Why should Florida taxpayers fund a secret airline and travel agency for the governor and the state’s political elites? That’s the question raised by a patently ludicrous bill that would shield any public information about how and where Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state officials go. Florida’s open-government laws may be a drag to unaccountable politicians and lazy bureaucrats. But disclosure comes with the territory — and Florida’s constitution requires it.
House and Senate sponsors in the Republican-led Legislature advanced bills this week that would impose the first-ever public records exemption for the transportation records held by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the agency that handles the governor’s security. The exemption would take effect retroactively, prohibiting anyone from scrutinizing how DeSantis has used his state travel in the past and as he prepares for a likely campaign for the Republican nomination for president, as Mary Ellen Klas of the Times/Herald Tallahassee bureau reported Wednesday.
As irony would have it, the Senate Governmental Oversight and Accountability Committee unanimously passed SB 1616 on Wednesday, one day after a House committee advanced a companion bill on a 17-0 vote. The measures would exempt travel information for the governor and his or her immediate family, visiting governors and their families, the lieutenant governor, a member of the state Cabinet and the House speaker, Senate president and chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, and for others whose secretive arrangements “are requested by the governor.”
