Editorial: Gov. Scott’s cronyism shows lack of conservative values
Recent reporting from the Miami Herald’s Mary Ellen Klas reveals more about our governor than any campaign ad ever could. Here’s the lede from Klas last week:
“The Florida Department of Revenue has ousted top employees and kept positions vacant for months to make room for many of Gov. Rick Scott's loyal staffers who will be out of their jobs when he leaves office this year, even though none of them have any experience in that department's main responsibility: tax administration.”
Over the last month, the governor’s personally-appointed head of the Dept. of Revenue, Leon Biegalski, has orchestrated the systematic replacement of the agency’s top staff with inexperienced loyalists who have little experience outside of political connections to Scott.
Klas detailed some of the shady staff shake-ups.
The director of the Office of Property Tax Oversight who was hired after a nationwide search and had 30 years of experience was replaced by a 34-year-old lawyer with no tax policy experience.
A 31-year-old attorney who worked as a policy chief in the governor’s office was handed a $90,000 a year job replacing a lawyer who had worked her way up in the department for almost a decade.
A 24-year-old with no tax experience, who was formerly an intern for the governor, was handed a $60,000 salary as budget manager for the Office of Property Tax Oversight.
Another personal friend of Biegalski with no college degree and no prior tax experience was given a management job with a $78,000 salary. And yet another Biegalski friend was promoted to a management position for which state law requires a lawyer, yet the newly promoted loyalist is not. Klas said the salary for the new position was not disclosed.
Several of the positions were not advertised nor were they opened to other state employees. But this sort of cronyism is nothing new for the governor.
POLITICO Florida’s Arex Sarkissian reported earlier this month that a former aide to the governor with no experience in disaster management was made the second-highest-paid official at the Florida Division of Emergency Management’s Preparedness Bureau in Orlando. “The 32-year-old is earning $40 an hour as a temporary employee at an hourly wage equal to more than $83,000 a year,” according to Sarkissian.
Over the years, Scott has handed out important, high-paying jobs to inexperienced political loyalists everywhere from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to the Department of Environmental Protection.
Such shameless promotion practices might be common place in communist regimes, but it shouldn’t be happening at the state of Florida or from self-professed “conservatives” in the Republican Party.
There’s no doubt that both Democrats and Republicans have engaged in this sort of pathetic political patronage over the years. Before the top dog leaves elected office and walks out the door, he throws bones out to all the sycophants and yes-men who were panting, political lapdogs during the official’s time in office.
And guess who pays for all the puppy treats? Taxpayers. We finance the high-paying perks and state salaries that are used to buy the fawning and the favoritism.
Talk about a swamp that needs to be drained. It’s disgusting. And it’s especially hypocritical coming from a governor who proclaims the virtues of conservative principles and the value of running government like a private sector business. Any private business that operated on cronyism like this would be broke and busted in no time.
True conservatives in Northwest Florida and beyond need to speak up and demand better. This is precisely the swamp-like behavior that voters should condemn and reject. While waving a phony flag of fiscal conservatism, Gov. Scott has been allowed to get away with this sort of publicly-funded favoritism for eigth years. The result is a Tallahassee swamp that’s chock full of snakes, slugs and mosquitoes.
The governor leaving office will be a good start to draining it.