Opinion: Florida Legislature, House Speaker, Squeezing Public Universities

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Years ago, the state created Direct Support Organizations to enable quasi-private, non-profit groups to support our universities and their missions with scholarships, athletics, and other fundraising activities.   These DSO’s include Alumni Foundations, Science Foundations, Booster groups and other entities.

Some of these organizations have employees who are FTE’s of the State of Florida.  Given that the role of these employees is to raise private dollars for state universities, it seems logical that they be state employees.  Because they are, however, the Florida House has argued it has a right to access all the records of these Foundations and has, on at least one occasion, turned information over to the public that the organizations believe are NOT in the public domain.   Corcoran’s goal seems to be to embarrass some of these groups for spending large sums of money on employees, travel and fundraising activities, even without knowing the affect or efficiency of these expenditures.

There should be no doubt that the salaries and state-paid travel for these groups and employees does, in fact, belong in the public domain, but Corcoran seems to want to go further and bring more and more information into the Sunshine and place strict limits on many of the activities of these organizations.