![\"Alex](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/202602231537MCT_____PHOTO____US-NEWS-HOPE-FLORIDA-CHARITY-AG-FILEPIC-MI_adc084.jpg\")
Alex Andrade, R- Pensacola, and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier talk during the first day of the legislative session at the Florida State Capitol on March 4, 2025, in Tallahassee, Florida. (Matias J. Ocner\/Miami Herald\/TNS)<\/p>\nFlorida has \u2014 or used to have \u2014 the nation\u2019s strongest government-in-the-sunshine laws. The Legislature has riddled them with more than a thousand exemptions.<\/p>\n
More and more, officials are 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 on 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 modeled on Florida\u2019s, but FOIA requests to U.S. agencies are going unmet due to President Donald Trump\u2019s vast layoffs and firings. A March 14 Washington Post op-ed 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 reform bill (CS\/HB 437) that 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
Alex Andrade, R- Pensacola, and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier talk during the first day of the legislative session at the Florida State Capitol on March 4, 2025, in Tallahassee, Florida. (Matias J. Ocner\/Miami Herald\/TNS)<\/p>\n
The bill\u2019s sponsor, Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, had exposed how James Uthmeier, then DeSantis\u2019 chief of staff and now the state\u2019s attorney general, laundered $10 million in Medicaid money into DeSantis\u2019 political advertising campaign against a 2024 recreational marijuana initiative.<\/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 public record requests and even less able to afford the fees.<\/p>\n
The South Florida Sun Sentinel won 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 Tampa Bay Times plumbed the state\u2019s accounting system and found that a total of $36.2 million in public funds had been laundered into those ads. Nearly half of the spending had not been posted, as required, to the state\u2019s contracting database.<\/p>\n
Reporters tracked the money \u201cby tracing 29-digit account codes and 6-digit object codes across three state databases,\u201d the newspaper reported.<\/p>\n
![\"President](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/202602031715MCT_____PHOTO____US-NEWS-FLA-IMMIGRATION-ENFORCEMENT-COST-FILEPIC-GET.jpg\")
President President Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem tour a migrant detention center, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” located at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida, on July 1, 2025.<\/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 \u2014 most of them were chosen without bidding competition \u2014 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. 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.<\/p>\n
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. 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 \u2014 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
Martin Dyckman is a member of the Sun Sentinel\u2019s editorial board and a retired editorial writer for the Tampa Bay Times. He wrote this commentary for the Florida Trident, a publication of the Florida Center for Government Accountability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Florida has \u2014 or used to have \u2014 the nation\u2019s strongest government-in-the-sunshine laws. The Legislature has riddled them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[483,28,30,29,482,109,76410],"class_list":["post-201280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-commentary","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-opinion","tag-social","tag-social-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}