Guest Author
Last week found Jesse Panuccio resigning as director of the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO).
Ya-a-a-wn, says the reader.
Z-z-z-z, goes the reader.
Pay attention! Pay attention!
Here’s why: Newspapers and blogs have pronounced him a “trusted” adviser of Gov. Rick Scott.
Upon his appointment as DEO leader in 2011, Scott was fulsome in his praise of Panuccio, a graduate of Harvard Law School, and his general counsel at the time:
“Jesse’s unparalleled work ethic and intellectual capacity will be a much-needed catalyst for progress at DEO.”
Until the very end, Scott’s man crush was at full bore:
“While at DEO, so much has been accomplished under his leadership. He has helped grow jobs by streamlining the economic development process and has protected taxpayer money by instituting new accountability measure.”
Scott even gave him an American flag flown over the state Capitol. But there was no love lost between Panuccio and state lawmakers.
State Sen. Nancy Detert, the Venice Republican responsible for the current disaster called Florida unemployment compensation and who once called the unemployed “slackers and malingerers,” said he “stonewalled” constantly.
Republican State Sen. Jack Latvala of Clearwater, recent loser in that august body of 40’s secretive presidential sweepstakes, was more visceral in his dislike.
He didn’t care for Panuccio’s “attitude,” or for his “arrogance,” either.
Panuccio chalked up all the legislative hate to the politics of the moment, stating that his aim was to improve the lives of Florida’s families, an annoying “talking point” of the Scott administration.
With Scott making a hard sell for a $250 million, the widely disliked Panuccio had to go.
Even Scott was unwilling to offend legislators to the point of undermining his legislative agenda. A rare show of astuteness.
But Scott has been showing such astuteness, in spurts admittedly, lately: His economic incentives program makes unusual concessions to legislators, giving them a greater say in its dispersal, for instance.
That surprised Detert, a consistent Scott critic.
Because around the Capitol, Scott has a reputation for executive high-handedness, a tic developed from his years as a Fifth Amendment-pleading CEO of a healthcare concern.
Whether Panuccio was a success worth fighting for is already answered. Whether Panuccio was successful is debatable. Very debatable.
If you ask him, he made a relatively new state agency effective. He established its tone, gave it energy, and a purpose.
Panuccio speaks with evident pride of his efforts to “combat” unemployment compensation fraud.
Like welfare fraud, this is more or less, a dog-whistle to Scott’s Tea Party constituents in The Villages. Such fraud tends to be of negligible impact.
Lawmakers would say that DOE’s CONNECT program, a new system for processing unemployment compensation, was a mess.
Actually, it was worse: a damn mess. A $77 million program could not keep track of its payments to recipients and exposed Florida’s families to grave privacy risks. Running government like a business, eh?
No one would accuse Scott of living in the real world, anyway. To say Florida has added jobs because of his efforts, not the cyclical nature of the modern economy and the Federal Reserve’s easygoing monetary policy, demonstrates the point.
When a Scott effort has yielded a direct return on investment, it has been through his personal intervention. Say, a trip to recruit in Kentucky. Say, a yield of 50 jobs.
Not nothing.
Though when the recent federal Department of Labor has jobs up at 210K, what is, 50? Even accumulated. Scott says: tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Maybe, maybe, maybe they have been an effective instigator of job growth.
At its lowest point, Florida’s unemployment rate was above the national rate. Especially its black unemployment rate. But that is a historical problem, especially in the South.
Florida will need more than $1 billion in tax gifts to big business and $250 million in corporate handouts to end its endemic vulnerability to economic booms and busts.
It may need that $1 billion in new higher education funding one legislator has proposed.
Nevertheless, Scott is increasingly becoming less autocratic and opening up to the possibility that the Legislature is a coequal branch of government.
He had to get rid of his most “trusted” advisers and “catalyst” for all that is emblematic of his administration in order to concede to that reality.
On those terms – Scott realizing he is governor, not CEO – Jesse Panuccio had been a real dynamo at DEO.
Chris Timmons is a native Floridian, columnist and fellow with the James Madison Institute. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
