politicians like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Fried — comes from sugar, FPL and Disney.

AIF has made endorsements in dozens of legislative elections around the state, in both Democratic and Republican primaries. So you can get a pretty good idea of who sugar, FPL and Disney want to win these races.

Here in Orlando, for instance, AIF wants voters to oust Representative Travaris McCurdy, who was first elected two years ago and has already proven to be one of the most progressive members of the Florida [00:03:00] Legislature. You might remember that several Black lawmakers led a sit-in protest on the floor of the state House earlier this year. It was in response to Congressional maps drawn by Ron DeSantis' office that erased two districts that had been designed to ensure Black voters could elect candidates of their choosing. McCurdy was one of the lawmakers who led that sit- in.

Now AIF wants him gone. Instead, it's hoping that Democratic voters will elect a former state representative named Bruce Antone, who was one of the most conservative Democrats in the state House back in his day.

Republican voters will want to pay attention, too. Up in Jacksonville, for instance, AIF is hoping Republican voters will bring back another former representative named Lake Ray over a pair of other Republican candidates, including one supported by Ron DeSantis. I'll post the full list of AIF endorsements in the show notes. Maybe seeing who sugar, FPL and Disney want to win will help you decide who you want to win.

Speaking of [00:04:00] sugar, let's now turn to our main story this week. It centers around the sugar industry's practice of setting open fires in its fields. These burns are a cheap way to harvest sugarcane. But they also produce smoke, soot and toxic particulate matter that can drift over and fall on nearby communities.

Before you go any further though, let me first say this: this week's show leans heavily on the incredible and indispensable reporting of the Palm beach post and reporters like Lulu Ramadan and T Barton and Hannah Morse and Gilda de Carley, a journalist who has written for Grist magazine in the Miami Herald. Last year, the Palm Beach Post and ProPublica published an exhaustive investigation into sugarcane burning in a series called "Black Snow". That's the name that locals give that toxic soot that falls on their homes, schools and playgrounds. Black Snow was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. I'm going to post links to those stories in the show notes. I hope you'll read them.

[00:05:00] Okay, let's start with a bit of orientation. I want you to picture a map of Florida, or at least the southern half of Florida. You can see Lake Okeechobee, which looks like a big hole punched right through the peninsula, a little ways inland from the Atlantic Ocean. That's where Florida's sugar country is, in the part of the state known as the Glades. Sugar growers have roughly 400,000 acres of cane fields across the Glades. The two biggest growers are US Sugar and Florida Crystals, who we mentioned earlier are two big funders of AIF.

Those sugarcane fields are mostly to the east and south of Lake O, sandwiched between West Palm beach to the east and the Everglades to the south. Every winter and spring, sugar growers set fires in those fields. It's part of the harvest process. The fires burn away the outer leaves on the sugarcane plants, leaving behind the stalks, which are then gathered and transported to mills to be turned into sugar.

But like I said earlier, those fires produce smoke, [00:06:00] soot and particulates that often blow over Glades communities, places with names like Pahokee, Belle Glade and South Bay. And locals say this black snow can make it very hard to breathe and contributes to health problems like asthma and respiratory disease.

This is one of the most blatant examples of environmental racism you will ever find. Here's why: sugarcane burning has been going on for decades. But 30 years ago, wealthier suburban communities east of sugar country near the Atlantic coast complained to state officials about smoke and soot reaching their homes. So Florida leaders stepped in to help. They set rules that generally prevent sugar growers from burning their fields on days when the wind is blowing to the east. Those rules are still in place today. So no cane burning is allowed on days when black snow might end up falling on wealthier and largely white coastal areas.

But the Glades is one of the poorest places in Florida. [00:07:00] And there are no similar restrictions to prevent black snow from falling on those poverty-stricken and largely Black and brown communities.

Now, the sugar industry says its burning is well-regulated by the state and that the air in the Glades is clean. US Sugar has even begun producing an annual air quality report. I'll post the most recent one in the show notes. But the Post and ProPublica's Black Snow investigation exposed serious flaws in the way the state has historically measured this stuff. And it also found evidence that the state has failed to fully and independently investigate the potential links between cane burning and health problems in the region. I'd encourage you to read all these stories and rebuttals yourself. The Post and ProPublica even wrote a helpful piece that addressed, in detail, all the criticisms raised by US Sugar and Florida Crystals. That'll be in the show notes too.

A few years ago, a coalition of Glades residents and environmental activists began [00:08:00] pushing for changes, lobbying state leaders to impose stricter regulations that either better protect the people living in the Glades or ban sugarcane burning altogether and force sugar growers to switch to harvesting with mechanical blades.

But things became significantly more threatening the US Sugar, Florida Crystals, and the rest of the industry in the summer of 2019. That's when a group of Glades residents sued the companies and accused them of, among other things, polluting the air, making people sick and destroying property values.

Let's pause for a moment to remember what else was happening in 2019. Two new statewide leaders had just been elected promising to stand up to Big Sugar: Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried. DeSantis had won his governor's race in part by tarring his Republican primary opponent as a sugar industry's quote, "errand-boy", and then defeating his Democratic opponent in the general election after getting a surprise endorsement from the Everglades [00:09:00] Trust, an anti-sugar environmental group. And Fried had promised to hold polluters accountable after defeating a Republican opponent who had been heavily funded by the sugar industry.

Glades residents and anti-burn activists were especially hopeful about Fried, who had met personally with them during the campaign and who, as the state's agriculture commissioner, oversaw the Florida Forest Service. That's the agency that regulates cane burning.

But then something weird happened in Tallahassee. In the fall of 2019, just a few months after the sugar burning lawsuit had been filed, Fried suddenly announced a series of what she called "major" and "historic" changes to burning regulations. She made a big deal about how long it had been since anyone had made any changes at all. "Today's enhancements are the first changes in nearly 30 years to some of these procedures," she said in a press release issued by her office.

The problem is that Nikki Fried's major and historic changes didn't really [00:10:00] change anything at all. That's according to the Palm Beach Post's latest investigation, which published earlier this week and took a hard look at what Nikki Fried has done — or, more accurately, what Nikki Fried has not done — about sugarcane burning.

Here are just two examples: Fried announced that her office was imposing an 80-acre buffer between sugarcane burns and any nearby wildlands on days when it was dry and windy outside. This is to reduce the threat of wildfires. Sounds good, right? Except the Department of Agriculture already had a two-field buffer in place, with the understanding, according to the Post, that two fields equaled about 80 acres. Fried also said her office was banning burning at night. Except burning at night was already illegal under state law, according to the Post.

These changes were window-dressing at best. And they did nothing to help people living in the Glades worried about the health [00:11:00] impacts of black snow. But they did help someone: the sugar industry.

A few weeks after Nikki Fried announced her allegedly "major" and "historic" changes to sugarcane burning rules, US Sugar and other growers filed a new motion to dismiss the lawsuit against them. And one of the arguments they made was that sugarcane burning was already strictly regulated by Nikki Fried's office. Not only was it strictly regulated, they told the court, those regulations had just been made even stricter. Attorneys for the sugar growers wrote in their filing, "the Forest Service continues to update and enhance its regulations of pre-harvest sugar cane burns." They even attached a copy of Nikki Fried's press release as evidence.

In other words, the sugar industry argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the state was already on top of things. And the sugar industry's proof that the state was on top of things was that Nikki Fried had just announced a bunch of changes — changes, as the Palm Beach Post later reported, [00:12:00] that didn't actually do anything.

Five days after that court filing, records show a political committee controlled by Associated Industries of Florida gave $20,000 to Fried. You remember AIF, right? They're the big business lobbying group we talked about earlier in the show that gets much of its money from US Sugar and Florida Crystals. Altogether AIF has given Fried $265,000 since she was elected agriculture commissioner.

That all happened in the fall of 2019. And the judge in the sugar burning lawsuit eventually agreed to dismiss part of the suit. But not all of it. So the case continued to grind on through 2020 and into 2021.

Then, in January, 2021, another weird thing happened in Tallahassee. A piece of legislation was filed in the Florida Senate called Senate Bill 88.

The bill expanded a state law known as the Right to Farm Act. The purpose of the Right to Farm [00:13:00] Act is to protect farms from lawsuits accusing them of causing nuisances like excessive noise or odor. It's an important protection for the farming industry, especially as urban sprawl encroaches further and further into agricultural areas.

Supporters of Senate Bill 88 said they needed to expand the Right to Farm Act to protect farms that were starting to do agricultural tourism. You know, building corn mazes, or taking kids on tractor rides or converting old barns into wedding venues. But that's not what this bill was really about. The real goal was to protect US Sugar, Florida Crystals, and the rest of the sugar industry.

If you read past the agritourism provisions of the bill, you saw that it also expanded protections for farms that produce particle emissions — like black snow from sugarcane burning. Another part of the bill pretty much copy and pasted the defenses that the sugar growers were using in the sugar burning lawsuit. What's more, emails obtained through public-records requests showed that [00:14:00] Senate staffers were keeping very close tabs on the sugar burning lawsuit as they worked on the legislation.

Lobbyists for the sugar growers and groups they helped finance were working hard behind the scenes, too. They provided talking points to lawmakers and rounded up letters of support. The Florida Chamber of Commerce, another big-business lobbying group that gets lots of funding from the sugar industry, even warned lawmakers that it would penalize them severely on its annual post-session report cards if they dared to vote against Senate Bill 88.

In a testament to just how much influence US Sugar and Florida Crystals have in the Florida Legislature, Senate Bill 88 passed by an overwhelming margin: 110-7 in the state House and 37-1 in the Florida Senate. Every single Republican member of the Legislature voted for it. Most Democratic members did too.

But there was still one person standing in the way: Ron DeSantis. The guy who had so often [00:15:00] boasted about his history of standing up to Big Sugar.

DeSantis signed the bill. It's actually pretty funny. DeSantis has become the most aggressively partisan governor in recent Florida history. He genuinely seems to relish picking fights with liberals and taking on the woke mob. But my man swaddled himself up in a blanket of bipartisanship when it came time to help Big Sugar.

When he signed Senate Bill 88. DeSantis used Democrats as cover. He made sure a couple of Democratic lawmakers were standing behind him when he signed it. And he repeatedly emphasized the bipartisan support for the legislation.

Now, there was some dispute about whether Senate Bill 88 would've directly affected the sugar burning lawsuit. Lawmakers insisted that it would not have. But they also made sure to write the legislation as what's known as a "clarifying" bill, which suggests that they wanted the courts to view the changes as retroactive.

But ultimately it didn't matter. After more than two years of litigation, the [00:16:00] Glades residents who sued the sugar companies suddenly dropped their lawsuit and agreed not to file it again. It's actually a bit of a mystery as to why. There was no real explanation in the court filings, and no one has said much publicly about the decision. But with that lawsuit out of the way, the sugar industry may be in the clear now. Because now that Ron DeSantis has signed Senate Bill 88 into law, no one else will be able to bring a similar lawsuit against them.

And, oh, by the way, Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 88 on April 29th, 2021. The very next day Associated Industries of Florida gave him $100,000.

I mentioned earlier that AIF, which, again is heavily funded by the sugar industry, has given $265,000 to Nikki Fried since she was elected agriculture commissioner. Well, AIF has given more than $2 million to Ron DeSantis since he was elected governor. Nothing brings Tallahassee together quite like Big Sugar.[00:17:00]

All right, that's gonna do it for this week's episode. Before I wrap up, though, I wanted to throw a shout out to a few great stories from the last couple of weeks, just in case you missed them.

On the never-ending Florida Power & Light beat, Matt Dixon of Politico Florida exposed a secret bar that FPL operates near the state Capitol. John Archibald and Kyle Whitmire of the Birmingham News in Alabama uncovered a corporate spying plot that targeted the CEO of utility giant Southern Company. And Mary Ellen Klas and others at the Miami Herald shined a light on the role FPL and its consultants played in yet another spoiler candidate election scheme — one that likely tipped the scales in a key Senate race in 2018.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Mower of the Tampa Bay Times and Alex Harris of the Miami Herald teamed up on a really good deep dive into why Florida's property insurance market is so screwed up. And Rebecca Liebson of the Times had an important story about a Florida eviction law that is one of the most anti-tenant laws in the entire country. [00:18:00] This was also the subject of an award-winning series of stories last year from Caroline, Glenn and Desiree Stennett of the Orlando Sentinel called "Locked Out."

We'll have links to all of these stories in the show notes.

Okay. That really is it. But again, remember to vote. And if you've already voted, then make sure all your friends and family have voted, too. It really is the best way to make change happen.

Thanks for listening to everybody. See you soon.