“I am here as a dad,” said resident Tim Prather, who stepped up to the microphone in Panama City Beach during a hearing in Florida Power & Light’s case to hike electricity rates.
“I have been an FPL customer for over 30 years,” said Rachel Keesling at a similar hearing, held virtually.
“I have lived in South Florida all 27 years of my life, and I am a business owner,” said Daniel Bogardus at another near Miami.
Each had one more thing in common: They worked for businesses or organizations that have received financial backing from the state’s largest energy provider and failed to disclose that fact when they testified.
They weren’t alone.
The Tampa Bay Times identified 49 people with connections to the utility who testified in support of the rate hikes. They are from foundations, charities, chambers of commerce and other organizations that have been the beneficiary of support from Florida Power & Light. The connections range from direct payments to companies and nonprofits to having a utility employee serving on their boards. Eight more speakers were former employees, several of whom did not initially disclose their affiliation. Some speakers did, however, acknowledge that they were asked to testify at rate hearings by someone at the utility.
People from these organizations showed up to every one of the 10 customer service hearings, held from Pensacola to Miami Gardens. Many did not disclose their affiliation with the utility until opposing lawyers asked.
In response to those follow-up questions, the dad, Prather, revealed he is the incoming president of the Bay Education Foundation, which has received donations from Florida Power & Light.
The loyal customer, Keesling, leads the Southwest Florida League of Cities, of which the utility is a sponsor. And the business owner, Bogardus, owns a warehouse company that lists Florida Power & Light as a client.
Bogardus said the utility did not ask him to speak at the hearing and declined to answer further questions. Keesling declined to comment. Prather didn’t respond to a voicemail or email.
Leveraging its relationships with various groups and nonprofits is part of a longstanding practice that’s been documented in Florida Power & Light’s previous cases before regulators: Those that receive support from the company turn up when the company needs them. The pattern was highlighted by news reports in 2020, sparking criticism and highlighting how one nonprofit, the Florida chapter of the NAACP, had reversed its support.
Since then, Florida Power & Light hasn’t changed its relationships with charities, but the foundation that facilitates the company’s donations has made them harder to track. The NextEra Energy Foundation, for the past four years, has stopped listing individual donations in its nonprofit paperwork that it files to the federal government.
State Sen. Don Gaetz, a Panhandle Republican who sponsored legislation that would have curbed utility company profits, said it’s a business strategy for Florida Power & Light to associate itself with good causes.
“It’s not illegal, it’s not unusual, it’s not surprising — it’s a clever tactic,“ he said. ”But it should be seen for what it is, and that’s quid pro quo.”
Florida Power & Light did not respond to specific questions about its rationale for recruiting speakers to testify at rate case hearings.
“FPL has helped power Florida for nearly a century and has a long tradition of giving back to the communities we serve,” spokesperson Sarah Gatewood said in a statement. “We believe it’s responsible corporate citizenship to promote economic growth in the places where we do business, support the communities where our own employees live and raise their families, and to partner with organizations that seek to improve the lives of all Floridians.”
Providing counterpoints
The positive comments from supportive groups break up what can otherwise feel like a litany of testimonials from Floridians talking about how higher bills, in service to higher profits, would add one more burden to dwindling household budgets.
“I want to build a family,” said Laylah Holiday, a Pensacola resident, who said she just got married. “But with rate increases and stuff like this, I know many people, they are afraid to have kids. They are afraid to expand their families because they are afraid that they won’t be able to afford that.”
“I am going to go home tonight and cuddle up to an icepack because I can’t afford to turn the air conditioning on,” said Margaret Albrecht, a school district employee, told utility regulators. “I heat water on the stove, not in a water heater because it is cheaper to do it on the stove. … Where do you think I am going to cut next? Huh?”
But praise for Florida Power & Light blunts these comments. In addition to the nonprofit leaders, the Times counted eight speakers at the hearings who were former employees for the company — some of whom presented themselves only as customers until directly asked by lawyers.
Some of the speakers said that Florida Power & Light had asked them to speak. The hearings were held by the Florida Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities.
One who called into a virtual meeting, a West Palm Beach resident named Adam Wright, said he felt conflicted.
“I, as a consumer, would really prefer my bill not be raised unnecessarily,” he told regulators. “However, I was asked by a friend of mine who is an FPL employee to call in and speak to the quality of service based on what I have experienced.”
Gaetz noted this irony: Some of the leaders of nonprofits that expressed support for a rate hike represent constituents who may be harmed by higher bills.
“You have local chambers of commerce sending their executives,” he said. “It’s strange because the members of that chamber of commerce … they’re probably not a big fan of increasing the costs applicable to their small businesses.”
The charities whose leaders supported the hike have missions ranging from disaster response to racial acceptance to ending homelessness. Deborah Koch, executive director of the American Red Cross’s Miami chapter, called in to a hearing to support the hikes, praising the company’s charity work and its customer service. In an email to the Times, she said she was attending the hearing as an individual and not as a representative of the Red Cross.
The nonprofit received more than $230,000 in donations from the charitable arm of Florida Power & Light’s parent company in 2019, the most recent data publicly available.
A new layer of secrecy
The reason that no donation data has been made public since 2019 is because of a paperwork change made by the NextEra Energy Foundation.
In recent public tax filings, the only contributor it lists is Florida Power & Light. The foundation then turns around and sends money back to the company. In 2022, for instance, the foundation received $12,160,606 from the utility. The same year, it returned the exact same amount back to Florida Power & Light, documents show.
It’s unclear what the utility does with the money next. When asked by the Times, a spokesperson for Florida Power & Light did not directly respond, only saying the company follows all applicable laws, and that the donations are funded by shareholders and employees, not customers’ bills.
“The NextEra Energy Foundation, a corporate foundation of NextEra Energy, Inc. and Florida Power & Light Company, contributes to hundreds of nonprofit groups throughout the nation in communities where NextEra Energy’s companies operate,” said Gatewood, the company spokesperson.
In public hearings during rate cases, residents can testify before the Florida Public Service Commission. This June 2024 hearing in Largo was for Duke Energy Florida’s rate hike request last year. (Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times/TNS)
The Times also asked the company to provide a list of all NextEra Energy Foundation donations in the years since it stopped listing them on federal records, but the company declined.
The opaqueness of NextEra’s charitable filings differs from the paperwork submitted by other utility company foundations, including for Duke Energy and the Atlanta-based Southern Company, which have consistently disclosed long lists of organizations to which they’ve donated each year.
Charity experts told the Times they had never seen a foundation fill out 990s this way before.
“As a bottom-line issue, they can’t send it back to the for-profit (company) and call it a ‘charitable contribution.’ That just doesn’t make sense,” said Doug White, a longtime charity adviser who’s authored books on nonprofit management.
If Florida Power & Light keeps the contributions from the foundation, it would likely violate federal rules related to self-dealing, experts said. If Florida Power & Light is taking the foundation’s contributions and then sending it to charities, this method of filling out the paperwork is eliminating the transparency the tax forms are intended to convey.
“Whether or not a rule is being strictly broken, it’s clear that the spirit of the rules are not being followed,” wrote Laurie Styron, CEO of nonprofit watchdog group CharityWatch, in an email to the Times. “Since the foundation doesn’t provide a detailed description of these circular transactions, it’s difficult for the public to judge whether or not the charitable purpose is being met or to quantify the for-profit’s accomplishments.”
During this summer’s public hearings, it wasn’t only utility insiders who noticed the large turnout from people representing nonprofits are other groups with ties to Florida Power & Light. A few Floridians, who’d come to plead with regulators not to increase their bills, also remarked on it.
“Why is everybody here who is in support of FPL only representing an organization?” said Panhandle resident Declan McGurk, when it was his turn at the microphone.
“Where are just the regular people, the people that are just customers that are coming and saying, ‘We love FPL, we are fine with a rate hike?’”
Since these meetings, Florida Power & Light has announced a potential settlement in its rate case, lowering its historic, nearly $10 billion rate hike request to almost $7 billion over the next four years. Still, if approved as-is, the company’s shareholders would earn among the highest rates of profit in the nation.
Consumer advocates, including the Legislature-appointed public counsel, have argued that the settlement grants big breaks to corporations in exchange for high costs for the residents who make up the vast majority of the utility’s customer base.
The public counsel then took the unusual step of proposing an alternative settlement without the company’s buy-in, that would roughly halve the original rate hike request. In a filing Friday, Florida Power & Light slammed the public counsel’s move, saying it lacked legal legitimacy and was a “ham-handed media stunt that attempts to turn this proceeding into a circus.”
Regulators with the Florida Public Service Commission have not yet said how they will handle the dueling proposals. But lawyers will debate and dissect the utility’s arguments in hearings scheduled for October, with a final decision on the rate hike expected by the end of the year.
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