Alex Sink: Cabinet officials are not telling whole story on FDLE's Bailey

Former Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink sent a message to her successors on the state Cabinet on Wednesday, admonishing them for allowing the governor to unilaterally make the decision to replace the head of the state's law enforcement agency which under the Florida Constitution they, as a group, oversee.

"The thing Im most distressed about is, in order to terminate the head of a Cabinet agency, you need the governor or one other person -- or you need three votes,'' Sink told the Herald/Times, referring to the surprise ouster by Gov. Rick Scott of Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Gerald Bailey.

"It looks like the governor on his own decided he was going to fire Jerry Bailey but you cant do it that way,'' said Sink, a Democrat who oversaw FDLE for four years as a member of the Cabinet and lost to Scott in a bid for governor in 2010. "Thethree Cabinet officers are independently elected and they need to start standing up and take responsibility for it. One of them had to agree to it."

After voting to approve the Scott-picked replacement of FDLE on Tuesday, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam on Wednesday said he was misled by the governor and his staff. Putnam, however, did not call for restoring Bailey's term or for replacing him with someone other than Rick Swearingen, the governor's former FDLE escortwhom Scott chose to succeed Bailey.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said after the Cabinet meeting that she was told that Bailey had voluntarily resigned, as did Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater.

"For me as a public citizen. I want to know which of the three of them agreed to terminate Jerry Bailey,'' she said. "One of them had agreed to terminate him."

Unlike the cabinet structure in many other states, the Florida Constitution requires that the FDLE report to the governor and the Cabinet and the hiring, and firing, of the FDLE commissioner must receive unanimous approval of the Cabinet. The Cabinet is comprised of the agriculture commissioner, the CFO,the attorney general and the governor, who gets a super-vote in the event of a tie.

The shared-control of the agency was designed to make it more difficult for a single officer to control and politicize the law enforcment arm charged with investigating corruption and state-level crime.

FDLE is currently charged with investigating nearly 100 inmate deaths that occurred in Florida prisons, which are under Scott's control. It has also been asked to investigate allegations that the governor's office has destroyed public records, or intentionally failed to turn them over in violation of the state public records act.

"The Florida way is, we have never politicize law enforcement,'' Sink said. "Maybe they do that in Louisiana where all those staff people come from. Jerry Bailey had incredible respect. He didnt have a political bone in his body."

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Alex Sink: Cabinet officials are not telling whole story on FDLE's Bailey