South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Voters consider Gillum’s and DeSantis’ hurricane leadership
Florida’s race for governor has turned into a Category 5 political storm. The Republican Party of Florida is airing ads attacking Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum’s performance as Tallahassee mayor during Hurricane Hermine’s aftermath in 2016.
Ron DeSantis, the Republican nominee, has accused Gillum of refusing help to restore power after the Category 1 storm struck Florida’s capital city, putting politics ahead of getting the lights back on for suffering residents.
Gillum’s campaign has hit back, saying the ad isn’t true and noting that DeSantis voted
against disaster relief bills in Congress on ideological grounds. The campaign countered with a testimonial from Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil praising Gillum’s leadership skills. The ad’s title calls DeSantis’ attack a “hurricane of lies.”
It’s an issue voters will need to consider closely. Florida’s next governor will play a vital role in keeping the state’s residents safe, said Craig Fugate, who served as director of emergency management under former Govs. Charlie Crist and Jeb Bush.
The governor makes the call on whether to declare a state of emergency or call up the National Guard. Fugate saw Bush in action in 2004 when four hurricanes pummeled Florida.
“It is not ceremonial,” said Fugate, who later served as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during former President Barack Obama’s administration. “Gov. Bush moved his office into the state EOC (emergency operations center). His presence made sure every state agency knew this was serious, and they needed to send their best people.”
Ex-utility chief: GOP ad is a ‘flat-out lie’
During a campaign stop in West Boca, DeSantis said Gillum delayed power restoration to wait for unionized workers to arrive after the Category 1 Hermine hit Tallahassee.
DeSantis had been put on the defensive because of tweets his ally and supporter President Donald Trump had made questioning Hurricane Maria’s death toll in Puerto Rico. Gillum had responded that Puerto Ricans deserved better from the president.
“For him to be criticizing anybody on hurricane recovery, man, that takes some chutzpah,” DeSantis said.
Barry Moline, the former head of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, said he and Tallahassee’s general manager of electric utilities made decisions about crews — not Gillum.
“Any claim that suggests the mayor had anything to do with rejecting crews is a flat-out lie,” said Moline, who now serves as executive director of the California Municipal Utilities Association. “It’s wrong. It’s false. It didn’t happen. The mayor wasn’t involved with selecting or choosing crews to bring into Tallahassee.”
Further, he said the union status of workers never was discussed. The decision to turn down an offer for assistance from Florida Power & Light was based on concerns about over-saturating the city with crews and incurring unnecessary expenses, Moline said.
“The goal of the utility director is to restore power quickly and safely,” he said. “The conflict of ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ applies here. If you have too many people in the kitchen ... it gets real crowded. So you can’t necessarily do that.”
The city did accept 100 extra workers from Pensacola-based Gulf Power Co., Moline said. He denied that tensions between municipal-run systems and large utilities played a role, saying instead FPL didn’t supply adequate information about the type of workers it was willing to provide.
FPL offered the assistance of 575 FPL employees and contractors, said Chris McGrath, a utility spokesman.
“FPL was at the ready to help our fellow Floridians in need, just as we’ve assisted restoration efforts in other parts of the country, such as North Carolina and Puerto Rico earlier this year,” he said. “However, Tallahassee’s utility informed us it had the necessary resources and declined our offer.”
Under Tallahassee’s form of government, Gillum, 39, is involved in city utilities at the policy-making level, but day-to-day operational decisions are made by the city manager’s office, said Jamie Van Pelt, the mayor’s chief of staff.
Back in 2016, Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Gillum — a rising star in the Democratic Party — traded barbs over the response to Hermine, which caused some residents to go as long as a week without power. Scott suggested the city’s response to the storm was too slow. Gillum wrote on his Facebook page that politics played no role in the city’s response.
“Let me be clear,” he wrote. “We are happy to accept any help from any person or organization that is going to accelerate the speed at which we can safely restore power to our residents.”
About 90 percent of Tallahassee residents had their power restored within four days after the storm, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
DeSantis voted against disaster relief
DeSantis, 40, has also faced questions about his ability to lead the state through a hurricane. First elected to U.S. House of Representatives in 2012 as a Tea Party conservative, DeSantis has not led a large organization or served in an executive role. In September, he gave up his seat representing the Daytona Beach area to focus on his bid for governor.
One of his first votes in Congress was against $9.7 billion in flood insurance aid for Superstorm Sandy victims. At the time, DeSantis said he had concerns the bill wasn’t lean enough and would drive up the nation’s debt.
He changed course last year and voted for a $36.5 billion relief package for hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.
His primary challenger Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam questioned whether DeSantis had spent too much time in Washington and not enough time learning about Florida-specific issues, such as hurricane response.
“If a hurricane is threatening to make landfall in Chokoloskee, you need a governor who doesn’t need to find a map to discover where that little town is,” Putnam said during the campaign.
He endorsed DeSantis in his concession speech.
Before being elected to Congress, DeSantis served in the U.S. Navy as an officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and then as a federal prosecutor. Gillum was first elected to the Tallahassee City Commission in 2003 and then won the mayor’s seat in 2014.
Politics aside, the next governor of Florida will have to work closely with Scott’s staff during the transition, Fugate said.
Only a month after Crist took office in 2007, a tornado outbreak killed 21 people in Central Florida.
“Whoever is next governor of Florida, hope is not a strategy,” Fugate said. “You have to be ready on day one if disaster strikes.”