Taxpayers will pay dearly for DeSantis’ bumpy excursions | Steve Bousquet

How many Florida cops does it take to drive Ron DeSantis to a fundraiser?

The answer is seven.

Florida’s security-conscious governor won’t answer this simple question — even though taxpayers are paying for it.

We know the answer thanks to the people of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who still show an old-fashioned respect for public records and public information.

Seven agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), traveling in four different SUVs apparently rented by the state at our expense, squired DeSantis to a small campaign event in Tennessee on Tuesday.

That’s excessive. It’s outrageous. But it’s the norm for DeSantis, who has reshaped FDLE into his personal police force, with no resistance from a limp Legislature and an unquestioning Cabinet.

We know it was seven because we have the police report of the minor accident involving the DeSantis caravan in Tuesday morning rush-hour traffic in Chattanooga.

We verified all seven names with Florida law enforcement sources.

And it took us exactly one day to get that police report through an open records request.

No charge. No questions asked. Just like Florida in the good ol’ pre-DeSantis days.

This is the kind of basic information that taxpayers have a right to know. But they don’t, because DeSantis got the Legislature to enact a new law that makes all of his travel records secret, even retroactively.

In Chattanooga, traffic on I-75 stopped suddenly and the governor’s entourage also had to stop quickly, and there wasn’t enough time. Nobody was hurt seriously, but a DeSantis campaign staffer sitting in the first SUV with DeSantis suffered a minor injury.

The cars were rented from Avis in Atlanta, the police report said. (Avis holds the rental car contract for state agencies in Florida.) The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

FDLE is required by state law to protect the governor around the clock regardless of whether he’s conducting official, personal or political business. But Florida has never had a governor so obsessed by security who spends this much time in Iowa, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Utah and other places, so those costs will become astronomical.

Now, add to that the money spent assigning dozens of FDLE agents to round up undocumented immigrants in the Keys, Texas and elsewhere.

No governor in Florida history has so aggressively used the agency to push a political agenda, and as The Washington Post has reported, some long-time agents have left FDLE in disgust or have been pushed out.

In the end, it’s going to be costly to Florida taxpayers for DeSantis to keep chasing his floundering presidential ambitions. At a minimum, he should dip into his vast campaign account and reimburse taxpayers for every dollar of campaign work done by state employees (If he has, nobody knows about it).

When former Gov. Rick Scott tried to reimburse the state in 2014 after being accused of misusing state vehicles in his re-election campaign, FDLE refused to accept his check from the Republican Party of Florida, which the agency considered inappropriate. Scott wrote a check for $90,000 to the state treasury instead.

To cover DeSantis’ travel schedule and satisfy his security concerns, FDLE is hiring even more agents whose job will exclusively be to safeguard DeSantis, his family or the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion.

On FDLE’s Facebook page, the agency has been seeking applicants to be protective operations special agents, to ensure “the safety and security of the Governor and First Family.”

In addition to the seven cops who escorted DeSantis to the Tennessee fundraiser, as many as six others may have already been in place at the site of the event, sources said. FDLE doesn’t discuss security measures, but it can’t afford a repeat of an embarrassing episode from earlier in the campaign.

Security was tightened after a miscue in April, when two women protesters chanting “Jews against DeSantis!” charged onto a stage in a hotel ballroom in Manchester, N.H. DeSantis brushed off the brief distraction with a “Yeah, thank you,” but the protesters got within inches of the governor, a major security failure.

Too bad it didn’t happen in Chattanooga. We would have had the report immediately.

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on Twitter @stevebousquet.