Slick Oil Storms Tallahassee
By Julie Hauserman
Senior Advisory Board
Progress Florida

Times may be lean for us ordinary Floridians, but fat cash is flowing in Tallahassee these days. Mystery oil drillers are spreading big bucks around, greasing the Legislature to allow dirty oil rigs to threaten our perfectly nice, white beaches.

It’s really something to watch. The drilling group’s official name is Florida Energy Associates, but we ought to call them Slick Oil, because we have no idea who they are.

Slick Oil has hired Florida spinners and lobbyists and fixers of all sorts, and they are waving around stuffed wallets and buying up many people who should know better than to sacrifice our world-class beaches for corporate greed.

Everywhere Slick Oil goes, it leaves behind steaming piles of dubious claims. We’ll get money! And jobs! And cheap gas! And a pony!

With all the check-writing and back-slapping, the politicos don’t seem to care that we don’t know whether these oil companies are American or foreign, we don’t know their safety records, we don’t know their financial stability, and we don’t have any idea if they’d provide any local jobs.

All we know for sure is that they apparently have cash to burn while the rest of us are broke.

“Just when you think things can’t get any more dysfunctional in Tallahassee, we get this,” state Rep Rick Kriseman told a Tampa crowd as he described Slick Oil’s last-minute bill to put rigs off our beaches during last spring’s legislative session. (The Florida House approved it, thankfully the Florida Senate did not.)

But of course, now Slick Oil is busy bankrolling Tallahassee in advance of this year’s legislative session and election season.

Only two guys from Slick Oil have been identified in the newspapers – Doug Daniels, a Daytona Beach attorney, and M. Lance Phillips, who told the St. Petersburg Times he’s a Texas oil man.

Here’s the only other news we have about Mr. Phillips: The Dallas Morning News describes his association with a man accused of a colossal financial fraud similar to the one perpetrated by Bernie Madoff. The man is R. Allen Stanford, a billionaire financier who has been charged with a Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of $7 billion.

Phillips, according to the paper, helped connect Stanford to U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, for campaign contributions in 2004.

“That has become something of an embarrassment for Sessions, since Stanford now stands accused of swindling investors out of $7 billion,” The St. Petersburg Times reported. “Phillips said he helped Stanford only as a favor to Stanford's father, one of his Mexia (Texas) neighbors.”

Stanford’s father, the Security and Exchange Commission contends, was part of his son’s investment group.

All of this – the secretive oil group, the cash wafting through the halls of the Legislature, the corporate greed at every turn, and the enormous threat this political game poses to a state with a tourism industry that provides $62 billion and 948,700 jobs - is enough to make one pause.

But not in Tallahassee. Legislative leaders are pushing full steam ahead for their friends in Slick Oil.

We ought to put up a statue in Tallahassee, to memorialize what goes on here. Other cities have statues of town founders, or famous musicians or local heroes. Ours would have two guys in expensive suits, passing an envelope hand to hand. The plaque underneath it would say: Shill Here, Shill Now.