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Sugar Coating
Those dark days of American business come to mind in the aftermath of the November election, when Florida's sugar companies spent their way into the hearts and minds of the state's electorate. It's not just that U.S. Sugar and Flo-Sun, the two industry giants that bankrolled the campaign, managed to convince voters to vote down Constitutional Amendment Four on the ballot, which would have put a penny-a-pound levy on sugar produced in Florida to go toward cleaning up the Everglades. More troubling is that the industry has gotten its way by forging a Faustian pact with one of the most anti-progressive forces in the state, thereby frustrating efforts by thinking business and political leaders to elevate the state's economy (see "Can Florida Compete?" in last month's Florida Trend).
Those are pretty broad charges, but the industry's tactics in the campaign leading up to the November ballot make it clear that Big Sugar pollutes more than just the Everglades.
To get its way, Sugar joined forces with the Tax Cap Committee, the creation of David Biddulph, a New Smyrna Beach business consultant whose unhappiness over property taxes on his family's beach house in the 1980s led him to create anti-tax initiatives. Biddulph was instrumental in the successful 1992 "Save Our Homes" initiative, which limits assessment-value increases. That twisted piece of taxation hocus-pocus, which effectively capped assessment increases on the most valuable property (it should have been called "save our waterfront homes"), shifted more of the burden of property taxes to businesses and poorer homeowners.
The sugar companies, seeing Biddulph as the perfect front to push their own agenda, put their lawyers and money to work creating more taxation havoc in his name. Like "Save Our Homes," Sugar's initiatives came cloaked in the guise of a valiant defense of Little Taxpayer against Big Government.
In last month's election, Sugar's campaign led voters to support Amendment One, which requires that two-thirds of all voters who go to the polls approve any tax voted into the state constitution. That bit of mischief, making it more difficult to fund Florida's already underfunded state government, was written and paid for by Big Sugar as a fallback in case Amendment Four passed. (One would likely have made Four invalid.)
Sugar is appallingly skilled at fudging the facts, to put it kindly. In fighting the penny-a-pound fee, the industry made it sound as if that fee would put farmers out of business.
That's not a new claim by the industry. It's been saying that for about 60 years in order to justify a government subsidy in the form of loans to farmers and limits on sugar imports. That indirect subsidy causes raw sugar prices in the U.S. to be about double those on the world market. Consumers pay at the supermarket for that bit of corporate welfare.
As Florida Trend noted in its October 1995 issue ("Sweet Talk"), sugar companies closely guard their balance sheets, even from their Uncle Sugar in Washington. But Trend figured that Flo-Sun, with a 7.4% share of the U.S. sugar market, enjoyed a profit margin of 22% or at least $75 million in pre-tax profits.
What frosts this taxpayer/sugareater is that, by consuming their products, I help implicitly to finance U.S. Sugar and Flo-Sun's low-road campaigns against the commonweal.
The sugar companies spent an estimated $24 million on their propaganda campaign, outspending backers of Amendment Four by a two-to-one margin. That eclipsed the amount paid for the casino initiative two years ago and made the total of $15 million spent by both candidates in the 1994 gubernatorial race seem like chump change.
While it's no revelation that money often buys elections, it's still a little baffling how easily voters can be suckered. I asked Bob Joffee, director of the Mason-Dixon Florida Poll, what his findings showed, and he said that the initiative never had a chance. By late October, only 41% of the voters supported it, which he blames on the complexity of the initiative's language. It wasn't clear how the money would be spent, a weakness that Sugar parlayed to argue that this tax inevitably would lead to an income tax in Florida - an incredible stretch of logic.
Interestingly, Amendment's Five and Six did pass. The latter a technical measure creating a "trust fund" to preserve clean-up funds from the kind of political hanky-panky that has plagued the state lottery. Amendment Five reads: "Those who cause pollution ... shall be primarily responsible for paying the costs of abatement of that pollution."
Joffee dismisses this as "the environmental equivalent of a pooper-scooper law," but Clay Henderson, president of the Florida Audubon Society, argues that Amendment Five "puts Sugar on the same level of liability as the Exxon Valdez."
Perhaps. Big Sugar didn't even bother with Amendment Five, probably holding its money for the next round when it can be expected to throw millions of dollars at lawyers, lobbyists and legislators who will argue the measure's impact.
To date, Big Sugar's relatively modest commitment to Everglades cleanup amounts to a $232 million chunk of the $800 million first phase. Total restoration could cost $5 billion.
Meanwhile, the spin-masters of Big Sugar are at work on other fronts. The sugar companies, along with developers, are behind a nettlesome amendment fronted by the Biddulph crowd that will be appearing at your local polling place. This one, quaintly called People's Property Rights amendment, is really aimed squarely at land use, growth management and zoning laws - areas of extreme interest to the owners of the vast tracts of sugar cane rimming lower Lake Okeechobee. Stay tuned.
