Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday he quickly will name a replacement to succeed Ken Lawson as executive director of the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO).
The DEO chief manages the state’s much-maligned unemployment system.
Lawson submitted his resignation from the $162,000-a-year position Monday after being shunted aside by DeSantis in April, when COVID-19-related closures overwhelmed the state’s unemployment compensation system, CONNECT, and only about 15 percent of newly unemployed claimants had been paid amid a mushrooming backlog.
In response, DeSantis authorized at least $100 million to upgrade CONNECT, purchased 72 computer servers, reassigned 2,000 state workers to help and tapped Department of Management Services Secretary Jon Satter to manage it.
“Every morning, I should know how many claims have been paid,” DeSantis said during an April 15 news conference. “Right now, it’s hard for me to even get those numbers. That’s unacceptable.”
Lawson’s exclusion left him the fall guy even though he had warned DeSantis a year earlier the CONNECT system Deloitte built for $77 million in 2013 was inadequate and would collapse under pressure, as it did in March when Florida’s unemployment rate nearly tripled to 12.9 percent, leaving hundreds of thousands of jobless residents waiting weeks for their first checks.
In a December 2018 memo, a month before DeSantis was sworn in, Lawson, then president of Visit Florida and a member of the governor’s transition team, said state audits found repeated failures in the CONNECT system and warned it “may struggle in the event claims volume increases in the future.”
It wasn’t until six weeks after the system collapsed and Lawson was sidelined, however, that DeSantis requested an investigation in May into why then-Gov. Rick Scott paid Deloitte $77 million for a website that collapsed “right off the bat.”
“To his credit, (Lawson) submitted a memo to the governor even before the governor got sworn in,” said Sen. Annette Taddeo, D-Miami “This was not a priority of the DeSantis administration.”
While Lawson has been looking for another job, as reported by POLITICO, Deloitte has secured another a job with the state, a $135 million program to modernize its Medicaid database for the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA).
DeSantis said Monday “things needed to change” in DEO, and he will name Lawson’s replacement “very soon.” He criticized the “difficult system” Lawson inherited from the Scott administration and thanked Satter for “getting it going.”
Lawson was chosen to lead DEO by DeSantis after serving in the Department of Business and Professional Regulation and with Visit Florida, the state’s tourism marketing agency.
“In the spirit of moving forward and turning the page, I have resigned from DEO. However, it has been my great honor to serve and to work with each of you. I am extremely grateful for the dedication and focus you all have given to the people of Florida,” Lawson wrote in an email to staff.
According DEO’s dashboard, there were 691,886 continuing claims for unemployment benefits by Floridians last week. It has processed nearly 2.74 million unemployment claims, with 1.77 million claims, or 96.6 percent, paid $11 billion in unemployment compensation since March 1.
Every weekday, Senate Minority Leader Audrey Gibson, D-Jacksonville, posts Florida Unemployment Benefits Watch, which offers an alternate view of DEO’s continuing issues with paying unemployment claims.
On Friday, “Day 174,” Gibson noted, there were “1,714,678 Floridians still waiting for payment.”
