Former consumer advocate finds friends in big Florida business for campaign | Commentary

You've probably never heard of Richard Gentry, but the odds are good the legacy he left briefly leading an obscure state office still weighs on your pocketbook today. The long arc of Gentry's career in Tallahassee, where he was a familiar face for decades as a lobbyist before an abrupt turn as the state's top consumer advocate, makes him that most quintessential Florida politician, a product of the state's Wild West blend of government and big business.

Gentry is described in court papers as a key figure in highly confidential negotiations in 2021 that eventually scored Florida Power & Light the largest electric rate increase in Florida history, a controversy that remains an active case before the state Supreme Court with meaningful financial stakes for the more than 12 million people who live within the behemoth electric company's vast service territory.

Today, Gentry, a Republican who lives in the St. Johns River hamlet of Astor, and no longer working for state government or as a registered lobbyist, is running for state House District 27, which includes portions of Marion, Lake and Volusia counties in central Florida. It's a remarkable, head-swiveling late-career campaign for Gentry, who is in his early 70s — remarkable because he's found financial support from anti-regulation advocates and the utility and natural gas industries, which he was once supposed to spar with as the head of the Office of Public Counsel, a consumer advocacy office that represents (or is supposed to represent) the people when Florida's investor-owned electric companies ask state regulators for rate increases.

Gentry faces two Republican opponents in the August primary for the deeply conservative state House seat, but — with a substantial fundraising advantage and backing from high-profile locals, including the sheriffs of each of the three counties in the district — he has the unmistakable shine of the Tallahassee-preferred insider.

Campaign finance reports for Gentry's campaign and an affiliated political committee supporting him, Friends of Richard Gentry, show donations from natural gas firms; homebuilding interests, including from companies associated with Mori Hosseini, a key ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis; and business-backed political committees like Associated Industries of Florida, a political powerhouse long affiliated with the state's utilities generally and Florida Power & Light specifically. In a sense, this is not surprising: These are some of the same interests Gentry worked for as a lobbyist and as the longtime general counsel for the Florida Home Builders Association.

And yet Gentry's striking transformation — from big-business lobbyist to consumer advocate to legislative candidate with big-business backing — says something profound and troubling about the state of regulatory capture in the nation's third-most populous state, and it argues for a reexamination of his time as the Public Counsel, one of the most important oversight roles in the state.

"Gentry's long list of utility-related campaign contributions casts his time at the Office of Public Counsel in a new light," Daniel Tait, a research and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog organization, told me. "Whose interest was he really serving when he helped seal a deal for FPL's largest-ever rate increase? Probably not the public's."

Gentry did not return messages sent to his campaign and personal emails or his cell phone.

"The utilities regulated by the (Florida Public Service Commission) have a high degree of influence on the Governor and the legislature through political contributions and lobbying and have used that influence to pursue favorable regulatory decisions by the PSC, at the expense of the public," Integrity Florida, a watchdog organization, concluded in a 2017 report.

"The result is an agency that has been 'captured' by the industries it regulates."

Gentry's story shows the infiltration of corporate interests now reaches even deeper into Florida's regulatory machinery than the Public Service Commission, a group of political appointees who have generally treated utilities favorably under Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Gov. Rick Scott. The Office of Public Counsel was once viewed as a reliable adversary to that industry on behalf of consumers, but that perception changed dramatically when Gentry burst onto the scene.

Gentry's brief tenure as the Public Counsel, from early 2021 to late 2022, coincided with an incredibly high-stakes moment for Florida Power & Light, although one that was also ripe with opportunity. How Gentry — a longtime lobbyist who'd done work with at least one group with utility ties — got that role in the first place was a controversy in its own right. But for FPL, the timing was undeniably fortuitous.

FPL, headed by then-CEO Eric Silagy, had recently acquired Gulf Power from regional rival Southern Co., a purchase that finally gave FPL a long-desired foothold in the Florida panhandle. Wilton Simpson, a key FPL ally, was still president of the Florida Senate ("I was a fan of that," Silagy once told me and a group of other journalists of Simpson's tenure as the body's leader). And revelations about dirty tricks FPL's former political consultants had deployed across the state — including efforts to manipulate elections in the Republican Party's favor (thus helping to keep Simpson in power), as well as the harassment of journalists — had not yet hit Florida newspapers, a development that would later publicly tarnish the company and Silagy's leadership of it (Silagy, who is in his late 50s, unexpectedly retired in the beginning of 2023).

At the time, however, Silagy's FPL was still at or near the peak of its powers, and the company was expected in early 2021 to ask the Public Service Commission for a rate increase.

At that same time, Simpson, FPL's Senate ally, had decided to make a move on J.R. Kelly, the then-Public Counsel who'd developed a reputation as an agitator of the state's electric companies. The Public Counsel, created decades ago by the Legislature, is intended to offer consumers legal representation before the Public Service Commission, a role that can become naturally adversarial when the utilities ask for rate increases.

Simpson never directly said as much, but his public comments at the time seemed to indicate he was deeply sympathetic to FPL's plight and believed the utilities faced too much resistance when they asked for higher rates. He felt there were "big powerful interests" on both sides of debates about rates. "It’s not just on one side. We only talk about the one side," he said in one debate, according to a News Service of Florida report.

Simpson orchestrated a legislative change to the Office of Public Counsel that ultimately led to Kelly's resignation. The job, appointed by a legislative committee, ultimately went to Gentry, the only applicant interviewed.

Questions about the timing, the hiring process — which proceeded with little debate — and the suitability of a longtime lobbyist for a consumer advocacy role were obvious. Gentry's temperament was also a concern. "You need someone who is going to fight for consumers," Bradley Marshall, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, who has also worked on the appeal of FPL's rate increase, told me.

But Gentry, some utility watchdogs feared, saw his role more as a dealmaker than as a fighter. And making a deal is precisely what he did. Shortly after FPL presented the Public Service Commission with what's called its "rate case" — a term of art that essentially means its request for higher rates — Gentry and a few other groups entered into confidential talks with FPL, emerging soon after with what Gentry later described as "a give-and-take global compromise."

Others saw it as a bonanza for FPL.

"This is a gross miscarriage of justice," a coalition of consumer groups, including Floridians Against Increased Rates, wrote in a Florida Supreme Court appeal of the Public Service Commission's swift approval of that deal.

"If allowed to stand, the 2021 FPL Settlement will result in FPL’s customers paying hundreds of millions of dollars per year, totaling in the billions of dollars, in excessive costs over the next four years."

The settlement guaranteed FPL the right to collect a rate of return (in essence, a profit margin) of 10.6 percent, though it could go as high as 11.8 percent. That is higher than the rates the Public Service Commission had approved for Duke (9.85 percent) and Tampa Electric (9.95 percent) in the weeks just before and after it signed off on the FPL deal, according to court documents. That all translated to FPL being able to use rate increases to generate an additional $692 million in revenue in 2022, $560 million in 2023, and about $140 million in 2024 and 2025.

That the decision by the Public Service Commission to approve this settlement was flawed is nearly beyond dispute. "The Commission’s reasoning about whether all this is in the public interest covers less than two pages of the over 70,000 in the record we have for review," Florida Supreme Court Justice John D. Couriel dryly noted in a majority decision last year that threw the rate case back at the Public Service Commission for a redo.

" ... [I]t is not enough to point to the pile of paper memorializing these proceedings and say, 'It’s in there'," Couriel wrote. "Instead, the Commission must do the job with which the Legislature has tasked it by showing, in its final order, how the paper in that pile supports its decision."

It was a stunning rebuke from a conservative court loathe to bolster regulatory hurdles, and it was an embarrassment for the Public Counsel, whose entire job is supposed to center around the "public interest" and whose support for the contested FPL rate settlement lent it crucial credibility. By then — the fall of 2023 — Gentry had been long gone from the office; he'd resigned at the end of 2022 to "prioritize spending time with my wife and family."

The decision frustrated some members of the Public Service Commission, who responded flippantly to the court's mandate. “So basically what the Florida Supreme Court just said that we didn’t write enough? ... Can we weigh the order the next time to see if it (weighs) enough?" asked Commission Art Graham during a meeting this past spring. Indeed, the commission essentially re-approved the settlement with a bit more substantive comment about it being in the "public interest," and the consumer-watchdog groups promptly re-appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, where it remains an active, unresolved case.

Gentry's campaign has played up his time as the Public Counsel, boasting that he "served as a watchdog for Floridians, advocating for citizens’ interests before the Public Service Commission." It also touts his time as a development lobbyist, noting that he helped shape the Growth Management Act and the Sadowski Act, landmark housing and growth laws. At the same time, he's won plaudits from some anti-regulator advocates, including the conservative Florida chapter of Americans for Prosperity, whose endorsement of Gentry noted his desire to "reduce regulatory burdens."

Marshall, the Earthjustice attorney, saw Gentry's time as the Public Counsel differently. Appointing Gentry, he said, was a recipe for a "shi--- deal" on FPL's electric rates.

And, he said, "that's exactly what consumers got."

Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida big business warms to former consumer advocate Richard Gentry