Investigative reporter covering corporate influence in Florida. Publisher of Seeking Rents, a newsletter and podcast about state politics. https://jasongarcia.substack.com
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More evidence education policy is now being driven by whims of billionaires. Here's Florida, which is about to get a whole lot more Success Academy charter schools because one of its wealthiest residents likes them. @jasongarcia.bsky.social has the receipts jasongarcia.substack.com/p/lobbyists-...
The new law even allows Success Academy to open up new charters inside existing traditional public schools – without paying any rent to the school district. Full story: jasongarcia.substack.com/p/lobbyists-...
And that expansion just got a lot easier under the new law Success Academy helped write. The network will have far more freedom over where to open subsidized "Schools of Hope" – including even in affluent areas and places that already have highly-rated public schools...
Success Academy, meanwhile, has been developing Florida expansion plans for at least a year. The charter network currently operates only in New York, but has applied for and received approval from state education officials to participate in Florida’s Schools of Hope program...
The billionaire was also behind another new law passed this year by Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature that enables businesses to bind workers to longer and stronger non-compete contracts... jasongarcia.substack.com/p/lobbyist-f...
Griffin gave $12 million to a political committee personally important to Ron DeSantis that was used to oppose a ballot measure that would have legalized marijuana. He also gave $4 million each to committees led by Perez and Albritton, the House speaker and Senate president...
Records show Griffin made more than $28 million in state and local campaign contributions during Florida’s 2024 elections — an enormous sum for a single person at the state level...
Ken Griffin, who has a ~$50 billion net worth and moved from Chicago to Miami in 2022, Florida has rapidly become one of the most influential figures in Florida...
In a funding document sent to lawmakers and staffers, Success Academy proposed roughly $50 million over the next few years to cover start-up costs for nine new schools in Florida — plus a perpetual bonus of as much as $5,000 a year for every student Success Academy serves...
The lobbying blitz may not be over. The records also show that Success Academy wants an enormous infusion of taxpayer money — beyond the existing subsidies Florida already offers through the Schools of Hope program...
Success Academy wrote an initial draft of the legislation. Griffin’s team gathered intel...
They also arranged meetings to discuss their proposal with Senate President Ben Albritton (R-Wauchula) and some of his senior aides..
The records show, for instance, that they worked on the bill with Rep. Jennifer Canady (R-Lakeland), a future speaker of the state House who currently leads the chamber’s top education committee...
Lobbyists for Griffin and Success Academy engaged in an extensive behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign for the privatization legislation, according to emails obtained through a series of public records requests...
They got it through, at least in part, at the behest of Ken Griffin, the billionaire investor and Republican megadonor in Miami, and Success Academy, a polarizing charter school system in New York City...
“I’m glad we were able to work with the Legislature to get that through in this extended session,” DeSantis said two weeks later, when he signed the legislation into law...
Legislative leaders ultimately tacked the measure onto a last-minute budget bill that they passed just before finally gaveling their 2025 session to a close, which had to be extended by more than a month amid all the infighting...
The privatization legislation was a top priority for Republican leaders in Tallahassee — including Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Speaker Danny Perez, who made sure to get it done even as they clashed over a host of other issues during a dysfunctional legislative session...
It has already resulted in a more than five-fold increase in potential locations for the heavily subsidized charter schools, which are public schools managed by private entities...
The two-month old state law has set the stage for a potentially massive expansion of Florida’s “Schools of Hope” program, in which charter school operators can get lucrative cash grants and low-interest loans if they open up new schools in certain areas around the state...
New: A billionaire hedge-fund manager and a New York City charter network lobbied to expand a school-privatization program in Florida, according to records obtained by Seeking Rents. 🧵..
Lobbyists for a billionaire and a charter network pushed #Florida lawmakers to expand a school privatization program jasongarcia.substack.com/p/lobbyists-... via @jasongarcia.bsky.social
Deleted a sloppy hot take that served as a good reminder that I’m not the legal expert I like to think I am just because I took a constitutional law class 25 years ago
No, I think the 1DCA is right that Norman has been abrogated by Bruen.
This is a bad take. The FL Sp Ct 2017 Norman decision applied an analysis that the US Sp Ct later expressly rejected in Bruen. Bruen's test stinks, but a FL lower court is actually obligated to apply Bruen and not follow Norman, given that it is a federal const right at issue.
More on the changes – which were slipped into a budget-related bill at the last minute of this year's session – here: jasongarcia.substack.com/p/florida-la...
The five-fold increase – which now has some A- and B-rated public schools labeled "low performing" – is the result of changes enacted this year by the Florida Legislature and Ron DeSantis and pushed by lobbyists for Miami billionaire Ken Griffin & New York-based Success Academy.
The state of Florida just updated its list of “persistently low-performing” schools – a key designation that opens to the door for privately managed “Schools of Hope” charters to move into an area and tap into giant public subsidies. The number of PLPs jumped from 51 to 267.
He also deserves credit for vetoing SB 2508 in 2022. It would have given the Legislature (and thus Big Sugar) more control over rules governing Lake O water levels. The again, he signed SB 88 in 2021, which shielded the sugar industry from public health claims arising from pre-harvest cane burning
#Florida Gov. Ron DeSastrous' Everglades concentration camp pollutes his own River of Grass legacy with 20A of new pavement, lighting so bright it can be seen 20 miles away & daily shipments of jet fuel & human waste. jasongarcia.substack.com/p/as-the-end... via @jasongarcia.bsky.social
He spent a lot of tax money on Everglades restoration. Now it's like a fancy Lamborghini he paid for, but then put sand in the gas tank.
Ron DeSantis and Joe Ladapo doing some destination marketing for Florida: "Florida is ending vaccine mandates. What do Canadian travellers need to know?" www.cbc.ca/news/health/...
"The Tampa Bay Times identified 49 people with connections to the utility who testified in support of the rate hikes." Great digging by Emily Mahoney as Florida's biggest power company seeks a $10 billion rate increase from Ron DeSantis-appointed regulators: www.tampabay.com/news/busines...
Ron DeSantis says he spent at least $218 million building an immigrant detention camp in the Everglades – vs. $6 million to retrofit an empty prison in North Florida – because the Everglades site is next to an adequate runway. The North Florida site is 15 minutes from an adequate runway.
yes
"Why didn’t the state start with this site in the first place?" @davearonberg.bsky.social has answered this question... "This facility was always meant to be political clickbait."
"That’s nearly a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money, at least, that may as well have been burned to ashes. In fact, Ron DeSantis and his enablers actually would have done a lot less harm—to people, to the environment, to the rule of law—if they had simply set the cash on fire." #Florida
The state of Florida wasted more than $200 million on 'Alligator Alcatraz' stunt: jasongarcia.substack.com/p/the-state-...
Jason Garcia @jasongarcia.bsky.social The state of #Florida wasted more than $200 million on 'Alligator Alcatraz' stunt [and who got the money] jasongarcia.substack.com/p/the-state-...
I'd never admit this publicly but editors are important sigh
www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...
This is shameful. It wasn’t hurting anyone.
This is insane.
what’s the matter don’t you love freedom
I don't know how anybody can look at this and see it as anything other than astonishingly pathetic lol
Florida is literally what happens when the HOA takes over state government.
Just picturing the governor stamping his boot heels mad about chalk
Love that someone immediately put a Pride sticker on the signs
Government efficiency is when you create permanent signs to stick up to warn people off from making temporary art.
Your tax dollars at work, Florida.
I didn’t know you could have snowflakes in Florida
if there's one thing that people will respect, it's the exercise of entirely arbitrary state authority to stop them from doing something entirely inoffensive
Worth noting that FHP’s typical mandate is responding to highway crashes. Even relative to local police this is a big departure and presumably at expense to public safety.
When a regime decides that a symbol of successful protest cannot be allowed to win at any cost.
The DeSantis administration currently has at least seven Florida Highway Patrol troopers just on anti-chalk duty: Two watching from a Dunkin Donuts next door and five more parked in the lot right behind them.
“LAW AND ORDER” he screamed as a he nailed up yet another makeshift edict declaring another form of protest illegal without so much as a statutory citation
The Free State of Florida is now trying to ban *sidewalk chalking*
New: Newsmax — the right-wing cable news network that grew in popularity by promoting false election-fraud claims after the 2020 election — secretly lobbied Florida lawmakers to choke off funding for firms that rate news outlets based on accuracy and ethics. jasongarcia.substack.com/p/a-right-wi...
More in this week's Florida in Five: jasongarcia.substack.com/p/empire-ris...
Unless, that is, people in places like Lakewood Ranch and Sarasota realize they are in the same boat as folks in spots like Orlando and Gainesville — and we all start paddling together against the current.
What began as anti-democratic creep has become an authoritarian tide that is now rapidly rising both around Florida and across the country. And it will eventually come for everyone.
Preventing developers from paving over wetlands, keeping guns out of the hands of teenagers, and stopping embarrassing extremists from ruining the reputation of the state’s most prestigious university are all bipartisan issues.
The Pulse crosswalk was greenlit eight years ago by a Republican governor, and the post-Parkland gun-safety law was passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature.
Sarasota and Manatee counties are Republican-heavy regions.
And if it’s not abundantly clear already, what’s happening in Florida isn’t just a case of Republicans in Tallahassee using state power to target Democratic-run cities or issues that only liberal voters care about.
Apologies for the lack of rhetorical artistry here but: This shit is getting really bad, really fast.
5. University of Florida leaders revealed the search for a new president “has become more challenging” since UF’s first choice — a molecular biologist who had led a higher-ranked university — was rejected by political appointees who decided he wasn’t MAGA enough www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2...
4. The governor’s hand-picked attorney general, a position that typically defends state laws in court, urged a court to strike down a gun-safety law passed after the 2018 mass shooting that killed 14 students and 3 staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School www.wusf.org/courts-law/2...
3. The DeSantis administration dispatched a crew in the middle of night to erase a rainbow-colored crosswalk next to the Pulse nightclub in Orlando — a crosswalk painted as part of a memorial honoring 49 mostly-LGBTQ+ people murdered in a 2016 mass shooting www.orlandosentinel.com/2025/08/22/i...
2. Locally elected commissioners in Manatee County abandoned a campaign promise to restore protections for environmentally sensitive wetlands amid fears that DeSantis would remove them from office if they followed through with the vote thebradentontimes.com/stories/with...
1. Ron DeSantis put a political ally back on the school board in Sarasota County — one year after Sarasota voters kicked her off their school board floridapolitics.com/archives/752...
Here are five things that happened in Florida last week:
The weekly postcard from Florida by @jasongarcia.bsky.social manages to be chilling as hell without even mentioning Alligator Alcatraz. He's always careful and he doesn't exaggerate. So yeah, we are doomed.
Ron DeSantis just appointed someone to the school board in Sarasota County one year after voters in Sarasota County threw her off their School Board.
‘I don’t know the particulars of that particular project,’ the Florida state senator claimed… ...after filing the bill that records show was written by the company’s lobbyists.
A small Florida city stopped a corporate giant from building an ethanol plant next to its historic downtown. So the corporation and its lobbyists turned Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature for help. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPKa...
Background via the Orlando Sentinel: www.orlandosentinel.com/2025/04/19/o...
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General James Uthmeier just announced that the state is joining a whistleblower case against a pair of textbook publishers accused of overcharging school districts. And hey would you look at who else is a plaintiff's lawyer on the case:
Earlier this year, Republicans in the Florida Legislature tried to pass a bill erasing protections for rural land around Orlando. The legislation came from a lobbyist for the largest private landowner in Florida: The Mormon Church. And the church had help. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXo0...
The net tightens around key figures in the Hope #Florida scandal. This contains the clearest explanation of the timeline I've seen anywhere. jasongarcia.substack.com/p/the-net-ti... via @jasongarcia.bsky.social
The issue I have is there was no substantive debate about this in Tallahassee. The lawmakers sponsoring this legislation hid their intentions. There should be been good-faith discussion about how best to solve the problem rather than just copy-pasting language written by a donor's lobbyists. 2/2
I think it *probably* is. But there are tradeoffs. Ie: Drones have been used to expose dog-fighting rings. Maybe (probably?) the privacy concerns outweigh ancillary issues like that. But it also may be that there are narrower ways to protect people's privacy without also protecting bad actors. 1/2
A year ago, animal-rights groups used drones to expose a Republican megadonor who hosted a massive pigeon shoot at secluded shooting ranch in Florida. That donor just got Florida Republicans to criminalize the use of recording drones over private property: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edqd...
The Free State of Floridaᵀᴹ
Two big developer front groups – the Florida Home Builders Association & Associated Industries of Florida – lobbied lawmakers on this. FHBA boasted that SB 180 "blocks local governments...from halting redevelopment." AIF said the goal was to prevent "more restrictive policies."
Recorded a quick podcast about this last week. Senate Bill 180 is blowing up into a major issue across Florida right now. jasongarcia.substack.com/p/ron-desant...
SB 180 was a 48-page bill dealing with all aspects of hurricane response and recovery. The provision developers are now exploiting shows up on page 46. Read broadly, it arguably erases *all* new land-use protections that cities and counties have adopted in the last year.
This is at least the 2nd developer-led lawsuit trying to exploit SB 180 – a bill Republican lawmakers claimed was simply meant to help Florida homeowners rebuild after a hurricane. A developer front group in Manatee County is trying to use the law to undo an impact fee increase.
Real-estate developers in Orlando have filed a lawsuit to eliminate protections for rural lands around the city. The developers are citing a new hurricane-recovery law Ron DeSantis just signed (Senate Bill 180) that included a sweeping rollback of local land-development rules.
To give you an example of what the DeSantis administration is doing, here's the original purchase order they posted with Critical Response Strategies, which got a nearly $80 million contract to manage Florida's immigrant jail in the Everglades:
Here are both sections of that statute in context with each other:
If state officials want to redact information from these records, they must then post “a property redacted copy of the contract or procurement document." Not a "summary sheet"...
The administration is STILL breaking the law. That’s because you can’t just remove the original records completely and replace them with “summary sheets.” The same statute is explicit about this...
But that's not all. Let's say you buy Kevin Guthrie’s claim the rates the DeSantis administration is paying vendors at Alligator Alcatraz are somehow proprietary information and not covered by the requirement to disclose unit prices...
This is spelled out clearly in in 215.985... leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/ind...
First, Florida is required by law to post certain information to this transparency database. That mandatory information includes both “electronic copies of the contract and procurement documents" *and* the “applicable contract unit prices and deliverables"...
There are two clear problems here...
So Guthrie said his agency replaced the original purchasing records with what he called “summary sheets"...
