If you want to know how much your local government is spending on private lobbyists to lobby the Legislature, the Florida House has a web page devoted to disclosing it.
But though House Speaker Richard Corcoran promised the web page would provide “transformational” transparency, the House forgot one thing: to post all the data.
Records obtained by the Times/Herald show that despite an ethics rule that requires lobbyists for taxpayer-funded entities submit lobbying contracts to the Florida House, that rule has not been enforced. The House’s much vaunted web page was not updated for a year and some lobbyists neglected for months to comply with the required disclosures.
Today, the web page still includes outdated data on lobbying expenditures made by local governments and remains incomplete. At one point, the backlog left hundreds of documents off the books in the last two years, despite Corcoran’s claim. Read more…