Spending on Florida’s out-of-state employees continues to raise questions

For the third time in as many weeks, lawmakers have summoned Pedro Allende, the head of the Department of Management Services (DMS) appointed in 2022 by Gov. Ron DeSantis, to answer questions about the hiring of four highly paid out-of-state-based employees who commute periodically to Tallahassee at taxpayer expense.

Allende did not attend last week’s House oversight subcommittee meeting in the state Capitol. Instead, he appeared at a cybersecurity conference in Washington, D.C., dispatching to the Tallahassee meeting a surrogate who struggled at times to give definitive answers. 

Allende, who lives in Miami, has since been invited for Wednesday’s session but has not yet confirmed his attendance.

As the Florida Trident first reported, at issue is the hiring on March 3, 2023, of four out-of-state employees as part of DMS’ “Data Team”: 

/State Data Director Edward Rhyne of Maryland, who is paid $205,485;

/Computer & Info Systems Manager Caleb Georgeson of Idaho, who earns $103,265;

/Database Administrator Leann Trosclair of West Virginia, whose salary is reported as $125,678, 

/And Data Scientist Nicholas Evancich, also of Maryland, paid $147,952.

Travel costs, which totaled more than $56,000 in just two years, were reimbursed separately, according to Florida state records.

At last week’s meeting, committee members grilled Tom Berger, the DMS Deputy Secretary in charge of business operations dispatched to field questions in Allende’s absence, over the need for remote employees, rather than Florida-based ones, and whether the agency even looked at or opened the positions to qualified Floridians.

“What they’re saying is these are the only four people in the country. I’d like to see if that was true, based on how they were recruited,” said State Rep. Vicki Lopez, of Miami-Dade, who chairs the House State Administration Budget Subcommittee, one of several Florida House oversight committees conducting the House’s own probe into wasteful agency spending.

Reading a statement sent from Allende to committee members, Berger said the hiring decisions were Allende’s. He described the moves as “exclusively within executive discretion.”

He did not mention in his statement whether previous relationships may have influenced any of the hirings. 

For example, Edward Rhyne, who had the highest travel reimbursement bills at $42,000, previously worked at the U.S. Department of Energy during at least a portion of the time Allende, too, was employed at the federal agency, according to reports.

State records list both Allende and Rhyne as officers in a non-profit company, Emerging Risk Project Corporation, formed in 2021 and based in Miami. Questions sent to both Rhyne and Allende about the corporate venture have remained unanswered.

In response to questions about the apparent inability to find equally qualified Floridians, Berger defended the out-of-state hirings as “exceedingly high talent. It is not found everywhere,” a description the Republican Speaker of the House recently contested. 

The state employees “should be residing in Florida,” said Speaker Daniel Perez when asked about the remote positions in a recent interview on the “Deeper Dive” podcast. “We have enough talent here in Florida to where we can have our employees reside in our own state.”

DMS is responsible for managing various workforce and business-related functions, including real estate, procurement, human resources, retirement and fleet management. For the 2022-23 fiscal year, the Legislature appropriated $1.1 billion to DMS, according to a recent state audit that found, among other issues, the agency’s inability to accurately track the number of state vehicles under its supervision.