Tom Lee loves reporters and they love him back. After committee meetings during the last session of the Florida Legislature, I think he would have answered reporters' questions until the sergeant-at-arms flicked the lights if his staff had let him.
So what if he panders to the press a little.
Last year the Republican senator from Brandon, Senate president from 2004 to 2006, had his seat hijacked in the Democrats' anti-gerrymandering crusade and saw his dreams of repeating as Senate president head south. Lee needs to stay relevant, and who better to help him do that than the media?
But, affable as he is, surely Lee's chat-ability shouldn't mean he's allowed to slip past media security guards while other legislators get frisked.
It happens all the time. Lee is treated as the Senate's ethics guru, the institutional wise man who's seen it all after 20 years -- the good-old pre-term-limits days, the bad-old revolving-door days. His cries for ethics reform are always heard. Meanwhile, his participation in special-interest wheelings and dealings -- the very practices he claims to abhor -- attract zero attention.
I have no idea why.
But there it was again Monday in a story in the Tampa Tribune and Naples Daily News. The headline said it all: "State Sen. Lee sees dark side of Legislature's changes."
In the story Lee talks about "troubling experiences" during his Senate tenure, bemoaning "the proliferation of political committees, the cost of campaigns ... too many issues are being proffered by special interest groups that are not good public policy and they are being slid in any way.”
I can't argue with that, it's exactly what's happening.
Yet, the story leaves out the very person who's telling it. It's as if while reading, I'm actually watching a documentary and listening to an outside narrator.
Lee is anything but an outsider. The story cites the $829,000 flowing into Gov. Rick Scott's Let's Get to Work committee -- but not one word about Lee's heavy-duty political committee, The Conservative.
I look back at the headline again and think, Tom sees the dark side ... but after pulling $2 million into his own political slush fund (yes, $2 million), how is his eyesight any clearer than the next guy's?
Lee has been chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee for the past two years. You probably know what a cash cow of a leadership position Appropriations is. A fountain of flowing green. Shouldn't the media want to know how Lee's ethics square with holding literally more money in his account than any other member of the Legislature? His $2 million make him the winner in the special-interest sweepstakes.
Looking at The Conservative donor list and dollar figures among the more than 380 entries during the time Lee served as Appropriations chair -- all with business in the 2015 or 2016 Legislature or both -- you have to wonder. Here is just a handful:
AIFPAC .............................................................$42,000
Alico Incorporated .......................................... 20,000
American Investment Holdings .................... 25,000
AVMED ............................................................. 20,000
Committee of Safety Net Hospitals ............. 30,000
Disney Worldwide Services .......................... 40,000
Florida Medical Association ......................... 70,170
Fountainbleu Resort ..................................... 40,000
The Geo Group ............................................. 85,000
Harris Corporation ........................................ 25,000
MCNA Health Care Holdings ........................ 35,000
MEDNAX Inc. .................................................. 40,000
Motorola Solutions ....................................... 19,500
Protect Our Liberty ....................................... 50,000
Taxpayers Against Insurance Bad Faith ..... 20,000
Lee's political committee first caught my attention while I was looking at the contributions gaming interests made to lawmakers in the past year. Lee wasn't the biggest gambling-money winner by any means, but he did nicely enough, raking in more than $50,000, not counting a $10,000 check from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.
Interestingly, Lee took money from both companies in the Great $7 Million Police Radio War of the 2016 session. He took $25,000 from Harris, the company that wanted to supply the radios and try to negate the need for a system-wide competitive bid; and $19,500 from Motorola, the company that wanted the state to wait for the upcoming, scheduled competitive bid. Harris ended up with the $7 million, even though no agency had requested the phones and the project died before it came to the floor.
How could this happen? During the $123.1 million rollout of pet turkeys that followed passage of the budget, the House and Senate cut a deal. Lee was directly involved. He told Brandon Larrabee of the News Service of Florida, "Our only concern was that it not go into a spreadsheet that included any indication that the Senate bought into (it) at the subcommittee level ..." Be honest here. However you look at it, the Senate did buy into it, or else Harris wouldn't have taxpayers' $7 million today.
Lee told the Tribune and Naples Daily News he isn't sure he has the stomach to run for the Senate again. Certainly, if he did, he would want to move north into uncontested District 18 rather than run against Bill Galvano, tapped for Senate president in 2018. Not easy for a family man long established in Brandon to pull up stakes. But I'm going to take a wild guess here and say he'll move this summer and run for the Senate one more time. Senators looking at a $2 million campaign stash sitting in the bank rarely just call it quits.
I'll be looking to see if incoming Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart, gives Lee the Insurance Committee chairmanship -- or something similar, something that would oversee the chief financial officer. Lee -- who unfortunately for him wasn't an early supporter of Negron for president -- may fancy running for the Cabinet post Jeff Atwater will vacate.
None of this is personal, as far as I'm concerned. The bottom line here is, Tom Lee is a likable senior senator who has pretty much seen it all. Certainly his opinion is worth listenng to. But the man is still mortal, still like us imperfect, still a player in the political arena, a lawmaker who may detest the Capitol money climate yet plays it for all it's worth. All I ask is that he be measured with the same stick as the rest of the political class.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
