Republican lawmakers launch petty, partisan raid on Nikki Fried’s ag duties | Editorial

Give Holly Raschein R-Key Largo credit for candor: “Quite frankly,” said the sponsor of HB 5401, “the election of Gov. Ron DeSantis happened,” and that’s all the reason Republicans need to seize control of Florida’s Office of Energy (OE) from Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried.

Fried is the only statewide elected Democrat currently holding office. As a member of the state Cabinet, she has been a thorn in the side of the governor and his fellow Republican Cabinet members, who reliably vote the way he wants them to.

Raschien’s bill is moving rapidly through the House and aims to bring the OE to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which is controlled by DeSantis. Fried is pushing back hard, denouncing the move as a partisan power grab and political payback.

The feud has provided a rare moment in the spotlight for OE, an office that was birthed in a flurry of showy but shallow support for the environment by then-Gov. Charlie Crist, and quickly reduced to stepchild forced to live in the basement. Over the years, OE was given temporary shelter in the now defunct Department of Community Affairs, the Executive Office of the Governor and even the DEP, before finding what seemed to be a forever family in 2011, when the agency Fried now heads was run by Republican Adam Putnam.

There, OE settled into a quiet life of scandal-free contracts administration. By 2019, OE had 14 full-time equivalent positions, all funded by federal grants and helping to produce energy-efficiency upgrades for local parks, community centers and libraries, along with renewable energy research and development.

It ain’t broke, but Raschein nonetheless proposes to fix it by moving those 14 people and all their paperwork back to DEP . It doesn’t benefit the public, but it does serve the real agenda of putting an uppity Democrat in her place.

To be sure, Fried qualifies as an uppity Democrat. Soon after her election, she spent $5,000 in taxpayer dollars to imprint her picture on inspection stickers to be placed on Florida’s 120,000 gasoline pumps.

As shameless self-promotion by preening politicians goes, this is small potatoes. But it sent House Speaker Jose Oliva, R-Miami Lakes, into orbit. Oliva deployed a taxpayer-funded spokesman who makes considerably more than $5,000 to denounce Fried’s stickers as “unseemly, self-promoting and contrary to taxpayer interests.”

Like a toddler having an annoying but meaningless temper tantrum, Oliva’s chamber is threatening to withhold the entire $19.7 million budget for Fried’s Division of Consumer Services. The Division’s 284 employees process hundreds of thousands of consumer questions and complaints; assure the safety and accuracy of everything from weights and measures in grocery stores to rides at amusement parks and fairs. Oliva’s theory seems to be that if he holds the noses of state employees and the Floridians they serve, Fried will turn blue and cry.

Or at least be humiliated in the public square.

The Senate, which prides itself on being the grown-ups in the Legislature, does not appear to share Oliva’s obsession with Fried’s penny-ante personal branding exercises, and doesn’t much care about moving OE’s furniture from one government building to another. With a $1.4 billion gap in spending plans passed last week by the House and the upper chamber, Senate Appropriations Chair Rob Bradley, R-Orange Park, told reporters that fiddling with Fried’s turf is “not a priority.”

Nevertheless, Oliva persists. “I think that it’s important. It’s a priority of the governor. It’s where that department was originally,” he told reporters Thursday. “Our plan is to continue to move forward in the hopes that we will be able to accomplish (moving OE) with the Senate.”

Senate President Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, has said his chamber will support the effort if there is a “valid reason” for the move.

There isn’t, and Oliva’s Fried fixation is beginning to look like a petty and pathetic search to find that non-existent “valid reason.”

This story was originally published February 16, 2020 at 6:00 AM.