Last month, after the Orlando Sentinel published an eye-popping investigative piece on freshman legislator Carolina Amesty — featuring unpaid taxes, false claims and questions about the private university she works for — Amesty took to Twitter to tell residents she was bringing home the bacon.
In one post, Amesty shared a photo of herself delivering an oversized check to Orange County. “I’m proud to have delivered a check for $7.9 million today to the Orange County commission,” she wrote. “I’m working hard, and delivering, for families in Central Florida!”
Amesty definitely championed a number of successful funding requests for local projects — though Nicole Wilson, the commissioner for the district supposedly receiving the check, said no check presentation ever actually took place, that Amesty had just gotten a photo of herself outside Wilson’s office, something Amesty later acknowledged.
But at least one of Amesty’s touted funding accomplishments wasn’t local at all — and raised bright, red flags.
The one that caught my eye was at the bottom of another pork-promoting post the freshman GOP legislator had shared a few weeks earlier: “CAROLINA AMESTY SECURES MILLIONS FOR OUR COMMUNITY.”
The spending in question: $3 million in taxpayer money going to the relatively small Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce for something called a “Flood & Stormwater Predictive Analytic Solution Pilot.”
That just seemed … odd. Millions of tax dollars for a stormwater project going — not to any state or local environmental or public works division — but to a South Florida-based chamber of commerce.
So I pulled Amesty’s funding request. That’s where I learned that the money wasn’t for Central Florida, but meant to benefit the tiny Village of Key Biscayne 240 miles away. In fact, her sponsored request listed only one “documented show of support” to justify this $3 million appropriation — an alleged “Letter of support from the village manager of the Village of Key Biscayne.”
I say “alleged,” because the House Speaker’s office said it had no evidence of such a letter. That’s probably because the aforementioned village manager said he never wrote one. “Someone must have written that into the form inadvertently,” said village manager Steven C. Williamson, “because to my knowledge, there is no such memo.”
So now we have a couple of issues — an Orlando representative requesting money on behalf of a tiny town more than 200 miles away run by a man who says he never wrote the letter cited as backup.
But that’s only the beginning.
Had Amesty’s fellow legislators bothered to actually vet the appropriations request before voting to give away $3 million, they would’ve seen several other troubling admissions.
One was the answer to this question: “Has the appropriate state agency for administering the funding, if the request were appropriated, been contacted?” The answer: “No.”
Then there was this question: “Has the need for the funds been documented by a study, completed by an independent 3rd party, for the area to be served?” Again, the answer was “No.”
So, according to the funding request, no independent group said this $3 million was needed. The appropriate state agency hadn’t been contacted. And the only city that supposedly said the money was needed said it never submitted the request.
Then there’s the actual recipient of these $3 million — the Hispanic chamber, a group that had assets of less than $200,000 in 2019 and who the IRS website says had its tax-exempt status “revoked for not filing a Form 990-series return or notice for three consecutive years.”
Rep. Amesty leaves trail of falsehoods, unpaid taxes and bills, records show
The funding request said the money would go to the chamber’s “Institute of Sustainable Water Solutions” — a group that has no proven record of success for the simple reason that it doesn’t seem to have even existed when Amesty’s funding request was submitted. Records from the Florida Division of Corporations show the group filed its first paperwork on March 23 — more than a month after Amesty and a South Florida senator asked to give the group money.
After I asked Amesty about all this in an email, she responded Tuesday, saying: “Any issues with appropriations requests are of the utmost concern to me,” adding that she had asked legislative staffers to look into them.
She said the chamber had approached her about the money and said the request form had been filled out by the chamber’s CEO, Julio Fuentes, “under penalty of perjury.” She stressed that her legislative peers and even Gov. Ron DeSantis had approved her request and said it was the job of the House appropriations committee staff to vet the funding request she sponsored.
If I was attaching my name on a request for millions of tax dollars, I’d like to think that I’d vet the accuracy myself.
Still, Amesty, 28, said she’d alerted staff to the inconsistencies in her own sponsored request and suggested I direct other questions to Fuentes.
I did. In an email, Fuentes said the chamber planned on using the tax dollars to work with “Hispanic entrepreneurs and trailblazers working on innovations related to water” and be “a facilitator of water-related solutions throughout the State of Florida, providing support such as bringing together complementary innovative business solutions, identifying and facilitating grant opportunities, and serving as a resource for information sharing.”
I honestly don’t know what all that means.
The general idea seems to be that they’re vowing to work on early-warning detection for flooding and mitigation issues, starting with the Village of Key Biscayne — which, remember, said it never wrote the mystical letter requesting the money — and that the pioneering solutions they develop will then be shared statewide. (That’s why Amesty said she claimed in her tweet that this $3 million request for a South Florida chamber to help a South Florida town would help “our community” … because the ideas they come up with could one day help communities here as well.)
Delivering for Central Florida! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/QQZHU13vKP
— Carolina Amesty (@carolina_amesty) July 8, 2023
I then asked Fuentes for more details — about the missing letter, the newly created “Institute” and about his organization’s status with the IRS. He didn’t respond after that.
House Speaker Paul Renner also didn’t respond to questions about the money his chamber approved and why the state’s own storm- and flood-water experts weren’t the ones leading this effort. Nor did a spokesman for the state’s environmental department nor the South Florida senate sponsor, freshman Miami-Dade Republican Alexis Calatayud. The Hispanic chamber endorsed both Amesty and Calatayud in their campaigns last fall.
Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here — whether this is some shady money-grab or whether it will turn out to be the best investment of public money in the history of Florida water management. Or maybe something in between.
What I do know is that, according to the sponsor’s own filing, this project was not deemed necessary by any state department, was not endorsed by the South Florida city that is supposed to benefit from it and was not vetted by any independent experts.
And those all seem like issues that should be probed now, since they apparently weren’t vetted when they really should’ve been — before the spending was approved.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com