Florida

Sunshine in the House but darkness in the Senate. The Florida House captures testimony and legislative appearances by lobbyists and makes them public in a searchable database, but the Senate captures neither. This creates a situation in which a lobbyist can say one thing in the House, another in the Senate, and not worry about their divergent Senate remarks being discoverable by the public.

Florida insurance executives describe a “crisis” over the increasing severity of storms, flooding, and other climate-related problems. Yet Liberty Mutual has been sharing a lobbying firm with coal- and gas-plant operator Duke Energy, and coal- and gas-plant operator TECO Energy, which is based in Tampa Bay, Florida.

In 2021, TECO’s lobbyists reported lobbying on HB 919, a bill banning municipalities or counties from passing ordinances to limit the use of gas or other fuel sources, which passed and was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). This conflict of interest between TECO and Liberty Mutual’s customers–who’ll now have a harder time switching off climate-warming gas–is discoverable because of the state’s strong disclosure regime, which requires lobbyists to report bills numbers and positions taken on these bills.

Best feature: Florida has a Legislative Appearance search tool that identifies all instances of lobbyists testifying before legislative committees.

Worst feature: Integrated list of lobbyists and clients is hard to find and is only downloadable in a TXT format.

Additional Findings

The Florida lobbyist information hub is easy to find and lives on its own website. Searches are clearly available on the home page under “Public information.” The lobbyist search tool itself is difficult to use, only displaying results by the first letter of an entity. There is no actual search function at all. The names can be filtered by calendar year, branch of government, and by name, principal, location, and industry. More information can be viewed when clicking on a result, including a list of principals or lobbyists, depending on which result is clicked. Lobbying firm information doesn’t appear on the search tool at all. PDF directories that include lobbyist, client, and lobbying firm information are easily available from the hopepage, under the search tool, but aren’t workable in Excel or Google Sheets.

It’s not immediately clear where to find an integrated, downloadable list, but one can be found through the “Other resources” link on the website hub. Even then, the list is only downloadable in TXT format and needs to be converted to something usable. After the format is converted and the list uploaded to Google Sheets or Excel, it’s a fairly workable list. Almost every entry includes lobbying firm information, though the terminated/active status information can’t be found until columns AH and AI. There’s also no way to flter the list beforehand to only include active relationships. There are also probably too many fields for excessive information like lobbyist address, phone number extensions, and countries. Overall, Florida’s reporting system is decent at general access, though isn’t very customizeable and difficult to find and work with their integrated datasets. The individual search function is unecessarily simple, but does include a good function to sort by year and different entity types.