- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- Next on WEDU, the outgoing President of the University of Florida went on a spending spree in his 17 months on the job.

The disgraced group Moms for Liberty is active in Florida this election cycle and the Bay Area's largest newspaper is facing more financial trouble with our panelists, Daniel Ruth, Rosemary Goudreau, William March, and Joe Henderson right now on "Florida This Week."

(exciting music) Welcome back.

Joining us on the panel this week, Rosemary Goudreau O'Hara is the former Editorial Page Editor at the "South Florida Sun Sentinel."

William March is a columnist, and reporter for FloridaPolitics.com.

Joe Henderson is a political journalist and a former columnist and reporter for "The Tampa Tribune."

And Daniel Ruth is the Honors College Visiting Professor of Professional Practice at USF in Tampa.

Veteran journalists, all.

I'm honored to have you here.

Thank you for coming.

Well, he wasn't there long, less than a year and a half, but former US Senator Ben Sasse went on a spending spree when he became the President of the University of Florida in 2022.

As "The Florida Alligator" reports, Sasse more than tripled his office's expenses, directing millions of university funds into secretive consulting contracts and high paying positions for his GOP allies.

In his first year, Sasse tripled the amount of money spent by his predecessor from 5.6 million to $17.3 million.

A majority of the spending surge was driven by lucrative contracts with big name consulting firms and high-salaried remote positions for Sasse's former US Senate staff and Republican officials.

He also tripled the number of staff working for him from 10 to 30.

Many of those new employees were paid large salaries and worked out of state.

For instance, Sasse hired two of his former Senate staffers Raymond Sass and James Wegman, at salaries of 396,00 and $432,000 respectively, who were allowed to work remotely from their homes in the Washington, DC area.

Sass, who was Sasse's former Senate Chief of Staff, was given the job of UF Vice President for Innovation and Partnerships.

That's a new position, which did not exist under previous administration.

Wegman, Sasse's former Senate Communications Director, became UF's Vice President of Communications, making $160,000 more than the person who previously held that position.

Williams, that's just the tip of the iceberg too.

There's a whole lot more, but this was good reporting by the independent campus newspaper, "The Florida Alligator."

What else in the story stood out to you?

- Well, for one thing, Rob, a couple of points.

This is a pretty good example of what you might call alternative, but respectable news sources that are springing up lately in the decline of the newspaper establishment.

There's a major investigative story.

Did it come from "The Miami Herald?"

From the "Associated Press?"

No, it came from, of all places a student newspaper, which is pretty incredible.

The other point that really struck me about it was this duplicates what's been happening recently in higher education where high level positions, respectable positions at remarkably large salaries are going not to people who have credentials or qualifications in higher education, but who are politically connected.

The obvious example, Richard Corcoran at New College making more than double what his predecessor made.

Corcoran's history is as a lobbyist.

He was a political appointee as Secretary of Education.

He hired a former political operative and lobbyist David Rancourt as Dean of Students with no experience in higher ed.

And the presidents of Florida Poly, State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, South Florida State College, recently all chosen for political connections rather than for qualifications.

- Okay, that's a good question.

So where does the buck stop?

I mean, do you blame the university boards or do you blame somebody higher up, Joe, for kind of looking the other way when the spending goes outta control?

- Well, first off, I want to commend the author of that story, Garrett Shanley.

I would imagine that he's going to get several lucrative high level job offers and bravo, well done.

To go to your question, yes, there is a lot of blame to go around on this, but let's go back to when he was, Ben Sasse was hired initially.

It was rushed through, he was the only candidate up for consideration.

- A lot of it was in secret.

- It was done in definitely in the shadows.

Has Ron DeSantis' fingerprints all over it, even though he says, "Oh, I had nothing to do with it."

I have a bridge I wanna sell you, if you believe that.

And what this does is it's not only a scandal about money, but it goes to the credibility of the state's flagship university.

And that for that reason alone, you know, DeSantis and all the rest, "Oh, we're gonna investigate this."

You should have done it before a student journalist beat you to it.

- Well, this kind of spending, Rosemary, is not done without the knowledge of the board.

You know, every board passes a budget and okays it.

$633,000 for travel, which is 20 times what the previous president spent.

That's incredible.

- Unbelievable.

Yeah.

No, the board, which is politically appointed, the governor appoint them, was definitely asleep at the wheel as this gravy train from Washington to Gainesville was allowed to play out.

Coincidentally, the day the story broke, I got this letter in the mail, I'm a Gator, asking me for a donation and thanking me for my donations.

(panelists laugh) And I'm like, "You know, gee, if they have this kind of money to spend."

Who, I'm just a small time donor, but you've gotta imagine the big time donors think that you can go from spending $5 million in the President's office to $17 million in the course of one year, hiring all your old staff at salaries over $400,000.

No, he, it was just a runaway train.

The board, it really, no, the board definitely deserves, I mean, they ought to be resign.

They ought to resign for their failure to do due diligence over the university at a time when students are paying record tuition and have student debt that this was allowed to happen.

Is, does, as Joe said, it all falls back on the governor.

- So who would it be up to?

No crimes were alleged here.

It's just outta control spending.

So who would be the proper place to get this investigated?

Where would you go?

I mean, if you're part of Gator Nation and you're concerned that your college is spending oodles of money on people that work from home in Washington, DC, who do you complain to and who do you say, "Hey, fix that."

- That's the function of the trustees.

That's the function of the board.

They're the oversight.

They're the board of directors, if you will, of the university.

And if they weren't looking at this and raising questions, shame on them.

You know, this was- - And who are the trustees appointed by?

- The governor.

- Most out of them, since about the late 1990s.

- So, you know, if Sasse needs another job after this, perhaps he can assume the chair of cronyism in the public corruption department as a, this is cronyism at its worst.

And we, to just waste this public money.

And as an employee of the state university system, I simply wanna know how do you, how do I get one of those jobs?

- Yeah.

How do you work from home for $400,000 a year?

- And CFO Jimmy Patronis has said that he's gonna investigate and today, I guess the governor is saying, oh, he wants somebody to look too, but it's the hen, the wolf, you know, guarding the hen house.

- They're outraged to find the gambling's going on in this establishment.

(panelists laugh) - So an investigative website called "The Lever" looked at the DeSantis administration and it looked at the way that contracts were given to investigate, to invest state employee pension money.

It was given to political insiders.

And that the pension, the state pension plan could have done much better had it not been given to insiders just to invest in index funds.

Another time "The Tampa Bay Times" reported that DeSantis used a politic politically connected vendor to help fly migrants from Texas to Massachusetts two years ago.

So is this something that, you know, is going on kind of under the radar that if you're politically connected, this administration will help you out?

- It's not really under the radar.

It's been out there.

It's exposed.

Everybody knows it.

- You know, the other outrage is that he spent $7 million on contracts to consultants.

And in one case- - For a company he had worked at.

- For a company, McKinsey.

Over $5 million to McKinsey.

And we'll never know what that contract was for, because the legislature has chipped, chipped, chipped away at Florida's once vanguard Sunshine Law.

And so now contracts to consultants are protected by trade secrets.

So we'll never know.

Well, trade secrets is an exemption to the public records law and it's used wildly.

- And Sasse's resignation is suspect.

He said he resigned because his wife was recently diagnosed with epilepsy.

And I'm sorry about that.

I mean, that's not, I'm not making light of that at all, but the University of Florida, I would imagine has some really good experts on treating epilepsy where he could have continued to do his job if he wasn't up to his neck in money.

And his wife- - Yeah the resignation- is so sudden.

- Would get the care.

- Yeah.

- One strongly suspects though, one does not know that the resignation may have occurred right about the time that the public records requests were coming from "The Independent Alligator" about this story.

That those public records requests were being made to the president's office for the documents that back up.

- We didn't try to beat the sheriff to the county line on that one.

(panelists laugh) - Okay, we're gonna continue to follow this story.

Well, two years ago, the group Moms for Liberty was celebrating successes in winning school board races around the state.

The group champions a version of parental rights that allows anyone to challenge and push for the removal of books from school libraries.

They also accuse some teachers and librarians of what they call "grooming school children."

The founders of the group, two Floridians, Tiffany Justice of Indian River County, and Tina Descovich of Brevard County, ran into trouble when they were unable to tell "60 Minutes" Scott Pelley earlier this year, what they meant by grooming.

- What are you trying to say?

- Well, I'm going to say that if we'd have to see the exact tweet, Tiffany manages our Twitter account.

- So we read more exact tweets from their account.

This targets a librarian.

"You want to groom our children and we're supposed to give you love?"

Again, Justice and Descovich went to their talking points.

I'm just asking, what do you mean by that?

What does, what do you mean by grooming?

- Parents want to partner with their children's schools, but we do not co-parent with the government.

- Grooming does not seem like a word that you want to take on.

- You know, we did some polling, and we asked, we really wanted to know where are the American people on this issue of parental rights and what's happening in our schools?

- Dodging questions like those was not an option back in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Critics of the book Ban said they knew what groomer meant and they saw it as a threat to people of color and the LGBTQ community, - A sex scandal involving a Moms for Liberty school board member in Sarasota County, further harmed the group's reputation.

This year around the state, Moms for Liberty candidates are taking a lower profile, but in Pinellas there are three school board candidates who have been endorsed by the group, Danielle Marolf, Stacey Geier, and Erika Picard.

Governor DeSantis has embraced Moms for Liberty as the key political force in this election cycle.

He's endorsed 23 school board candidates across the state who share his version of parental rights and his anti-woke agenda.

Rosemary, this group did champion parental rights.

It has a view on parental rights, but I'm wondering, were they the ones who enabled parents to have rights to challenge things in schools or had parental rights already existed before they came along?

- Without question, parents have had a voice at school board meetings for a long time.

I, you know, what I wanna say is of the 23 school board candidates around the state that the governor has endorsed, 14 are incumbent school board members.

Two are in Hillsborough County and two are in Pinellas County.

And in Pinellas, which is where I live, there are already two Moms for Liberty school board members, aligned school board members.

On the August 20th primary, there are three races.

Each has a Moms for Liberty candidate.

And if they win, the board would be five Moms for Liberty against two, five to two.

Now, as far as I can tell, the Moms for Liberty agenda is about banning books, prohibiting masks, limiting instruction on race, gender, and trying at least in one case to undo the referendum that boosts the salaries of teachers and students.

Backing these candidates is this religious group that wants the school board to be all Christian.

Also backing this, these candidates is this PAC led by Republican Florida House speaker Paul Renner, who last week sent flyers to Pinellas voters that identified in one case the candidate as a Republican School Board candidate.

And now, that's totally illegal.

These are nonpartisan races.

You're not allowed to identify as Republican and you would think that he would know the law.

Now the problem is that the candidates that they're in, they're targeting.

Laura Hine is the School Board Chair.

She's a Naval Academy Graduate, deployed in the Middle East, ran the James Wild West Museum, founded a parental group that helped over write a troubled school.

She's fabulous.

The other incumbent they're targeting, Eileen Long, is a special ed teacher who has stood strong for students and teachers and parents and helped make the district an A-rated district.

There's only one reason that the governor has targeted these incumbent candidates and it's because he wants to be aligned with the political muscle of Moms for Liberty.

It's like candidates be damned, I wanna be strictly aligned with this group and it's political muscle to ensure my future political success.

- Daniel, I can see the value.

I mean, parents always had this ability, but I can see a group coming forward to say, "Hey, you know, you have the right to challenge a book."

But the question is, should parents be able to challenge a book and make it unavailable to all students or?

- Absolutely not.

If my child, if I feel strongly about it and I don't want my child to read a certain book, I have the right, I think to say to the school, "I don't want my child to read that book."

And it may be for irrational reasons, but as a parent I have that right.

But you don't have the right to say, "All you other kids don't have the right to read this book."

It might actually be a pretty good book, you know?

And you might want to actually read it and it might help you.

This whole issue dovetails into our previous issue in that we have people running for school boards, we have governors promoting people who have no interest in education, no real interest in it.

All they wanna do is demagogue these issues.

And it's a raw power grab.

And they, I don't think Moms for Liberty gives a rat's patootie about the overall welfare and educational quality of our public schools.

And we've seen government, we've seen Tallahassee, chipping away at our public schools for decades now with school vouchers or charter schools or what have you.

And this is yet another assault on a cherished cornerstone of our society, which is a strong public education system.

- And, Joe that's so true.

We all want a strong public education system.

Everybody says that.

What's the best way to achieve it?

I mean, is the best way to achieve it through what Moms for Liberty is doing, or?

- No, best way to achieve it would be put Moms for Liberty outta business.

But that is the most ironically named group that I can think of because they are not for, they're for their liberty.

Your liberty doesn't count.

Are they for Muslims' liberty?

No.

Are they for people of color liberty?

No.

White Evangelical.

And that's all that need apply.

And by their standards, they are gonna go, they're gonna look at one little snippet in a 200-page book and go, "That's trash.

Throw it out."

- And this is also intertwined somewhat with the growing Christian Nationalist movement that's dominating Republican politics.

- And let me just dovetail on that and I know we got a rush, but as a Christian, and I am one, Moms for Liberty greatly offends me with what they're trying to do.

They're wrong and they should be stopped.

- All right, well, the Bay Area's largest newspaper, "The Tampa Bay Times" announced last week that it needed to reduce payroll by 20%, part of a series of cost cutting measures.

"The Time" says it will offer buyouts to its roughly 270 full-time employees, which includes about a hundred journalists in the newsroom.

In a letter to "Times" staff, Chairman and CEO Conan Gallaty said, "Employees have until August 16th to decide if they want to seek a buyout package, which at maximum is 12 weeks of pay."

Gallaty said layoffs will follow later this month if the savings from the volunteer buyouts fall short of the target.

So Daniel, 60 staff jobs are at stake here.

What's at stake for the public interest?

- It's heartbreaking.

I mean, you have four ink-stained wretches sitting at this table who have all been through this, especially at "The Tampa Tribune" and maybe elsewhere with you.

And so when this happens, it is like almost a family member dying because we all love the newspaper business.

And we also understand that when newspapers can't perform their watchdog function, society suffers.

The "Alligator" story is a good example of that.

And we've had many other examples, where as newspapers have had to reduce their staff, there's less and less coverage of county commissions and city halls and other government agencies.

And you know, when the, if there's not a watchdog, it's real easy for people to get naughty.

- And what William, there have been studies that show that corruption rises where there is a news vacuum, especially a newspaper news vacuum.

- Oh, absolutely.

No question about it.

The, I mean, who is going to do stories like "The Times" project on Robert Du Bois, the guy that was wrongly convicted of murder on bite mark evidence, spent 34 years in prison.

Who's gonna do stories like "The Times'" coverage, credit to Tracy McManus, of Scientology and it's work in Clearwater?

Who's going to do these things?

"The Times" is still with these staff losses doing major stories.

But from personal information as somebody who has until this happened, has been a contractor, a contributor to "The Times," I know that they're losing two of their most important reporters in terms of connections in Hillsborough County leaving very, very few, very, very little reporting muscle for them in Hillsborough County.

They're losing the only reporter they have in Pasco County.

They're losing, well, just a number of other people.

Now that, as I said earlier in the show, there are some alternative sources taking over, filling in a lot of these gaps.

The expose on Bridget Ziegler, who was mentioned in the piece on Moms for Liberty, was done by a new nonprofit newsroom, "The Florida Trident," which is published by the Florida Center for Accountability.

ProPublic is doing many major scoops.

The Center for Public Integrity recently did a major story on wild spending by a Sarasota County Commissioner.

But most of these organizations don't normally focus on the city council, the county commission, things like that.

So where is this coming from?

I don't know.

- Rosemary, I can remember moving here in 1978, we had "The Clearwater Sun," "The St. Pete Evening Independent," "The Tampa Times."

We had a bunch of newspapers that no longer exist, daily newspapers.

But what do we do about this?

How do we fix this problem?

Whereas as these guys are saying, city council isn't getting covered, county commissions aren't getting covered the way they should be.

How do we fix it?

- Yeah, no, my hairdresser said her second grader came home from school one day and had an assignment to do something out of the newspaper.

And he said, "Mommy, what's a newspaper?"

Since like 2000, I think 2,500 newspapers have closed and the trend line is clear.

And what can be done about it?

I mean, the reason that, and I feel bad for the people who are getting laid off and the people who are having to take the buyout trying to protect their future.

And I also feel bad for the people who are having to make these decisions.

It is no fun to sit in the chair and have to tell somebody they are laid off.

Nobody got into the business for that.

The only solutions that the industry has identified is they're asking Congress to let them, to undo antitrust so that they can work collectively to demand that Facebook and Google, which is scooping up all the advertising dollars that used to fund these salaries, to share some of that money with them, and- - 'Cause a lot of these stories that newspapers generate end up on Facebook and Google.

- And that's where people get their news is from social media.

- All right, well we're almost out of time, but before we go, what other big news stories should we be paying attention to?

And Rosemary, let me go back to you for the other big story of the week.

- Well, you know, I had a couple, but I guess I'm just gonna land on sort of after these sad news stories.

I gotta say I'm still in the afterglow of the Olympics and you know, for anybody who thinks that America's not great, you know, okay, we tied the Chinese for the most gold medals, but you know, we had the most medals in the whole competition and all you had to do is turn the TV on and see our great.

Yeah, USA.

- Yeah, it was great.

- I'm all in.

- All right, William, you're on the big story of the week.

Well, we talked about our conservative groups trying to take over the school boards in both Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, by the way.

But another thing that's going on that's hard to believe is the same thing is happening with, of all places, the Sarasota Hospital Board, which runs a public health system that covers all of Sarasota County.

And these are medical freedom folks who are vaccine skeptics and CDC deniers who want to take over the hospital board.

- Fascinating.

- Daniel, you got a big story.

- There have been some reports this week that Kamala Harris' poll numbers are inching up in Florida.

She may not win the state, but if she makes it competitive, she's gonna force Trump to spend more time and money here than he would otherwise, so it's worth watching.

- All right, and Joe, your other big story.

- Well, as a proud resident of Brandon, Florida and have been out there forever.

When I went out there, there was two lane roads and a couple of fast food joints and now it's a traffic nightmare.

But, Tampa General Hospital has a strong presence out there and they are building an apartment complex for their employees and I think that's great.

- An affordable complex?

- Yes.

- All right, and I've got a story of the week.

It is the destruction of hundreds of library books by the new management at New College in Sarasota.

As the "Sarasota Herald Tribune" reports and other outlets have been been reporting, the New College library books, many on LGBTQ+ topics and religious studies were trucked to a landfill this week and presumably destroyed.

A New College spokesperson says it's part of the routine weeding process.

The ACLU of Florida condemned the destruction of the books saying it's an intentional act of censorship that strikes at the heart of our democratic values.

Thanks to our guests this week, Rosemary Goudreau O'Hara, William March, Joe Henderson and Daniel Ruth.

If you have comments about this program, please send them to FTW@WEDU.org.

Our show is now available as a podcast and from all of us here at WEDU, have a great weekend.

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