Florida
Florida lawmakers seek records as it investigates state agency funding
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Amid an escalating feud between Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled House, the chamber’s budget chairman on Friday sent letters to six state agencies seeking a broad array of documents as part of a probe into government spending.
The inquiry into DeSantis administration spending, ordered by House Speaker Daniel Perez, R-Miami, has raised questions about potentially missing state-owned vehicles, agency leaders earning six-figure salaries while living in other states and millions of dollars of interest paid on a prison facility that has not been built.
The most high-profile issue involves a $10 million donation the state’s largest Medicaid managed-care provider made to the Hope Florida Foundation, Inc., a direct-support organization tied to a signature program of Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis. The donation from the Centene managed-care company was part of a $67 million settlement with the state Agency for Health Care Administration, with $57 million going to the agency and $10 million to the foundation.
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The letters, sent Friday by House Budget Chairman Lawrence McClure, R-Dover, targeted the Agency for Health Care Administration, the Department of Education, the Florida State Guard, the Department of Management Services, the Department of Corrections and the Division of Emergency Management.
“We’re just looking for accountability and efficiency. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing,” McClure told The News Service of Florida in a phone interview.
The requests focused on issues that arose as House budget panels began delving into ways to slash spending as lawmakers write a budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. The House and the Senate approved their proposed budgets on Wednesday, setting up negotiations on a final spending plan over the final weeks of the legislative session, which is scheduled to end May 2.
McClure gave the agencies until May 16 to respond to the requests for information, meaning the data likely won’t play a role in the upcoming budget talks.
The requests, in part, ask each agency to provide “all communications and documents related to settlement agreements with third parties” and all communications and documents related to the Hope Florida Foundation and to the Hope Florida program.
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During a Wednesday meeting, House Health Care Budget Chairman Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, grilled Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Shevaun Harris about the $10 million settlement, repeatedly asking her what the money was spent on.
Harris said the foundation is a separate organization from the state Hope Florida program and was unable to provide such details. In a video posted hours later on social media, Harris called the meeting “an ambush” as DeSantis and other allies continued to clash about the issue with House leaders on social media and conservative media outlets.
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DeSantis on Thursday defended the donation and called the $10 million settlement from Centene a “cherry on top” of the deal that was “100 percent appropriate.”
Friday’s letters reflected what Perez has called an increasing “frustration” over a lack of cooperation from some agencies and a dearth of information from others as the House attempted to dig into the DeSantis’ administration’s finances.
The letters pointed to a part of Florida law that gives the Legislature “the right and authority to inspect and investigate the books, records, papers, documents, data, operation and physical plant of any public agency in this state, including any confidential information.”
Each agency is “accountable to the public for how it spends its funds,” McClure wrote to the heads of the six agencies.
“To this end, the House Budget Committee and its subcommittees have enjoyed productive meetings where we have learned more about the operations of our partners in the executive branch. However, certain information and records stemming from these discussions remain outstanding and are needed in order for the House to continue our oversight function of state agencies,” McClure wrote.
In addition to records related to Hope Florida and the foundation, the requests seek “all communications and documents” related to a swath of other issues.
As an example, the request to the Division of Emergency Management asks for “all communications and documents related to the issuance of executive orders declaring a state of emergency and any extensions thereof” dating back to July 1, 2017 — before DeSantis took office in January 2019.
In another letter, the House also is asking the Department of Management Services for 19 sets of records in categories including “remote workers,” “financial management,” “travel,” and “fleet management.” The request also seeks information “related to the 2,279 vehicles with acquisition costs totaling $57,046,583 that could not be found or located” in an auditor general report released this year.
It’s unclear whether the agencies intend to hand over to the House what could be a voluminous amount of records.
“Florida’s agencies have already spent hundreds of hours in meetings and document production — only to get hit with another performative request from the House. We’re focused on serving Floridians, while the House is seemingly focused elsewhere,” Molly Best, a DeSantis spokeswoman, said in an email Friday.
But McClure said the efforts to get information from the DeSantis administration could play a role in upcoming budget talks.
“We’re going to either get answers that help us solve the puzzle or we are going to be extremely conservative on what we’re willing to agree to and then we can talk about it next year,” he said in the phone interview.
Other information sought by the House includes records about the state’s school voucher programs. In part, the House wants the Department of Education to provide “records of requests for reimbursement of overpayments to scholarship-funding organizations” as well as “information on cross-checking processes to prevent duplicate funding for students” in voucher programs.
Andrade, an attorney, acknowledged that the requests to the agencies are broad but said they are dissimilar from public-records requests made by members of the public.
The Legislature is “a separate branch of government tasked with the direction and oversight of the executive branch,” Andrade said in a phone interview Friday.
“We want and we are entitled to everything. You (agency officials) need to actually act in good faith and help us understand what’s going on,” he added. “If we don’t get, we’ll have bigger questions and bigger issues.”
A 40-year-old man accused of using an AR-style rifle to threaten another man in a Wawa parking lot was arrested, according to a recently-obtained affidavit.
Jeremy Vigil, of the 700 block of Southwest Estate Avenue in Port St. Lucie, was arrested June 15 on aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and battery charges after the incident at a Wawa at Southwest Becker Road and Southwest Port St. Lucie Boulevard.
A man about 10 p.m. June 15 told Port St. Lucie police that he and Vigil completed a job together the weekend before, and Vigil was angry about payment.
The man said Vigil contacted him, telling him to meet with his money. He arrived at Wawa and met Vigil, with their vehicles positioned window to window.
He described Vigil as “extremely angry,” and accused Vigil of pointing an AR-style rifle out of his truck at him.
“I’m a gangster (expletive),” Vigil is quoted as saying. “I’ll (expletive) kill you.”
The man said Vigil’s son was in the truck, and tried to get the rifle away from his father.
The man reportedly tried to record the encounter on his phone but said Vigil knocked the phone from his hand.
The man said he drove off and circled around to get his phone from the ground near the air pumps.
Ultimately, he said Vigil approached again without the rifle. Vigil reportedly “prevented him from leaving by chest-bumping (the man’s) vehicle.”
Vigil and the man got in a physical altercation near the gas pumps. Vigil then is accused of chasing the man into Wawa and yelling before leaving the scene.
Police viewed video surveillance of the incident.
Police reported they couldn’t definitively see a firearm in the video, noting the quality of the footage and distance away made it difficult.
The store manager told investigators it was the third incident involving Vigil at the location.
Police went to Vigil’s home, and he finally came outside after officers used a public address system and made a number of phone calls.
Vigil allowed officers to search his home, and they reported finding an AR-style rifle inside a safe.
Vigil initially denied the allegations.
Parts of the affidavit that appear to contain some of Vigil’s statements with police were redacted.
Vigil was taken to the St. Lucie County Jail, but it couldn’t immediately be determined June 22 whether he’d been released on bond. Attempts to reach the booking desk via phone were unsuccessful.
Will Greenlee is a breaking news reporter for TCPalm. Follow Will on X @OffTheBeatTweet or reach him by phone at 772-267-7926. E-mail him at will.greenlee@tcpalm.com.
Cape Coral has one. So do Fort Myers, Bonita Springs and Naples.
And now it’s Fort Myers Beach’s turn to get its very own food truck park.
Access 26 Family Food Truck Park is expected to open early next year at 2500 Estero Blvd. and Beach Access 26. On June 8, Stevens Construction broke ground on the project, which will highlight five yet-to-be-announced food trucks, all with unique menus.
And there’s more. A bar with covered seating, Manny’s Scoops ice cream and retail area will be featured in a two-story, 3,000 square-foot structure. Storage, office space, restrooms, coolers, a freezer and a dumbwaiter system for beer kegs and supplies will take up the second floor.
A 569-square-foot comfort center with restrooms, storage and three outdoor showers is also planned, along with a curbside table rail, artificial turf play area, three shade canvas structures, guest parking lot and beach access.
And it’s designed with storms and hurricanes in mind — the building’s generator and mechanical equipment will be above flood level, metal flood panels and waterproof walls will help with storm surge and flooding, and the foundation’s design lets water flow through more easily.
Southwest Florida’s expanding food truck scene
Access 26 is the latest food truck park to join Southwest Florida’s growing eatertainment scene. Slipaway Food Truck Park & Marina opened a year ago on July 4 with food trucks, a large covered central bar, live music daily and more in Cape Coral.
Bay Street Yard first brought its vibrant food and entertainment concept to downtown Fort Myers in May 2024, while Backyard Social debuted its food trucks and family-fun daytime and 21-and-up nightlife format in south Fort Myers in October 2023.
Bonita Springs welcomed Rooftop at Riverside’s two-story, two-bar (one on the rooftop) open-air venue with food trucks in January 2024.
Naples’ Celebration Park — a waterfront destination with gourmet food trucks, bar and live music — led the way, opening in November 2018.
Robyn George is a food and dining reporter for The News-Press. Connect at rhgeorge@fortmyer.gannett.com
Please support local community journalism and stay informed about Southwest Florida news by subscribing to The News-Press and Naples Daily News; download the free News-Press or Naples Daily News app, and sign up for daily briefing email newsletter, food & dining and growth & development newsletters here and here.
NASA’s next great observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, arrived at the Kennedy Space Center aboard the agency’s massive Pegasus barge late Sunday morning.
The spacecraft was nestled inside its protective case, which NASA nicknamed the “Chariot” in keeping with the “Roman” theme. That said, telescope is named not for the ancient empire, but instead for NASA’s first Chief of Astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman.
“She was a key person in our exploration of space. She understood that in order to better understand the universe, you have to go in space,” said Lucas Paganini, the program executive for Roman. “That’s why she’s called the ‘Mother of Hubble’ because she made Hubble possible.”
The 43-foot-tall observatory disembarked from the barge shortly after 7 p.m. EDT (2300 UTC), following a stream of thunderstorms that delayed its departure by about an hour. The spacecraft will travel to the south end of the KSC campus to a building called the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility.
There it will undergo a roughly 70-day prelaunch campaign involving checkouts, fueling, and finally the encapsulation inside the payload fairing of a Falcon Heavy rocket. The observatory is set to launch from Launch Complex 39A no earlier than August 30, moved up from the original September launch date.
“A lot of credit to this great team. They’ve been able to accommodate schedules, to accelerate to be able to launch earlier,” Paganini said. “There’s a lot of things going on at the Cape and of course the team has been amazing.”
This was the second trip to Florida for the Pegasus barge this year after it dropped off the propellant tank section of the core stage for the Artemis 3 Space Launch System rocket back in late April. While the spacecraft arrived safely, Neil Patel, the Roman mechanical engineer who traveled with the observatory, said it wasn’t entirely smooth sailing after leaving from Massachusetts.
“We do have a tight temperature tolerance on the observatory. We need to stay below 74 degrees. We have two cooling units: we had a primary and a redundant unit and they just weren’t getting the job done down here, so we had to make a stop, add additional rental units,” Patel said.
“Again, it was an amazing effort to have a team come down on an emergency basis. Basically, a MacGyver crew came in and we added additional units and those units did maintain the temperature quite well.”
Roman is designed to operate near a fixed point in space called Lagrange Point 2, about 1.5 million km away from the Earth on the side opposite the Sun. It’s designed to operate there for a minimum of five years, but Paganini said with the propellant onboard, it will likely last for 10 years or more.
The telescope is+ equipped with a 300 megapixel camera called the Wide Field Instrument, which features 18 detectors. It was developed by BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace).
“It’s going to allow us to observe at least 100 times wider field of view than what we can do with Hubble. Same resolution, but a wider area, 1000 times faster,” Paganini said. “So what takes Roman a year to observe, it would take Hubble thousands of years. So it’s definitely much more efficient.”
The observatory also features a chronograph instrument, developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will allow Roman to observe the faint light of exoplanets near their stars.
Paganini said Roman will also help scientists better understand dark matter and dark energy, the combination of which he calls the “dark universe”.
“100 years ago, we discovered that the universe was expanding. 25 years ago, we discovered that it was expanding at an accelerated pace and that’s what led to a Nobel Prize,” Paganini said. “What we don’t quite know yet is if that acceleration is changing in ways. We don’t know if it’s actually dark energy, what is producing it, or is it simply that we don’t understand gravity at all.
“So eventually, we’ll see if the laws of physics that we use these days are the right ones for what we are observing. But at the end is, we’re trying to understand a very human question, which is where do we come from and where are wea heading in this universe that is our neighborhood?”
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