Lobbying compensation: Tampa firms shine in third-quarter lobbying pay

Media

Lobbying compensation: Tampa firms shine in third-quarter lobbying pay

FLORIDA POLITICS
By Drew Wilson
November 12, 2019

Lobbying compensation reports for the third quarter aren’t due until Nov. 14, but some firms got their paperwork in early.

Among the early arrivals are reports from Mark Anderson, Louis Betz & Associates, Moore Relations and Sunrise Consulting Group.

The filings show each of the Tampa Bay-area firms could have earned six figures for the July through September reporting period.

Lobbying firms report their income in ranges covering $10,000 increments. Florida Politics uses the middle number of each range to estimate quarterly pay. Firms also list a broad range for their overall pay on their legislative and executive lobbying reports.

Mark Anderson

Anderson juggled 18 legislative clients and 16 executive branch clients last quarter.

Per his reports, the legislative effort netted he and fellow lobbyist Joshua Burkett an estimated $90,000.

Sitting alone at the top of the report was the Chief Executive Officers of Management Companies, which paid between $10,000 and $20,000 for the quarter. The rest of the list paid up to $10,000 apiece.

Anderson’s executive branch report showed another $85,000 in pay, with Chief Executive Officers of Management Companies again popping up with an estimated $15,000 in pay.

The bottom line of each report shows between $50,000 and $100,000 in compensation, giving Anderson’s third-quarter haul a floor of $100,000.

View Original Article – Florida Politics

110 South Monroe Street, Suite I
Tallahassee, FL 32301

    Lobbying compensation: Small firms are ‘little but fierce’

    Media

    Lobbying compensation: Small firms are ‘little but fierce’

    FLORIDA POLITICS
    By Drew Wilson
    August 23, 2019

    To paraphrase the Bard, the state’s small influence firms may be but little, but they’re still fierce.

    Lobbying compensation reports for the second quarter are starting to trickle in. Florida lobbyists report their pay quarterly. Reports for the period covering April 1 through June 30 are due Aug. 14.

    The reports disclose how much pay lobbyists and lobbying firms receive from their clients in ranges covering $10,000 increments up to $50,000, after which the exact amount of pay must be reported.

    Florida Politics uses the middle number of the reported ranges to estimate quarterly pay. That still shows some healthy revenue for even the smaller concerns.

    Mark Anderson

    Mark Anderson and his lobbying partner Joshua Burkett represented 18 clients in the second quarter and brought in up to $200,000 for their efforts.

    The duo’s legislative compensation report shows two clients paid an estimated $15,000 apiece: Chief Executive Officers of Management Companies and Woz U Education. The remainder of Anderson’s and Burkett’s contracts netted between $1 and $10,000.

    Per the last line of the report, they earned no less than $50,000 plying the Legislature and could have earned as much as $100,000. It was the same case on the executive report, where the team juggled 16 principals.

    The same two clients were again marked down in the $10,000 to $20,000 range with the rest netting the pair up to $10,000 each.

    View Original Article – Florida Politics

    110 South Monroe Street, Suite I
    Tallahassee, FL 32301

      Millions of homeowners would be hurt by bills deregulating short-term rentals

      Media

      Millions of homeowners would be hurt by bills deregulating short-term rentals

      Bills to deregulate short-term rentals would do great harm to millions of Florida homeowners and their neighborhoods, writes Mark Anderson, who represents homeowners associations and management companies
      Bills to deregulate short-term rentals would do great harm to millions of Florida homeowners and their neighborhoods, writes Mark Anderson, who represents homeowners associations and management companies

      SOUTH FLORIDA SUN SENTINEL
      By Mark Anderson
      April 19, 2019

      Florida is home to the largest number of residents living in a community association.

      Some 10 million homeowners live in neighborhoods with community associations and are protected by time-honored, deed restrictions adopted by a majority and, in some cases, a super majority vote of those who pay the bills and will be most impacted by them — homeowners.

      These homeowners voluntarily pay over $2 billion every year to protect their quality of life, home values, and property rights through enforcement and compliance through deed restrictions.

      Mark Anderson
      Mark Anderson (Handout) 

      Now, renting out one’s home or a bedroom on a short-term basis is nothing new. However, our laws have not kept up. In fact, Florida actually went the other way to benefit those who exploit home-sharing as for-profit, commercial businesses under the false pretense of “property rights”.

      And guess where those unregulated, commercial businesses with no offices are headquartered? Right inside Florida’s neighborhoods.

      These unregulated businesses then went even further and convinced our Legislature to remove what little oversight that existed, with some exceptions for cities who had existing rules, leaving our neighborhoods exposed as a last line of defense against unregulated proliferation of these commercial businesses. Our neighborhoods, in many cases, changed almost overnight. A buyer’s market is a good thing, but in neighborhoods, the opposite happened.

      Homes that were sold were snatched up by unidentified operators who did not occupy the homes they purchased. Homes were then rented out by the night with no protections for those living next door, no remedies for guests if something went wrong and no ability for our neighborhoods to know who lived next door, who these operators were or if they were licensed to do business at all.

      While some Associations already had protections in place, many did not. Those which did not amended their covenants to halt further proliferation of these commercial businesses inside of their neighborhoods and those efforts continue to this day.

      In the 2018 legislative session, some of these commercial operators tried to remove any local government or neighborhood oversight. The Florida Legislature thankfully sided with homeowners and rejected this idea.

      However, this year, some lawmakers are backing bills to remove the last vestiges of the few remaining local rules in place to protect the public. These bills unequivocally state that constitutional “property rights” apply to anyone who chooses to rent their home, or multiple homes or hundreds of homes by the night, with no regard for the rules they agreed to comply with.

      They say that because vacation rentals are “residential in nature” they therefore are permitted to exist in our neighborhoods, again, with no acknowledgment of the rights of millions of our fellow Floridians who contractually agreed to play by the rules.

      At best, these bills, HB 987 and SB 824, create confusion and conflict with adopted or yet to be adopted protections for our neighborhoods, forcing our Associations to increase costs by hiring pricey lawyers to defend the rights of their homeowners.

      At worst, these bills violate deed restrictions for an entire neighborhood by allowing anyone who owns a home — or hundreds of homes they don’t live in — to disregard the rules, which they, as a homeowner, legally agreed to comply with.

      This is wrong for our homeowners, our economy, and our state.

       

      View Original Article – South Florida Sun Sentinel

      110 South Monroe Street, Suite I
      Tallahassee, FL 32301

        Historic American Beach Looks To A Future That Would Leave Septic Tanks In The Past (Audio)

        Media

        Historic American Beach Looks To A Future That Would Leave Septic Tanks In The Past (Audio)

        NPR/WJCT
        By Brendan Rivers
        January 25, 2019

        The Nassau Board of County Commissioners has made historic American Beach’s conversion from septic tanks to general sewer a priority and they’re lobbying the state government for financial aid.

        “I was retained by the Board of County Commissioners to assist with working with our legislative delegation and with our legislature, with the governor’s office and the Department of Environmental Protection to see what we could do to help locate some opportunities to help finance and to help pay for the septic tank to sewer conversion project at American Beach,” said Mark Anderson, Lobbyist for the Nassau County Board of Commissioners.

        American Beach is a small historic beach community on Amelia Island, Northeast of Jacksonville and South of Fernandina Beach.

        Crowd gathered at American Beach. CREDIT THE AMELIA ISLAND MUSEUM OF HISTORY

         

        In 1935, 33 acres of shorefront property on Amelia Island, in the area now known as American Beach, was purchased by a black-owned Jacksonville business called Afro-American Life Insurance Company, also known as “the Afro.” The company’s president, A. L. Lewis, invited employees to use the beach and hosted company events there.

        The company made two subsequent land acquisitions, expanding the community’s size to 216 acres.

        In 1940 the Afro offered unsold building lots to the wider black community. At the time, segregation was in full effect and African-Americans weren’t allowed on many beaches, so American Beach became a popular vacation destination among African-Americans across the country.

        “I think the actual phrase was ‘to have recreation and relaxation without humiliation,’” Anderson said. “I think it was the only beach, at that time, in our state that was open to African-Americans. So it has a deep and unique history with the state of Florida, and of particular significance to Nassau County and to Northeast Florida.”

        But the community changed drastically following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

        Homes in American Beach. CREDIT THE AMELIA ISLAND MUSEUM OF HISTORY

         

        “Former American Beach vacationers and day-trippers now frolicked on Miami Beach, raced up and down the wide sands at Daytona, wore out the cobblestones of Savannah, and rode high at St. Simons Island,” said local historian Marsha Dean Phelts. “All along the shores of the East Coast, blacks explored areas that had once been off limits.”

        “The three-day weekends at American Beach shrank to one day; the Sunday visitors and day-trippers no longer stayed overnight. Loaded buses no longer caused a bottleneck at the crossroads” she said. “With so little business most of the restaurants and resort establishments closed.”

        The National Register of Historic Places has since designated the original 33 acres as worthy of historic preservation and the National Park Service has been given an 8.5-acre sand dune called NaNa at the center of the community, which is now part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve.

        Now American Beach is trying to preserve its environmental assets – as are communities across Florida – by getting off of septic and onto general sewage.

        Researchers say septic tanks are a major factor behind recent spikes in harmful algal blooms, but they cause other problems as well.

        During Hurricane Irma, cities were flooded with raw sewage as septic systems were inundated with water. Additionally, septic systems leak nitrogen into ground waters and the nitrogen enrichment of the planet is considered a strong contributor to global warming.

        There are more than 2.6 million septic tanks in Florida. Anderson said the conversion project in American Beach would target about 300 units, and that alone could cost more than $7 million.

        “It’s expensive no matter how you square it,” he said. “Everywhere in the state, this is a big, big cost driver and local governments just can’t do it themselves. That’s why the legislature is setting up a means of helping local governments pay for this.”

        But Anderson said it’s going to have to be a shared expense.

        “It’s not just going to be something that the state pays for,” he said. “The folks who live there are going to bear some of the cost, the county’s going to bear some of the cost and the state of Florida will bear some of the cost.”

        Anderson said he met with the governor’s office about the project this week and he’s been meeting with House and Senate leadership since the week prior.

        “We understand this is a very significant priority for our legislature. Senator [Aaron] Bean and Representative Cord Byrd are our two legislators from Nassau County. They’ve done a great job in really making this a priority,” Anderson said. “But we’ve got a lot of competing projects out there among many, many other cities and counties. So it’s our hope that we can get the legislature to focus on this and to make it a priority, just as our Board of County Commissioners has.”

        Brendan Rivers can be reached at brivers@wjct.org, 904-358-6396 or on Twitter at @BrendanRivers.

        View Original Article – NPR/WJCT

        110 South Monroe Street, Suite I
        Tallahassee, FL 32301