SFWMD Secret-Hiring Scandal Should Press Rick Scott to Act

Maybe when Gov. Rick Scott sees Joel Engelhardt's compelling story in Sunday's Palm Beach Post, he'll stop sitting on his hands and make those five new appointments to the South Florida Water Management District board. God knows, the whole place needs a good scrubbing.

The story says that neither SFWMD Executive Director Carol Wehle nor her boyfriend Bob Howard disclosed that the district -- through its inspector general -- hired Howard last June to serve as one of Wehle & Co.'s watchdogs.

An engineer with no auditing experience, Howard was chosen over four other applicants to the position of engineering auditor.

He drew -- draws -- a $120,000-a-year paycheck, he and Wehle kept it quiet, and even after board chairman Eric Buermann found out about the hiring and failure to disclose, he kept it under wraps. Why? Because, he said, it was "a fait accompli."

Buermann, whose term has already expired but stays on because the governor hasn't named his replacement, said he was told Howard would never "be in West Palm Beach auditing and dealing with executive management.

In fact Inspector General John Williams, Howard's boss, told the Post Howard would be posted in Jacksonville "75 percent of the time."

He wasn't.

Said the Post, "District records ... show that Howard spent just nine nights in Jacksonville in December, January and February, 14 percent of his time."

Read the story. Reporter Engelhardt establishes the relationship between Wehle and Howard and explains the conflict of interest in considerable detail -- and it delivers a feel for the problems at a closed-shop bureaucracy with vast power over the pocketbooks and natural resources and overall quality of life of Florida's citizens and interests.

Hopefully, Rick Scott will sit up and look at the largest of Florida's five water management districts -- second largest landowner in the state -- and acknowledge with greater urgency that things have to change there. The governor has to ask himself, is Wehle-Howard the tip of an iceberg?

Time to make those five appointments.

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