Quest for DeSantis’ travel records leads to 2-year delay, then denial

TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Department of Law Enforcement waited nearly two years to tell the Orlando Sentinel that the financial details of a flight Gov. Ron DeSantis took to Fort Pierce and Live Oak were exempt from public records requests.

The newspaper wanted to determine if DeSantis, who was running for reelection, had piggybacked campaign events on top of official ones without the campaign reimbursing the state for the Aug. 30, 2022, flight.

It also wanted to know whether other candidates reimbursed FDLE for using the jet bought with taxpayer dollars after DeSantis became governor in 2019. The aircraft is available to the governor and other top state leaders for official duties.

The FDLE denied the requests in late April and early May. It delayed the response until a year after DeSantis signed a law that bans the release of his and the other leaders’ travel records. Lawmakers called it necessary to protect their safety.

“My fear and suspicion is they are using public safety as an excuse to hide expenditures they don’t want you to know about,” said Bobby Block, executive director of the First Amendment Foundation. “We have a new model that can be summed up in two words: Trust me.”

The bill’s sponsors, both of them Republican, repeatedly assured public records advocates and Democratic lawmakers that the financial records related to travel would continue to be available to the public as they always had been. The law was meant to shield only the logistics of the trips, they said.

The bill passed along party lines in both the House and Senate.

Rep. Jeff Holcomb, R-Spring Hill, sponsor of the House version of the bill, also assured fellow lawmakers during a committee hearing in March that the bill wouldn’t affect public records requests related to campaign travel.

“This doesn’t affect any of the financial disclosures in place,” Holcomb said. “This is about the methods and means of security protection.”

But that has not turned out to be the case. Other news outlets besides the Orlando Sentinel have waited several months to find out their requests for travel records were denied.

The reason given for the lengthy delay was that the agency’s public records department is short-staffed and deals with a high volume of requests.

Holcomb did not return an email seeking clarification.

Complaints have been filed with the Federal Elections Commission and the state Commission on Ethics over the governor’s frequent use of state and private aircraft and failure to disclose using it for personal reasons. They are pending.

A lawsuit challenging the law’s constitutionality was recently filed in Leon Circuit Court by American Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog committee.

“It’s about accountability that impacts all the citizens of the state,” Block said. “Are you spending dollars on things that impact citizens or is it a personal trip intended for your career interests and nothing to do with the public good?

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Part of the problem is the law includes a long list of things to be exempt from public view but says nothing about the transportation costs or travel related to political campaigns or other personal use, he said. And the language is vague enough to make understanding legislative intent problematic.

“The only way to get to the bottom of this is a court case,” Block said.

It was difficult enough to trace the governor’s travel before he signed the bill into law, which went into effect immediately with hundreds of requests going back months and more than a year still in the pipeline, waiting to be processed. And the law is retroactive.

“The retroactivity makes it such that we’re not going to get anything related to his travel,” Michael Barfield, director of public access for the Florida Center for Government Accountability, said at the time. The FLCGA has filed numerous public records lawsuits against the DeSantis administration.

Other recent trips that have raised concerns about who was paying for them include ones to Japan, Seoul, South Korea and Israel, all paid for with officials said were private donations, Politico reported.

A book tour to launch DeSantis’ memoir and kick off his presidential campaign was handled by a nonprofit that didn’t have to disclose its records.

And a law enforcement report of a fender bender outside of Chattanooga that waylaid the governor’s presidential campaign convoy last July revealed that the FDLE had rented the vehicles used in the motorcade. The cost of those rentals is still unknown.

The Sentinel asked FDLE back in August 2022 how much it had cost to fly the governor to and from Fort Pierce and Live Oak, including flight crew costs, ground transportation, and security team expenses. A September 2022 flight to Fort Myers was also questioned.

Unlike previous campaign reports that show the DeSantis campaign paid back the FDLE $14,459 for transportation, campaign records show no repayment to FDLE for the Aug. 30 trip.

The dates of the three reimbursements lined up with DeSantis news conferences in Vero Beach, Daytona Beach, DeFuniak Springs and Sanford. But nearly two years later, the FDLE has still not provided details about those reimbursements.

Asked to explain the lengthy delays, FDLE spokeswoman Gretl Plesinger said the agency is overwhelmed by thousands of public requests.

FDLE publishes a Protective Operations Report each year that gives the total annual cost of transporting and protecting the governor, but it’s not broken down into individual trips.

The governor’s security detail for 2023, including transportation and agents’ salaries was  $9.4 million, more than double the amount spent the previous year.

“The information is invariably useless to anyone trying to figure out who paid” for the travel, Block said.

Former FDLE Chief of Staff Shane Desguin said in a sworn statement filed by the Washington Post in a lawsuit against the FDLE that top aides to the governor blocked the release of records detailing the governor’s taxpayer-funded travel.

“This extra layer of review often unquestionably delayed FDLE’s ability to timely respond to the public records requests,” said Desguin, who resigned after arguing the records should be made public. “These delays were not in line with the new law to protect the governor’s safety.”

When he began working at the Florida Amendment Foundation two years ago, Block said, he was reluctant to say that the public records system was broken.

But there is no independent body to mediate when a person’s request for records is denied, delayed or not even met with a response, Block said. The only alternative is to take the agency to court, something most Floridians cannot afford, he said.

“If that’s their only option, then the system is broken,” Block said. “There is no better explanation that the system is broken than this travel financial information brouhaha we’re having now.”