Rick Scott's Parting Gift to Carlos Beruff is a Disgrace of Governance

In a break from tradition, outgoing governor Rick Scott issued no less than 84 last minute, state-level appointments just before leaving office on Monday. In perhaps the most absurd appointment in eight years filled with elevating unqualified political cronies to state boards and agencies, Scott named local developer Carlos Beruff as one of seven members on the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Beruff, CEO of Medallion Homes, has been a Scott loyalist from the start, routinely stuffing his campaign coffers and PACs with contributions through his complex web of business entities in much the same way that he's purchased influence at the local level. For his generosity, Beruff has been richly rewarded. For example, the former governor appointed Beruff to our regional water authority–the Southwest Florida Water Management District, or Swiftmud–where he was able to shape a pro-development ethos and even have wetlands on properties he would later develop delineated.

The idea that a developer who so regularly asks for permission to destroy wetlands would be among those in charge of enforcing policies and issuing permits on wetland mitigation and development worked out about as well as one might have imagined it would. Most notably, while serving as Swiftmud chair, Beruff helped his friend (and occasional business partner) Pat Neal get a permit to destroy mangroves for a waterfront development on Perico Island–despite an administrative law judge's recommendation against it. Beruff resigned immediately after and currently faces an ethics complaint about the matter.

Nevertheless, Scott continued to appoint Beruff to positions for which he had no discernible expertise or experience, including naming him chair of his Commission on Healthcare and Hospital Funding, before naming him chair of the every-20-year Constitutional Revision Commission, where Beruff unsuccessfully tried for a power grab that would have allowed him and the governor unprecedented control over the process. Nevertheless, watchdog groups slammed the CRC for being a sham entity that didn't follow its own rules and had no interest in regulating the potential conflicts of its members.

Still, none of those seem as preposterous as naming the politically-connected developer as one of our state's wildlife commissioners. Not only does Beruff have no experience or expertise that would suggest he is qualified for the position, there'salso considerable evidence that he is among the last people Floridians should want serving as a steward of the single most diverse biological ecosystem in the United States.

Beruff has been credibly accused of disturbing a bald eagle nest that had gotten in the way of using the state's agricultural exemption loophole to circumvent development permits and clear land for his Aqua by the Bay project, by laughably claiming he intended to use the land for ag purposes after he'd already submitted plans to develop it. Because it included wetlands that Beruff managed to have temporarily delineated while on the Swiftmud board, he'd be able to clear the land and ensure they wouldn't be classified as functional wetlands when the delineation expired a short time later. While bald eagles nests are federally protected,the nest simply managed to disappear.

"Captain Kathe" Fannon, who owns a Cortez charter operation, told the Manatee County Commission during the public hearings on the Aqua by the Bay project that she'd witnessed a helicopter repeatedly circling and nose-diving toward the tree where the nest was located. It eventually "fell down," though the persistent birds built it anew. Not to be deterred, Beruff obtained a permit to cut down the tree and the eagles were seen no more.

The entire Aqua by the Bay project (Beruff's massive upcoming development on the last remaining large tract of undeveloped land on Sarasota Bay in Manatee County) itself provides a litany of reasons as to why one would question whether he has any concern whatsoever for fish and wildlife. From applying to destroy the seagrasses that house oyster beds to seeking to dredge a large channel behind an essential mangrove forest, and without the required 50-foot land-side buffer detaching it from the mainland, Beruff's clearly prizes the bottom line far more than critical habitats.

Experts said that the dredging would have threatened the very survival of the mangroves (themselves a wildlife habitat) while the 8-foot deep channel would have allowed larger predatory fish into what have always been shallower waters where feeder fish spawn, potentially throwing off the entire balance of the bay, while disrupting both the commercial and sport fishing industries.

But let's not pretend that Beruff's appointment–nor any of the others Scott made–were done to put qualified people in positions of critical oversight. No, they are just another example of stacking such boards, commissions and agencies with powerful political cronies from within the very same industries the bodies themselves are ostensibly there to regulate in order to protect the public's interest.

Being appointed as a wildlife commissioner would allow Beruff to use the position to gain influence over policy and enforcement of another realm that he routinely has to navigate as a businessman. It would be no different than his time at Swiftmud or, perhaps more notably, his time chairing the board of trustees at the State College of Florida (for more on that debacle, click here).

This should also tell Floridians, who elected Scott to the U.S. Senate by the slimmest of margins, everything they need to know about whether he will be serving their interests in Washington or continuing to push his personal agenda of padding his own wealth and ingratiating himself to GOP kingmakers that he hopes will find him to be a useful candidate for the presidency when 2024 rolls around.

Meanwhile, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who was sworn in just hours after Scott made the last of his appointments, has expressed resentment over his predecessor's rash of last-second appointments and said on Thursday that he would be rolling them back and reconsidering each one–with the caveat some of them were people he knew and respected that would likely get reappointed.

The governor declined to specifically comment on which category Beruff would fall into, but if DeSantis is to prove that he's serious in terms of the environmental promises he made while on the campaign trail–in an election he too won by the skin of his teeth, I might add–then Beruff certainly won't make the cut, and his tenure as a wildlife commissioner will be the shortest in history.