By Craig Pittman
Special to Tropic Press from Florida Trident
Once upon a time, one Florida legislator was the fiercest climate warrior in Tallahassee. You could see his stance written on his unusual footwear.
When he was a senator, Jose Javier Rodriguez used to stomp around the state Capitol in a pair of Bogs Bozeman rainboots, warning everyone about how rising sea levels were flooding the streets in his district. Scrawled across the black boots in white lettering was a hashtag followed by “Act on Climate FL.”
“It’s a little strange for a senator to wear a suit and tie with giant rubber boots, and that’s kind of the point,” Rodriguez told WUFT-FM back in 2019. “I’m doing it because the issue of climate change is not getting the attention that it needs.”
The men in my family are known for being hard-headed, but Rodriguez has me beat.
About six years ago, he ran afoul of some of the state’s most powerful people, and they cooked up a sneaky scheme to get rid of him.
But now the hard-headed former senator is back, running for the post of state attorney general. He’s determined to resume his assault on Florida’s most powerful corporate overlords.
I asked him if he’s going to bring his boots back.
“When I wore those boots,” Rodriguez told me, “the joke that went around Tallahassee was that those were the same boots you would wear to clean out a horse stable. Now we need to clean out Tallahassee because it’s certainly smellier and messier than any horse stall.”
A living hell
Rodriguez grew up in Miami, the son of one of the Cuban kids whose parents sent them to the U.S. as part of Operation Pedro Pan. He was first elected to the Legislature in 2012. He spent four years in the House, then another four in the Senate.
His signature issue – the one that led to his boot-scooting – came from the fact that people in his Miami district were dealing with water filling the streets even on days with no rain.
In a state as flat as Florida, rising sea levels sweep further inland than anywhere else in the country.
“Sea levels across Florida are as much as 8 inches higher than they were in 1950, and the rate of sea level rise is accelerating,” the Florida Climate Center has noted. “For instance, sea levels around Virginia Key have risen by 8 inches since 1950, but they have been rising by 1 inch every 3 years over the past 10 years.”
For Rodriguez, rising sea levels were no abstract threat. They were a real-life hazard for folks in Miami, Key Biscayne and Coral Gables. Yet getting any action from the Legislature was an uphill struggle akin to dragging a cement truck up Mount Everest.
For a decade, the Legislature avoided doing anything to counter climate change. When the subject came up, lawmakers skittered away like a cockroach when you turn on the lights.
Hence the boots, which cost Rodriguez $116.36. He’d originally considered donning a mask and snorkel, but his wife vetoed that as impractical for someone who needed to talk.
Finally, in 2020, a Rodriguez bill related to climate change made its way through both the House and Senate and was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis. The bill barred the use of tax dollars on any public construction project in a coastal zone until studies demonstrated it would be safe from flooding caused by rising seas.
“This is the most transformative climate legislation of the 2020 session,” Rodriguez said then. “It’s not ceremonial. It’s not, ‘Let’s look into this climate thing more.’ It’s actual.”
There was a point at which Rodriguez was seen as a potential candidate for governor. But then something bad happened.
Rodriguez offended the state’s powerful utilities.
In 2019, he proposed a bill to allow landlords to sell rooftop solar power to their tenants, cutting out Florida Power & Light and other utilities as middlemen.
That infuriated FPL’s then-CEO, Eric Silagy. One of the most powerful utility executives in the world was now paying attention to Rodriguez, and not in a good way.
“I want you to make his life a living hell … seriously,” Silagy wrote in a 2019 email to two of his vice presidents.
Ghost of a chance
Newcomers to Florida may find this hard to believe, but quite a lot of our politics involves chicanery.
I learned this as a child growing up in Escambia County, where we put “scam” right in the name, so you knew what to expect,
My dad, a former county surveyor, was my tutor. He used to bring me along to political rallies and candidate fish fries. In a quiet voice, he’d point out the various bag men, grifters and con artists – many of whom were named “Bubba” – who ran our government. It was a much more helpful tutorial than “Schoolhouse Rock.”
My dad would have been delighted at the simple audacity of the ghost candidate scandal that took out Rodriguez. The leading expert on what happened is investigative reporter Jason Garcia, so I called him to explain how it unfolded.
In the 2020 election, three candidates qualified to run for state Senate seats, then disappeared like ghosts. They delivered no campaign speeches, rang no doorbells, mailed out no fliers. All three were unaffiliated with any political party, so they didn’t face a primary.
Shortly before the November general election, someone bought TV ads touting the three ghosts as an alternative to the Democratic nominees. The goal: peel voters away from the Democrats, giving Republican candidates a chance to triumph.
The most outrageous of the trio was Alex Rodriguez, an auto-parts dealer who ran against Sen. Rodriguez. A candidate with the same last name guaranteed voter confusion.
The fake Rodriguez got more than 6,000 votes. The incumbent senator lost to his Republican challenger by 32 votes.
“Without this guy,” Garcia said, “Javier would’ve won.”
“That’s all me!”
The scam squad might have gotten away with it, except one participant, a former legislator turned lobbyist named Frank Artiles, was a colossal braggart.
Artiles had done some wild stuff before, including hiring a former Playboy model as a campaign consultant. But nothing tops what happened with the ghost candidate scam.
He was at a campaign victory party for a different race and saw a TV report about Rodriguez losing to “Rodriguez.” Instead of keeping quiet, he shouted, “THAT’S ME! THAT’S ALL ME!”
Word spread. Investigations followed. In the end, five people took plea deals or were convicted. No one got more than a slap on the wrist.
“The Miami State Attorney’s Office did a great job of investigating the case,” Rodriguez (the real one) told me. “But the penalties weren’t great.”
Meanwhile, the candidates who won the tainted races remained in office.
Power and might
What, you may be wondering, about the utility behind it all? Would Florida Power & Light lose some of its might?
Turns out FPL under Silagy had pulled a lot of what the experts call “shenanigans.” The ghost candidate scam was just a taste of what was to come.
It really pains me to tell you this. FPL’s parent company, NextEra Energy, which is based in Juno Beach, is the world’s largest generator of alternate energy. They own the most windmills and solar farms. They have invested in these alternatives not from an ideological bent but because they make market sense, especially given the price of gas and oil right now.
I wish their corporate officials were as clean as their energy sources.
For instance, FPL targeted a Jacksonville journalist named Nate Monroe who wrote critically about the utility.
An Alabama consulting firm called Matrix, working for FPL, put him under surveillance and obtained a report containing his Social Security number and other sensitive personal information. (I’m glad it was him and not me – the detectives doing the surveillance would have been bored to tears.)
Silagy, facing a room full of reporters including Monroe, denied directing Matrix to do anything like that.
“I have never authorized or approved or been a party to following you or any other reporter,” Silagy said.
But records leaked to the press told a different story. “Text messages show an FPL executive was kept abreast” of what the journalist was up to “while he was on vacation in the Florida Panhandle in November 2019,” the Floodlight News reported.
FPL didn’t stop at merely spying on journalists. The utility actually cosplayed as a journalistic entity, too.
A self-described “news” and views website called “The Capitolist,” run by former Rick Scott spokesman Brian Burgess, in effect became a wholly owned subsidiary of FPL, the Miami Herald reported.
The Capitolist depicted itself as independent, but in fact it functioned the way the Muppets do. There was always someone offscreen making things move.
As a result, the Capitolist became “an elaborate, off-the-books political strategy to advocate for rate hikes, agitate for legislative favors, slam political opponents and eliminate anything – even home solar panels – that the publicly traded utility worried might undermine its near monopoly on selling power in the Sunshine State,” the Herald wrote. FPL execs “maneuvered behind the scenes at the Capitolist to settle scores and bend the will of regulators, politicians and the public.”
Once all this hanky-panky was exposed by the press, FPL’s parent company was sued by a pair of pension funds for allowing it to happen, harming the stock price.
Ultimately it agreed to a $150 million settlement of the suit, according to a story written by none other than Monroe. One of the attorneys said the deal “would be the largest settlement for a securities fraud lawsuit in decades in the Southern District of Florida.”
I don’t dispute that. I merely note that FPL reaped profits above $2 billion, so that $150 million was the corporate equivalent of couch cushion change.
But at least Silagy had to retire.
Top lawman
Rodriguez could have tried running for his old Senate seat. After all, without a competing Rodriguez in the race, he might beat the Republican this time.
But he chose not to do that.
Instead, he’s going for a more powerful post – a seat on the state Cabinet, one that would make him Florida’s top law enforcement officer.
In the past, Florida AGs used to take on FPL and the other utilities with some regularity – even Republicans like Charlie Crist and Bill McCollum. That hasn’t happened in a while.
And I have to tell you that Rodriguez doesn’t seem to be ready to let bygones be bygones.
Despite what FPL did to him the last time he messed with the company, he confronted the current CEO of FPL, Scott Bores, about its $7 billion rate hike, the largest in U.S. history. There were no current officeholders there to accompany this modern-day Don Quixote tilting at a windmill-owner. Only Rodriguez.
“The corporations that run the show,” he said, “are the ones that write the checks.”
See what I mean? Hard-headed!
About the Author: Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He has written seven books about Florida and writes a weekly column for the Florida Phoenix. In 2020, the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend, and in 2022, the national Sierra Club gave him its Rachel Carson Award. Craig is co-host of the weekly “Welcome to Florida” podcast.
The Florida Trident is a Florida investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency. The Florida Center for Government Accountability created the Trident and first published it in 2022, amid shrinking newsroom budgets and staff across the country. Tropic Press is pleased to share the Trident’s work with you today. You can support the Trident here:
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Craig Pittman, unlike the scum he writes about, is a Florida treasure.
Mr. Bruce
Thank you for the story of Alex Rodriguez. I remember that stolen election and couldn’t believe that they got away with it without any real repercussions. Now running for statewide office he will have my support. Irwin Becker. Pompano Beach