TALLAHASSEE — Emergency management officials have authorized up to nearly $50 million in taxpayer dollars to one contractor for open-ended charter flights since Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the state to bring Floridians home from Israel two weeks ago, public records show.
State officials have offered little information about who’s involved in helping Americans leave Israel amid the war with Hamas, besides identifying Project Dynamo, a Tampa-based nonprofit international rescue group founded by ex-military personnel helping to run the mission.
So it’s unclear if all of the money is going to the Israel evacuation or to DeSantis’ controversial migrant flights as well.
Open-government advocates say a full accounting of the costs should be a public record and note that the governor’s office was sued and lost when it tried to hide the expenses for migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard and California.
“There is no exemption for the records sought here,” said Michael Barfield, director of public access initiatives for the Florida Center for Government Accountability.
The Governor’s Office fought the release of records in the migrant flights case tried last year, Barfield said. But the judge ruled against the state, “requiring the release of the names of those transported, the itineraries of the transport, the costs, text messages, etc,” Barfield said.
News organizations used those emails, text messages and other information to report about the migrant flights, said Barbara Petersen, former executive director of the First Amendment Foundation and a founder of FLCGA.
Emails show use of private emails, encryption app in discussing Florida’s migrant relocations
One of the contractors responsible for migrant flights is also involved in the Israeli mission. A search of Division of Financial Services online records by the Orlando Sentinel found that ARS/Global Emergency Management was issued four open-ended purchase orders beginning on Oct. 13 totaling $49.64 million to provide “wet flights.”
Wet flights are aviation-industry lingo for leasing planes with a lot of flexibility built in to fly anywhere, anytime for anyone. Those leasing arrangements often include their own pilots, flight crew, maintenance and airline certificates.
ARS/ Global also received $830,400 this year for flights that took migrants to California, records show.
Since DeSantis first announced his desire to bring Floridians home from Israel, the state has flown close to 700 Americans home, the governor’s office said Tuesday.
Only a fraction of them were Florida residents, said Bryan Stern, CEO of Project Dynamo, which received a $1 million donation from the state and federally funded Volunteer Florida Foundation on Friday.
About 40 of the 270 passengers on the first flight from Tel Aviv to Tampa on Oct. 15 were Floridians, Stern estimated.
Even fewer Floridians were among the 47 passengers on the next flight to Florida from Egypt. Among those were 23 people who had been stranded in Cyprus for five days before a larger plane could be found for them and after an additional two dozen passengers were picked up in Athens, Greece.
Stern told the Sentinel that he blamed the delay in Cyprus on the contractors used by the state that made the leasing arrangements for the planes. He said they rushed to get them in the air to help DeSantis score political points for his sagging political campaign for the presidency.
DeSantis’ Israel rescue operation left Americans stranded on Cyprus
But after First Lady Casey DeSantis announced the $1 million donation to his organization, the official Project Dynamo account on X, formerly known as Twitter, posted that the Sentinel took Stern’s comments “out of context.”
The post said the organization appreciated “Governor DeSantis and his swift decision to help save Americans. The Governor clearly cares about Floridians and Americans and we applaud his support.”
Project Dynamo would not comment this week about what was “out of context.”
Asked by ABC News to comment on the Sentinel article, DeSantis said, of course, officials were in a rush to get Americans out. “What are we going to do, just let them sit there for weeks on end?” he asked
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department has offered more than 5,000 seats and gotten 1,500 people out of Israel, with more charter flights scheduled for Thursday and Sunday.
Bobby Block, executive director of the First Amendment Foundation, said security could be a legitimate exemption for withholding flight information.
But he questioned the legality of the governor’s international airlift, saying he wondered “whether the state is even allowed to act in situations like this.”
