Negron finds ‘public service’ pays

News item: Former Florida Senate President Joe Negron is making $400,000 annually as the top lawyer for the private-prisons company, GEO Group, a top political benefactor he helped as a powerful state lawmaker — Politico, March 15

It’s a story that’s been told over and over in Tallahassee. Only the names change.

A state lawmaker or top government officials gets a certain item added to the budget, or a certain bill passed, and when they leave office, they coincidentally go to work for the company that benefitted.

Whether any specific example is an actual quid pro quo — arranged with the prior understanding of this for that — is beside the point. The appearance to the public is intolerable; the opportunities for abuse are immense.

A state constitutional amendment voters approved last November may make it more difficult for ex-legislators to lobby, which is for the better. But it doesn’t take effect until December 2022. In any case, beyond lobbying, it doesn’t apply to lawmakers or top government officials who land cushy jobs at companies whose water they carried.

Politico’s reporting noted that since 2013, GEO had given $300,000 to Negron or political committees he controlled and $100,000 toward his wife’s failed 2016 congressional campaign.

In this year’s state budget, which Negron oversaw as Senate president, there was a $4 million increase in payments to companies that run private prisons, including GEO, which runs seven prisons in Florida.

Negron said the money was to keep their payrolls competitive with those of state prisons, where employees finally received a raise. But why do that, when the pretext for sending inmates to private prisons is that they would cost the state less?

In the previous year’s budget, another $2.9 million was earmarked to Continuum of Care, GEO’s offender rehabilitation program, to expand it from one prison to five.

Negron is, it must be said, just one among hundreds of ex-legislators who have capitalized on their “public service.”

Large law firms used to encourage young associates to seek election to the Legislature as an apprenticeship to effective lobbying. In 1970, a former Speaker lined up a job as the trucking industry’s top lobbyist while still chairing the House Rules Committee. Of the last 11 speakers, four are currently registered lobbyists and another was a lobbyist before and after serving in the House and was later elected to the Senate.

Two of them, Dean Cannon and Steve Crisafulli, are members of the same highly influential law and lobbying firm, Gray-Robinson. Former Speaker and Congressman Tom Feeney is president of Associated Industries of Florida, a heavyweight business lobby whose annual lavish legislative reception at its sumptuous headquarters a block from the governor’s mansion serves to impress lawmakers with where the real power in Tallahassee resides.

When the Legislature forbade its members from accepting meals from lobbyists, it conspicuously exempted group functions like that one.

Negron’s new job — which he took the same month he left the Senate — will doubtlessly elicit demands for a tighter ethics law, as it should. But should one actually result, someone will find a loophole.

Since 1976, Florida’s Constitution has required a two-year cooling-off period between legislative service and registered lobbying. However, Cannon and others have gotten around the restriction by giving what some call “strategic advice” to their firms’ lobbying clients without actually contacting legislators. Some may reasonably see that as a distinction without a difference.

An amendment proposed by the Florida Constitution Revision Commission — and approved by voters in November — raises the no-lobbying restriction to six years. That may be a bit more effective at encouraging ex-legislators to seek other work.

But it still leaves open other questionable opportunities.

GEO’s announcement in December said he would “oversee GEO’s corporate governance, financial and regulatory disclosures and litigation-related matters.” It said nothing about lobbying, from which he will no doubt refrain. GEO is also a major contractor for the federal government.

At the time, there was a lonely protest from then-Rep. David Richardson, DMiami Beach, a prison reform crusader.

“All taxpayers should be appalled by the apparent conflicts of interest,” he said.

Such cases could be prevented, in theory anyway, with a lifetime ban on the employment of former state officials by any corporation or entity to which they had appropriated money, which they had regulated, or had given a contract.

In practice, such a ban would be very difficult to get through the Legislature. The Florida Commission on Ethics might be able to do it by rule, under the same constitutional amendment that lengthened the lobbying ban, but it would face an almost certain challenge in court.

The amendment forbids a public official to “abuse his or her public position in order to obtain a disproportionate benefit” for the official, for relatives, or for any business with which he or she is involved. This, too, is effective in 2022, by which time the Commission on Ethics presumably will exercise its new responsibility to define “abuse” and “disproportionate benefit.” But the courts might say that’s too much discretion for any appointed agency, and the ethics commission has rarely been bold.

What the ethics commission wanted most, and has been seeking for 40 years, was the power to initiate its own investigations without waiting for a sworn complaint from someone else. The revision commission, which Negron helped appoint, never even talked about that.