Daily e-Edition
Evening e-Edition
Sign up for email newsletters
Sign up for email newsletters
Daily e-Edition
Evening e-Edition
Trending:
TALLAHASSEE — Four high-level Florida employees earning six-figure salaries live out of state and racked up $56,000 in travel expenses, including money spent on trips to Tallahassee, in the last two years, a Florida budget oversight panel has learned.
The four data analysts — who live in West Virginia, Maryland and Idaho — work for the Department of Management Services, which also came under fire after an audit released last week showed a number of glaring data management problems, notably the agency’s inability to keep track of the number of vehicles the state owns.
Out of nearly 35,000 vehicles listed in the state’s new vehicle-tracking database, about 2,300 valued at $57 million were unaccounted for in other state property records, and hundreds of others had missing or inaccurate vehicle ID numbers, the audit stated.
Seven people who run state agencies for the DeSantis administration also spent large sums on travel — $160,000 in two years, according to state records. The head of the gaming commission spent the most at more than $76,000 and the lottery secretary came in second with more than $35,000 in travel bills, including a $2,745 one-week trip to Paris last October to attend a world lottery conference.
Members of a House budget subcommittee said this week they were surprised to learn that the top data analysts for the Department of Management Services were still living out of state two years after they were hired.
The amount spent by the four employees seemed like a “significant amount of taxpayer funds for staff to travel to their jobs. I worry that this isn’t the best use of state funds,” said Rep. Vicki Lopez, R-Miami, chair of the House State Administration Budget Subcommittee.
Most of the reasons listed for the travel are for routine job duties and visits, she noted.
“I am not aware of any employee or group of employees traveling regularly at this level of cost to taxpayers,” Lopez added, calling for a probe of other agencies to see how many employees they have living out of state.
The DMS is the business arm of the state government, with a budget of $1.1 billion. It provides workforce and business support services to other state agencies including purchasing, real estate development, telecommunications and managing the state fleet of vehicles.
The four executives head up an elite “enterprise cybersecurity data” team.
Lopez said she also wanted more information about state-funded travel by other agency leaders.
“I think all agencies should have their travel visible to the public,” she said.
Lottery Secretary John F. Davis didn’t show up for the hearing as requested.
“I think if he had been present here today he might have been able to give us more details,” Lopez said.
This heightened scrutiny of the travel expenses comes at a time when Gov. Ron DeSantis is calling for the creation of a Florida Department of Government Efficiency similar to the one launched by President Donald Trump. DeSantis even boasted that Florida was “DOGE before DOGE was cool.”
The lottery and DMS secretaries were both appointed by DeSantis.
DMS Secretary Pedro Allende hired Chief Data Officer Edward Rhyne in March of 2023, for an annual salary of $206,276. Rhyne, who lives in Maryland, had the highest travel bill of the four, at $41,860.
The other three managers have salaries ranging from $103,662 to $148,521 and together billed the rest fo the travel expenses.
Allende, who worked for the Trump administration in its first term, was appointed by DeSantis in 2022. He and Rhyne served together for 10 months in the U.S. Department of Energy from 2019 to 2020.
Allende was invited to this week’s committee hearing but he sent his deputy secretary, Tom Berger, in his place. Allende, who lives in Miami, was attending a cybersecurity conference in Washington D.C.
Berger read a statement from Allende stating the decision to hire the four data experts was his alone and done at his “executive discretion.” He said Allende made specific accommodations for Rhyne’s travel.
Lopez asked if a search was held. “What I’m hearing is these are the only people you could find with those specific skill sets,” she said.
Berger waffled on whether the jobs were posted and a search was conducted, adding that agency heads have the discretion to hire without that.
Rep. Felicia Robinson, D-Miami Gardens, asked why the state couldn’t get these people to move to Florida or why Allende couldn’t find equally talented data experts here.
“This is still a matter of Florida taxpayer dollars paying for someone that doesn’t reside in our state,” Robinson said. “Was there even a conversation about them living here?”
There is no law requiring top-level employees or appointees to live in Florida or the town where their agency is located. DeSantis has appointed several out-of-state residents to various boards.
Two lawmakers have introduced bills this year that would require agency heads to live in Florida and be U.S. citizens, and one bill would require them to live in the same county where their agencies are headquartered.
Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, for instance, lives in Clearwater but his agency, the Department of Health, is based in Tallahassee.
Rep. Linda Chaney, R-St. Petersburg, said the agency still has serious data management problems despite the addition of these four. “We have these high level people, and there are these significant problems,” Chaney said.
Lopez noted that the management agency was required to give a report to the Legislature in 2022 about data inventory but has not yet done that.
Initially, the committee was told the state didn’t have people who were capable of providing that report on time. But with those new people on staff, Lopez asked, “When will this report be completed that was due in 2022?”
The data team isn’t focused on the day to day operations but instead part of the “enterprise cybersecurity team” concerned with the “big picture,” Berger said.
“They are exceedingly high level talent not found anywhere else,” he said. “They were hired for their skill sets, not where they happen to live. These positions work at the enterprise level, not the agency level.”
Rep. Bill Partington, R-Daytona Beach, said he was still waiting for answers about the number of vehicles the state owned after the department went through three different IT systems to try to track them.
“This committee needs transparency to do our job, to know how money is being spent,” Partington said.
The new system went live in September of 2021 but still was not completely implemented by December of 2024.
The audit by the Florida Auditor General included 14 findings, among them that there was poor oversight of the state fleet, numerous unmatched, missing or incomplete records, and no evidence that purchasing requests were handled in a timely manner.
Copyright © 2025 Orlando Sentinel
