Local officials must take financial disclosure more seriously | Editorial

Why so secret?

Required for the first time to disclose more personal financial information under a new Florida ethics law, scores of mayors and commissioners have quit rather than reveal the details of their finances.

It’s overreach, they say. Many are challenging the law in federal court. Delving into specifics of a person’s stock portfolios, personal debts, partnership income and the names of those who bought property is a bureaucratic form of TMI — too much information.

If too much information is the grievance, what are we to make of local elected officials, board appointees and key government workers who for years flouted state law by failing to provide a financial equivalent of name, rank and serial number?

The plain vanilla questions of Florida’s Form 1 apply to certain government employees and appointees. Until this year, it also applied to the same local elected officials now balking at new and stricter money revelations required by the more robust Form 6. The Legislature changed the law last year.

Flouting the law

With Form 1, there’s no need to divulge how many cars are in the family garage, or the unpaid MasterCard balance. Just a person’s source of income (but no amounts), property ownership, business interests and major debts.

There has been no mass exodus over filling out those forms. Instead, they are too often ignored.

Former Lantana Mayor Robert Hagerty was fined $1,500, the maximum allowed, in 2021. Ex-Riviera Beach Mayor Thomas Masters was fined $150 in 2018.

Former South Bay City Manager Corey Alston did not file Form 1s in 2009 or in 2012, the year he was arrested on multiple theft charges for persuading three commissioners to pay him $25,000. He struck a plea deal and served probation, but never paid the state his $2,200 in fines.

Fines for slow filers and non-filers of the bare-bones disclosure topped $220,000 in Palm Beach and Broward counties alone between 2020 and 2022. Older fines totaling at least $105,000 have been turned over for collection. (Good luck with that, Florida.)

Excuses for non-compliance

Few explanations would pass muster with a fourth-grade teacher: “I didn’t know it applied to me.” “It got lost in the mail.”

You can empathize with elected officials, some of whom serve without pay, who protest they are not crooks and thus scrutiny of their finances is overkill, and still appreciate the potential conflicts, financial temptations and slippery-slope decisions they face.

Few would lead to criminal acts. But too often, the road to bad laws and lousy policy runs through a politician’s pockets. Information in financial disclosures can help to flag that, or derail it.

The same goes for non-elected officials. Scroll through a sampling of scofflaws who racked up $25-a-day fines until they hit the $1,500 cap and a picture soon emerges of why Florida adopted broad disclosure laws.

Board appointees and key government workers abound, including those with a say in everything from whether you can fence in your backyard to whether 500 homes are going to sprout in the green space next door.

Is a zoning board member employed by the developer hoping to build those 500 homes? Does the company also hold his mortgage? That’s exactly the kind of information people need, and exactly the kind of information the skinny Form 1 may provide.

But board members voting on code enforcement, architectural review, zoning appeals and community redevelopment in multiple towns have all racked up fines for not revealing their basic monetary interests or blowing off deadlines.

Like a speeding ticket? No

It’s not as though the state Commission on Ethics, which levies the fines, is setting the best example. The Commission last month erased a $1,500 fine incurred by one of its own members, Freddie Figgers of Lauderhill, who failed to file his financial disclosure nearly two years ago.

The ethics panel’s attorney compared failure to file with a speeding ticket. No it isn’t. People pay their speeding tickets because they know their license will be suspended if they don’t.

Keeping information from the public and being willing to rack up fines to do so shouldn’t be waved off as a traffic infraction or legal department afterthought.

Financial disclosure, which voters enshrined in the state Constitution in 1976, is the very first service that Florida’s public servants owe the public; a concrete commitment to honest governing that starts with putting all their cards on the table.

Even the ones they would rather keep up their sleeves.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.