Accusations against Van Ayres roil Hillsborough school tax referendum campaign

State officials are investigating a trip to the Masters golf tournament taken by Hillsborough County School Superintendent Van Ayres with the head of a construction firm that later got a no-bid contract with the district, according to Hillsborough County Commissioner Josh Wostal.

Reports about the trip have been stirring up conservative political circles in the county.

But some School Board members say the talk is only part of an attempt by conservatives to undercut the referendum campaign for a tax increase to fund teacher salaries.

Republican County Commissioner Ken Hagan and Ayres went to the Masters in April with Jonathan Graham, head of HORUS Construction Services. There are indications that Deputy School Superintendent Chris Farkas was also on the trip.

Hagan later filed a gift disclosure form with the state Ethics Commission, stating that the private flight to Augusta, accommodations there, and a round of golf amounted to a gift from Graham worth $6,500.

Hagan did not return calls for comment.

Ayres did not file a gift disclosure for the trip but told the School Board at its Oct. 7 meeting that he paid for it “out of my own personal funds” rather than accepting it as a gift as Hagan did.

At that meeting, he said he wanted the public to hear his side of the matter, but he has not publicly disclosed how much he paid for the trip or detailed the costs.

Before that Oct. 7 meeting, Ayres had individual meetings with Board members to discuss the issue, but none of the members contacted by Florida Politics knew details of the reimbursement.

Farkas has not spoken publicly on the matter.

School Board member Patricia Rendon said she knew Farkas attended the Masters but didn’t know whether he went with Hagan and Ayres.

When Wostal asked the School District for public records concerning the trip, officials responded that there were none because the trip was on personal time and “paid for with their own personal money,” apparently meaning both Farkas and Ayres.

Neither Ayres nor Farkas responded to Florida Politics’ requests for an interview with the School District’s communications office.

At the Board’s May 7 meeting, a month after the trip, the Board approved a proposal from Ayres and Farkas to trade a 1-acre plot of district-owned land at Hanna Avenue and 50^th Street to HORUS, in return for the company building the district a badly needed, 20,000-square-foot storage warehouse.

Ayres said the Board bought the Hanna Avenue property for $1.4 million and that it had been appraised recently at $1.8 million. The warehouse construction, he said, was worth $4.2 million.

Farkas told the Board the deal originated when “They (HORUS) came to us” to propose it.

“We need space, we need storage and this … seems to be a good deal,” commented Board member Lynn Gray.

The only no vote on the deal came from Rendon, who said she wasn’t satisfied with the research presented on the estimated value of the warehouse.

But over the next several months, word of the Masters trip began circulating, spurred by longtime conservative activist Tom Rask in the conservative blog Tampa Bay Guardian and other opponents of the tax referendum.

Rask has called the trip “apparent bribery” and the “tip of a much larger scandal iceberg.”

Ayres responded to the talk at the Oct. 7 meeting, saying he went “on my own time and paid for it out of my own personal funds.”

“Some individuals are now saying that this trip is somehow connected to a land exchange between the School District and HORUS that this Board approved in May,” he said. “Let me be clear that it is absolutely not.”

He said no bids were required for the deal because the district spent no money on the transaction.

Noting that the warehouse was estimated to be worth far more than the land traded for it, he added, “My job is to always put the District’s best interests first – we did so in this transaction.”

Reacting to the conservative media reports, Wostal, who has opposed the School District on issues including the tax referendum, wrote Gov. Ron DeSantis about the events.

He said DeSantis referred the matter to the state Department of Education, and the department’s inspector general’s office has replied to him and sought information about it. The department didn’t respond by the deadline for this story to inquiries confirm that.

“Should politicians and high-level bureaucrats be taking free private flights, free luxury room and board, free private golf, and free tickets to the Masters golf tournament all from a contractor receiving no-bid contracts?” Wostal asked in a Facebook post.

Following Ayres’s Board meeting comments on the issue, Rendon said she intends to get legal advice on whether the Board should adopt new policies concerning acceptance of gifts by district senior staff.

“The bottom line is whether an ethical line was crossed,” she said. “My focus was completely on the responsibility and legality of the situation.”

State law already requires district school superintendents to file personal financial and gift disclosures, but Rendon said the Board may need stricter policies for top officials – although teachers should still be able to keep the small gifts they typically get from students and parents.

Other Board members, however, interpret the controversy as part of a continuing attack on the public school system by conservatives.

“It’s part of a plan to try to attack the district to try to impact the millage referendum,” said member Nadia Combs. “It’s so sad to me. We have 10,000 kids without teachers. There’s no ethics charge here, just people who are trying to weaken the district.”

The Nov. 5 ballot will include a measure proposed by the Board to add $1 in tax per $1,000 of assessed property value to School District taxes – estimated to produce $177 million a year for four years — mainly to supplement teacher salaries. Proponents argue that the district is losing teachers to surrounding counties with similar taxes, leaving students without certified teachers.

But opponents, including the local real estate development industry, portray the district as corrupt and wasteful. A Realtors’ political committee has sent mailers and text messages opposing the referendum, noting that a similar proposal was defeated in 2022.

School tax campaign may warm up

The campaign for the Hillsborough County School District’s tax referendum has generated relatively few headlines and spending considering the stakes, but campaigning is warming up as the election approaches.

The Realtors Issues Mobilization Committee, a PAC funded almost solely by the Florida Realtors trade group, spent $77,080 through Oct. 18 opposing the tax, including mailers and text message advertising and still had about $50,000 cash on hand.

Its mailers claim there would be “little accountability in how the money is spent.”

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of political and business leaders wrote a letter to the Tampa Bay Times this week supporting it. They included Dick Beard, a developer and major Republican political fundraiser; Alex Sink, former Florida CFO and a Democratic Party fundraiser; Kathleen Shanahan, prominent businesswoman and GOP donor; Maryann Ferenc, prominent restaurateur and Democratic donor; former University of South Florida President Judy Genshaft and others.

Their letter said public education “is the cornerstone of any thriving community” and that Hillsborough faces a severe teacher shortage, with teachers leaving for other counties and states that have millage-supported salaries.

Could Brundage threaten Pittman?

By most conventional measures, Republican state Rep. Karen Gonzalez Pittman looks like a good prospect for re-election, but the state Republican Party is campaigning as if she faces a threat from comparatively unknown, first-time candidate Democrat Ashley Brundage.

The party won’t say how much it has spent on the race, but it is clearly well into six figures judging from the number of mailers, plus TV and digital advertising, sent out by the GOP’s state House campaign arm, the Florida House Republican Campaign Committee.

The committee has sent at least 16 mailers in the last two weeks, at a likely cost of five figures each. The mailers praise Pittman and trash Brundage, with several accusations Brundage says are falsehoods.

That’s happening even though the South Tampa-to-Westchase district has a 39-30% Republican-Democrat registration advantage, and Pittman won it against a strong challenge from Democrat Jen McDonald by almost eight points in 2022.

Pittman has raised more than twice as much as Brundage, $420,567 to $177,770, not including the party spending.

“Speaker-designate (Rep. Danny) Perez is committed to supporting our incumbents and doing all we can to get them re-elected,” was the response from committee spokesperson Sarah Bascom when asked the reason for the deluge. She declined to provide any spending figures.

“I’m a competitor; I never take anything for granted,” said Pittman. “I want to make sure we can lower taxes; our parents are able to make choices for their children and make Florida livable and affordable.”

Brundage said she believes the onslaught proves she is a threat to Pittman – “I don’t have to do a poll – I can’t afford to – but what they’re doing tells me I’m in it,” she said.

The mailers contend that Brundage, who’s transgender, “Believes biological boys should be competing on the same (athletic) fields as biological girls.” That’s false, said Brundage – “I do not believe that. I trust parents, school officials and Boards (along with science) to make those decisions on a local level.”

The mailers claim this could happen at local high schools, even though a 2021 state law forbids it.

The mailers say Brundage opposes parental consent for gender reassignment surgery for minors, which Brundage calls “outrageous … I’m a mom, and I think parental rights are essential.”

They also attack her financial history, including bankruptcy, foreclosure, and a homeowners association lien.

That’s all true — Brundage has said publicly that she was homeless and broke after the 2008 crash, largely because of an unwise mortgage on a home later sold at auction for less than half what she paid. She later became a banker and worked as a registered investment adviser, she said. She is now a consultant on diversity issues.

“If a bankruptcy disqualified me, what about Donald Trump?” she said. “I went through a bad period, but like a lot of Americans, I built myself back up.”

Brundage said the attacks are an attempt to divert from the real issue in the race, property insurance costs, for which she blames Pittman as an incumbent and part of the Republican legislative supermajority.