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The Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee, Florida on Sept. 15, 2025. Credit: Dennis MacDonald \/ Shutterstock<\/p>\nThe Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee, Florida on Sept. 15, 2025. Credit: Dennis MacDonald \/ Shutterstock<\/p>\n
Herbert Block,\u00a0The\u00a0Washington Post\u2019s\u00a0legendary political cartoonist, advocated tirelessly for government in the sunshine. The first page of his 1957 anthology,\u00a0HERBLOCK\u2019s Special for Today<\/a>, depicted two bureaucrats discussing a stack of documents in a government office. One is reaching for a set of rubber stamps on his desk.<\/p>\n \u201cWell,\u201d he says to the other, \u201cWe certainly botched this job. What\u2019ll we stamp it \u2013 \u2018Secret\u2019 or \u2018Top Secret?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Florida has \u2013 or used to have \u2013 the nation\u2019s strongest government-in-the-sunshine laws. The Legislature has riddled them with more than a thousand exemptions. And now, officials don\u2019t even need that form of rubber stamp to conceal whatever they choose to keep secret.<\/p>\n More and more, they\u2019re simply ignoring the law. Requests for public documents can go unanswered for weeks, months, even years. When they do bother to reply, they may pose prohibitive charges for copying the material.<\/p>\n An ABC News inquiry into the Florida prison system is still waiting three years later for the desk calendar of the secretary of corrections.<\/p>\n The Lee County Port Authority told a private citizen there would be a $391,000 charge for a set of documents.<\/p>\n \u201cThe default position is now ignore, delay, deny,\u201d says Bobby Block, director of the Florida First Amendment Foundation.<\/p>\n Block says secretive officials are exploiting the weakened finances of the news media, their advertising revenues having been hollowed out by the internet. It can be costly to sue for public records so litigation is less likely. Reimbursement isn\u2019t guaranteed.<\/p>\n Darkness is descending in other states also, Block said, and it\u2019s spreading in the federal government where delay has become a default too.<\/p>\n The Federal Freedom of Information Act was modelled on Florida\u2019s, but FOIA requests to U.S. agencies are going unmet due to President Trump\u2019s vast layoffs and firings. A\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0op-ed Saturday took note of 26 lawsuits, involving 13 agencies, in which government attorneys have replied that there were too few remaining FOI officers to provide timely disclosure.<\/p>\n Florida\u2019s regular legislative session concluded last week without enacting a potent public records\u00a0reform bill (CS\/HB 437)<\/a>\u00a0that the House had approved 111-0. It contained enforceable deadlines, limits on costs and meaningful financial penalties for scofflaws. It died on adjournment in the Senate, where the leadership had put it in three committees that were not meant to take it up.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear whether that owed more to the mutual dislike between the two chambers, to the institutional opposition of the Florida Sheriffs Association and other public officials, or to the influence of Gov. Ron DeSantis, the most secretive chief executive in Florida\u2019s modern history.<\/p>\n The bill\u2019s sponsor, Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, had exposed how DeSantis\u2019 chief of staff \u2013 who\u2019s now Florida\u2019s attorney general \u2013 laundered $10 million in Medicaid money into DeSantis\u2019 political advertising\u00a0campaign<\/a>\u00a0against a 2024 recreational marijuana initiative. There appears to be a\u00a0grand jury report\u00a0<\/a>on that which has yet to be released. One of Florida\u2019s \u201cshade\u201d laws allows someone who\u2019s not indicted to contest a grand jury\u2019s criticism.<\/p>\n The importance of public records to public integrity underlay a key element of Gov. Reubin Askew\u2019s 1976 \u201cSunshine Amendment\u201d initiative, an ethics code that among other things requires public officials to disclose their personal finances. He saw that\u00a0reporting\u00a0<\/a>as preventing misdeeds more than exposing them.<\/p>\n Government in the Sunshine isn\u2019t just for the media. It\u2019s for everyone. Citizens need it to keep their local governments honest. But they\u2019re even more likely than the media to be met with resistance to\u00a0public record requests<\/a>\u00a0and even less able to afford the fees.<\/p>\n Not many years after that Herblock cartoon, President Lyndon Johnson\u2019s administration had stamped \u201cTop Secret\u201d on what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page Defense Department history of one of the all-time botched jobs, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.<\/p>\n It told, among other things, how Johnson and other officials had persistently misled the nation deeper into an unwinnable war that cost 58,281 American lives.<\/p>\n Daniel Ellsberg, one of the authors, disclosed much of it to the media in 1971 but it took 40 more years for the documents to be completely declassified for the public.<\/p>\n That was one of the great examples, among countless others, why sunshine is indispensable. In 2010, Lucy Morgan of the\u00a0St. Petersburg Times\u00a0uncovered gross irregularities in the construction of a $48 million, lavishly furnished new courthouse for the First District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee, on a suburban site conveniently near the home of its chief judge, Paul Hawkes.<\/p>\n \u201cHow did it get funded?\u201d Morgan wrote. \u201cLike many things that gain life in Tallahassee, the courthouse grew out of a last-minute amendment on the last day of a legislative session. The funding for the courthouse was buried in the middle of a 142-page transportation bill, approved the last day of the 2007 session.\u201d<\/p>\n Her expos\u00e9 led to a Judicial Qualifications Commission investigation of Hawkes and to his resignation from the bench. Ironically, he had been the good-guy plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit that led to a 1992 constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to government records and meetings.<\/p>\n The\u00a0South Florida Sun Sentinel\u00a0won a Pulitzer Prize for its 2012 investigation of habitual high speeding by some 800 scofflaw police officers, most of whom were off duty. Reporter Sally Kestin and Database Editor John Maines used 1.1 million toll records from Florida\u2019s SunPass system to compute the travel times of 3,900 police transponders.<\/p>\n They revealed not only a small army of lawbreaking cops but also 320 crashes that had killed or maimed at least 21 people. Only one officer had been jailed. Cops routinely \u201cbadged their way\u201d out of tickets.<\/p>\n But today, reporters curious about where a city\u2019s cops live would be stymied by a law that conceals anything that might tell where they or their families reside. The law has been expanded to exempt home addresses of thousands of public officials and employees, many of whom have no plausible need for such security.<\/p>\n In 2025, legislative investigators found the $10 million that had been diverted from a Medicaid overbilling settlement into DeSantis\u2019 campaign against the recreational marijuana initiative. Digging deeper, the\u00a0Tampa Bay Times\u00a0plumbed the state\u2019s accounting system and found that a total of $36.2 million in public funds had been laundered into those ads. Nearly\u00a0half of the spending<\/a>\u00a0had not been posted, as required, to the state\u2019s contracting data base.<\/p>\n Reporters tracked the money \u201cby tracing 29-digit account codes and 6-digit object codes across three state databases,\u201d the newspaper said\u00a0reported<\/a>. The precise amounts were unavailable because\u00a0the administration has not turned over such documents as invoices and work products.<\/p>\n Documents have also gone missing from the database pertaining to the $608 million DeSantis spent just to open Alligator Alcatraz, his immigrant prison in the Everglades, that is costing $1.2 million a day just to run.<\/p>\n A lawsuit filed by Friends of the Everglades disgorged the state\u2019s request for a $1.49 billion grant from the federal government, which may or may not be forthcoming. The First Amendment Foundation was told the Department of Emergency Management was allowing contractors \u2013 most of them were chosen without bidding competition \u2013 to redact their documents to protect \u201cpropriety information.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2023, while he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, DeSantis had the Legislature make his travel records secret, purportedly for security.<\/p>\n It left Florida in the dark about how public funds might be subsidizing his political ambitions. The governor\u2019s visitor log, a public record for decades, has vanished as well, the better to conceal who\u2019s lobbying him.<\/p>\n Florida law and the Constitution provide for virtually all records and meetings to be public but allow for exemptions enacted by a specific law limited to one subject and passed by a two-thirds majority in each house. Such laws must \u201csunset\u201d after five years, meaning they must be renewed or allowed to die. The Constitution also requires the Legislature to state a \u201csufficiently compelling\u201d reason to override the public\u2019s right of access.<\/p>\n Trouble is, the Legislature has had no trouble finding excuses to enact and renew an ever-lengthening list of exemptions. There are now more than a thousand major ones. This year\u2019s session carved out two new enormous exemptions.<\/p>\n One seals records identifying crime victims. There is an implied exemption for court records, given that the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of defendants to confront their accusers. The other loophole provides up to 63 days of darkness for the identities of police officers who claim to be crime victims themselves. That\u2019s what police customarily allege after they have killed or beaten someone.<\/p>\n That bill, CS\/HB 1113, overturned a state Supreme Court opinion that had sensibly interpreted the 2018 victims\u2019 rights constitutional amendment known as \u201cMarsy\u2019s Law.\u201d Despite the severe damage to the public records law, there were no votes against the bill in the House and only three in the Senate. DeSantis is not likely to veto it.<\/p>\n The session\u2019s data center bill also granted shade to applicants, allowing them to request up to a year\u2019s confidentiality \u2013 time enough to steal a march on citizens\u2019 objections. The Senate wanted prompt disclosure but the House got its way by waiting until the next-to-last day to send the bill back with a harmful amendment.<\/p>\n A Legislature that believed as much in open government as Florida lawmakers once did would have done none of that. And it would have enacted Andrade\u2019s bill.<\/p>\n There has never been a statewide audit of public records compliance. A responsible legislature should want that too.<\/p>\n Disclosure: The author of this article is a current member of the Sun Sentinel\u2019s editorial board and a retired editorial writer for the Tampa Bay (formerly St. Petersburg) Times.<\/p>\n This article<\/a> first appeared on Florida Trident<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>. Pitch in to help make the Tampa Bay Journalism Project a success.<\/a><\/p>\n Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.<\/a><\/p>\n Follow us:\u00a0Google News<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0NewsBreak<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Reddit<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Instagram<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Facebook\u00a0<\/a>|\u00a0BlueSky<\/a><\/p>\n This article appears in Mar. 12 \u2013 18, 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tRelated\n<\/p>\n \t![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/floridatrident.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/cropped-trident-only-180x180.png?resize=180%2C180&ssl=1\")
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