Mayor calls for leader to resign
Demings: VanderLey’s exit from tollway board would resolve potential conflicts of interest
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said Thursday that Commissioner Betsy VanderLey should resign from the board of the Central Florida Expressway Authority, a day after an Orlando Sentinel report detailed VanderLey’s financial ties to an engineering company that holds contracts with both the county and the tollroad agency.
At the same time, two Central Florida residents said they filed ethics complaints against VanderLey, who owns a consulting business that has been paid as much as $88,000 by Orlando-based civil engineering firm DRMP.
VanderLey failed to disclose the extent of her income from DRMP and voted earlier this year to add nearly $100,000 to an Orange County contract with DRMP without disclosing her conflict, the Sentinel reported.
VanderLey, who has abstained from voting on other county commission and expressway authority board votes involving DRMP, has said she made simple mistakes and “clerical errors.” She filed amended financial disclosures and an after-the-fact voting-conflict disclosure earlier this week after the Sentinel began asking questions.
“Given the information and facts that have been related, I believe that Commissioner VanderLey should resign from the CFX board,” Demings said in a statement to the Sentinel. “This would resolve the potential for future conflicts of interest, or the appearance of conflicts of interest, related to her consulting business and the business of the expressway authority.”
Asked if she planned to resign from the toll-road agency board,
VanderLey said in an emailed statement, “Absolutely not.”
“I have followed exactly what the state prescribes to remedy a conflict. I abstained from voting and I disclosed the conflict,” VanderLey said, adding that she has recused herself and filed votingconflict disclosures every time DRMP has had an issue before the expressway authority board.
VanderLey is up for reelection Aug. 18 in Orange County’s District 1, which covers the western side of the county, from Winter Garden to Walt Disney World.
The expressway authority is run by a 10-member governing board, a mixture of local elected officials and gubernatorial appointees who together oversee a 125-mile network of regional toll roads and decide how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in toll revenue. Demings, a Democrat, has a permanent seat as county mayor, and he appointed VanderLey, a Republican, to a two-year term in February 2019.
Meanwhile, the ethics complaints that two people said they lodged against VanderLey this week accuse her of breaking financial-disclosure and conflictof-interest laws. A representative for the Florida Commission on Ethics said the agency could not say whether it has received either of the complaints, but both people provided copies to the Sentinel. In a separate emailed statement to questions about the complaints, VanderLey said she has not received any official notification of the complaints from the ethics commission and pointed out that she proactively corrected her mistakes.
“These filings are unmerited, because as soon as I was made aware of the oversight, I immediately corrected it and filed the appropriate forms,” she said.
Both people who filed complaints have ties to VanderLey’s opponent in the county commission race: Nicole Wilson, a Democrat and environmental-law attorney.
Attorney Steve Meyers cofounded the Orlando political consulting firm Meyers & Washington, which is working on Wilson’s campaign. And activist Chuck O’Neal, a former Democratic candidate for the Florida Legislature, has worked with Wilson on environmental causes.
Meyers said he filed a complaint because that’s the only way the ethics commission will open a probe.
“The facts are the facts,” Meyers said. “If the facts are that she didn’t violate ethics rules, then fine. And if she did, it doesn’t really matter who reported it.”
O’Neal said voters deserve to know the full extent of VanderLey’s ties to DRMP, because he said VanderLey has been a reliable vote for developers during her four years on the county commission.
In her emailed statement, VanderLey also pointed out that her contract with DRMP prohibits her from working on any contract involving municipal or county governments in Orange, Seminole, Osceola and Lake counties.
“As I have previously stated, I made mistakes, but have corrected them,” VanderLey sad. “Sadly, this is an attempt to politically exploit an honest mistake, evidenced by the fact that it is my opponent’s political consultants who have provided you with these supposed complaints.”
Once the ethics commission receives a sworn complaint, it then decides whether it warrants an investigation. The potential penalties range from public censure to removal from office or civil penalties of up to $10,000, though severe punishment is rare.
Wilson said Meyers and O’Neal each reached out to her before filing the complaints but that both men made the decisions to go forward on their own.
“I will be very curious to see what the investigation brings forth,” Wilson said.
The District 1 election was on track to be held in November when Floridians are expected to vote in big numbers because of the presidential election. But that changed when a friend of VanderLey’s — former Orange County Commissioner Scott Boyd — persuaded his 20-year-old stepdaughter to file as a write-in candidate in the race on the last day of qualifying.
The move had the effect of bumping up the race to the Aug. 18 primary, when voter turnout is likely to be much lower.