IT USUALLY ISN’T great news for a politician when a newspaper reports that you threatened the Special Olympics, but it was just another day for Florida state Rep. Randy Fine, a bombastic Republican millionaire.
Last April, Florida Today obtained text messages showing Fine had warned a West Melbourne City Council member that state funding for a Special Olympics event in the town was now at risk because the city had invited one of Fine’s political opponents—a Brevard County school board member named Jennifer Jenkins, whom Fine had previously called a “whore”—to a fundraiser. “Jenkins just put your project and special Olympics funding on the veto list,” Fine texted.
In another state, those texts might have stayed secret, but in Florida they were public property—and were revealed by a public records request. The City Council member told Florida Today that Fine objected to their release and wanted a city attorney handling the records request to be fired. Fine denied that the message was a threat or that he wanted anyone fired, although it’s hard to read his message any other way.
Florida has a particularly strong public records law that guarantees access to records from all three branches of state government, including the Legislature, giving news readers frequent glimpses into the machinations of its less gifted public servants.
Florida’s Sunshine Law was born out of a long fight to rein in the buffoonish corruption that has plagued the state since its birth, and the law became an improbable model for other states. Florida’s robust transparency laws may have also contributed to its status as a world-class generator of weird and scandalous headlines, cementing the bizarre comic persona of Florida Man in the process.
Over the years, reporters have used records requests to reveal the unjust seizure of millions of dollars from minority motorists, preferential treatment of college football players by police, fraud in Florida’s state lottery, and several instances of police chiefs and federal prosecutors caught on body cameras trying to use their authority to wiggle out of traffic stops.
But numerous carve-outs by the state Legislature and aggressive work by Gov. Ron DeSantis to create new exemptions to the Sunshine Law have weakened it. Like the critically endangered Florida panther, the Sunshine Law is being steadily squeezed out of existence by the same politicians who celebrate it.
