Winner and Loser of the Week in Florida politics — Week of 12.15.24

It’s almost Christmas, and this column is benefiting from the gift that keeps on giving: the ongoing drama of Glen Gilzean’s bumbling departure from leading the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office.

We’ve gotten plenty of material out of Gilzean’s unauthorized spending spree which has led to a lawsuit, concerns that workers won’t get paid (the county says they have them covered, thankfully), and plenty of verbal back-and-forth between the Governor-installed Supervisor and local elected officials.

And now, much like this year, it appears this saga is coming to a close.

We already knew Gilzean was on his way out, as he declined to run for re-election and voters chose his successor in November, Karen Castor Dentel. She’ll take over on Jan. 7.

What had been up in the air until this week was whether Gilzean could successfully fight in court the county’s decision to cut off his budget amid him sending out millions of dollars to various organizations without prior county approval.

While a Judge already allowed Gilzean’s suit to go forward, a court ruling this week is denying his effort to expedite the process. And that means whatever relief he might get from the court is likely going to come after he leaves office, by which time the county and the Supervisor of Elections Office will likely be back to a healthy working relationship.

That means, for all intents and purposes, Gilzean has lost this fight. But in the spirit of giving, we’re sure Gov. Ron DeSantis will gift another cushy government job to this man soon enough.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all. Now, it’s onto our weekly game of winners and losers.

Winners

Honorable mention: Florida Atlantic University. FAU snagged a 15-year, $22.5 million deal for naming rights to its football stadium.

The team will now play at Flagler Credit Union Stadium, named after a local bank. The name change will occur just in time for FAU to host the Boca Raton Bowl.

As the Palm Beach Post reported, it’s the first time ever that FAU courted naming rights for its stadium. And it could signal an intention to up the quality of its athletics programs going forward.

The football team left a lot to be desired this season, going 3-9 in the American Athletic Conference. But FAU’s men’s basketball team had a Cinderella run in 2023, advancing all the way to the Final Four. Will this new stadium deal signal the school wants to position its football team to make a similar push?

Almost (but not quite) the biggest winner: Devin Stephenson. The new Florida Polytechnic University President has his priorities straight, as he pushed the university to cancel a six-figure ceremony celebrating his inauguration and instead use the money for future student scholarships.

“I am deeply committed to ensuring that the resources entrusted to us are used to directly benefit those we serve — our students,” Stephenson wrote in a letter to the university community. “Prioritizing their futures is at the heart of everything I do, always making sure we provide them with the tools and opportunities they need to thrive.”

This isn’t the first time Stephenson made the move. He did the same when he took over the head role at Northwest Florida State College, diverting that money toward student funding projects.

Make no mistake: Leading a higher ed institution is a tough job. But let’s also be honest in acknowledging it’s also a cushy one at times, with the ability to dump major money into galas or other events honoring some such person or thing, where you are then the toast of the town.

Those ceremonies have their place. But it’s incredibly refreshing to see someone publicly pass on one such event that no one would have batted an eye at otherwise and instead focus on growing his institution. We need more of this mindset in government as well. Kudos to Stephenson for setting an example.

The biggest winner: City of St. Pete, Pinellas County. Both the city and county governments are now calling the bluff of the Tampa Bay Rays, passing previously in-danger bond packages needed to build a new baseball stadium.

In other words: Rays, the ball is in your court.

We’ve covered the drama surrounding this deal over the past several weeks. But see, this is a two-pronged problem. One saw growing resistance from state officials due to several factors (post-storm cost concerns, new members with different ideologies being elected, etc.) regarding approving these bonds and closing the deal.

Another, however, comes from the team. The Rays’ leaders have said early delays in these votes, which have now passed, already delayed the projected opening of the stadium from 2028 to 2029. The team says that has added costs to them, and that they need government help to absorb some of those costs.

The team is trying to argue that the deal local officials just approved actually isn’t sufficient now. And so this stadium may still be dead in the end.

But by passing the bond deal anyway, it’s now putting the onus on the team to say no to the deal, and local officials will no doubt point to the team’s greed as a driver for the deal going up in smoke.

If the worst-case scenario happens and the Rays leave the region entirely, it’s going to be a PR nightmare. With the votes this week, Pinellas and St. Pete officials are doing their best to make sure the blowback reaches the team’s owners. And if the Rays balk here, it just might work.

Losers

Dishonorable mention: Anna Paulina Luna. Luna is far from the only one responsible for the spending deal chaos we saw in Washington this week. But she earns a spot here for a few reasons.

First off, the rate at which she flip-flopped from originally saying she would support the original bill to coming out against it was truly something to behold.

“We just got the CR text a little over an hour ago. All of the SBA funding and FEMA relief $/aid that directly impacts my district in Pinellas County was placed in this bill. I asked early on for a stand alone vote on disaster relief, but that was denied,” Luna recounted ahead of the first vote in a now-deleted post.

“Much to my own personal objections to bloated spending bills, I am going to have to vote for this as it directly impacts the over 600,000 people I represent.”

Rational. Reasonable. But just a few hours later, she completely backed off, citing the bloat that she just said would not stop her from funding disaster relief.

And that’s the second reason Luna lands here. Her district was seriously impacted during this brutal storm season Florida just went through. By tanking the original deal, Luna also tanked an agreement to deliver much-needed disaster relief to Florida and elsewhere.

Yes, this cycle of crafting spending bills is broken, and these deals should be more transparent and released earlier. But the time to hammer that out is well before a government shutdown deadline, not right before while constituents are desperate for help.

Now to be fair to Luna, she advocated after the fact for a stand-alone relief bill and said she was still focused on getting that money to her district without some of the other fluff contained in the original package. And ultimately, a deal was reached just before the government was set to shut down.

But it led to a needless days of uncertainty for those still suffering from the effects of these storms. And if not for Democrats bailing out Republicans once again (though Luna did vote “yes” on two pared-down replacement bills, including the one that passed), we would have had a shutdown and this money would have been delayed.

We have to stop governing like this.

Florida is a red state now, and Democrats may not have the juice to mount a serious challenge to Luna in a Midterm cycle in 2026. But with votes like this, they’ll likely try.

Almost (but not quite) the biggest loser: Disney. Disney earned dual dubious distinctions this week, earning it a spot on this list.

First, a report this week from Popular Information detailed how the entertainment giant worked with California lawmakers to exempt Disneyland workers from a living wage ordinance that was directly sponsored by a union representing Disneyland workers.

That is, it was low wages at Disneyland which prompted this entire initiative to raise wages. And yet, the company cooked up a plan to make sure it didn’t apply to park workers.

Put simply, the measure applied to hospitality companies that benefit from city subsidies. That was the case for Disneyland, until they convinced local officials to cancel those subsidies, thus allowing Disney to dodge the wage requirements.

After years of court battles, Disney settled and paid the workers back wages. But it’s this exact type of using power to skirt the rules that regular people can’t avoid that has helped to build such resentment toward elites among many Americans, a feeling which helped propel Donald Trump to the White House.

Speaking of Trump, Disney also helped broker a deal to settle a defamation suit Trump filed against ABC News for tens of millions of dollars.

Trump had already won on a procedural ruling allowing the case to go forward, but nearly every experienced analyst thought he had little chance of winning the case, even if they would have had to appeal an adverse finding from a jury.

But because the case wasn’t thrown out immediately, it opened the possibility that ABC News would be subject to discovery. That was a path its parent company, Disney, did not want to go down.

And according to reporting from The New York Times, the company also was seeking to make nice with Trump, now the President-elect. Even if the company won in the end, an extended fight would have invited vitriol from Trump, whose antagonism toward the media — often either grossly exaggerated or undeserved entirely — would have hurt their brand.

Fair enough. Except, ABC News is a news organization. Private companies voicing shareholder concerns and not wanting to piss off Trump is one thing. Making nice with those in power may look bad in a certain light, but their job is to maximize profits for their company, so it’s understandable at the end of the day.

But a news organization making nice with those in power to protect its brand? Monitoring those in power is the entire point of the operation. Not only does this look bad for Disney and ABC News, it creates a terrible precedent for other news organizations that are now, or soon to be, facing threats from Trump.

The biggest loser: Matt Gaetz. Well, it seems that Ethics report might become public after all.

CNN reported this week that the House Ethics Committee “secretly voted” to release the report once lawmakers leave Washington for the holidays.

We surmised last month that, even as Gaetz was forced to withdraw his doomed Attorney General bid, that perhaps this was all some sort of longer play to run for Governor in 2026, and that by having some of this damaging info trickle out now, it would be old news by the time he ran to lead the Sunshine State next cycle.

Perhaps that will still play out for Gaetz. But it’s crystal clear that, whether there were any long-term machinations going on here, Gaetz absolutely did not want this full report to come out. He very obviously immediately resigned from Congress in the hopes of removing himself from the Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction and keeping this report under wraps.

And it appeared for a time as though enough of Gaetz’s Republican House colleagues agreed. Now, things may have changed.

Gaetz made clear his opposition to releasing the report in a lengthy X post in which admitted to “embarrassing” while continuing to deny he did anything criminal.

But with the Justice Department already passing on criminal charges, there’s not really a debate any longer over whether Gaetz is going to jail. There is, however, a debate about whether he has a political future. And there are plenty of things in this report short of crimes that could influence the public’s appetite for more Matt Gaetz.