Even after he's come under fire from Dave Aronberg, Alex Sink, the FDP and the Miami Herald, Friedgator has learned using a new tool provided by CFO Sink that he is still paying his campaign political consultant and gave him $140,250 of taxpayer money as recently as 5 days ago. This money is for airing ads that promote Bill McCollum more than the SafeFlorida.net website. The website, come to think of it, could use some of the $1.4 million for a rehab. It's not "legit" as the kids- and Dave Aronberg say.According to CFO Sink and Governor Crist's new vendor search tool the Attorney General's office has spent $1,405,439.00 to Chris Mottola's firm in this fiscal year.
Let's get this straight - he's spent over $1.4 million on these ads and seems to ignore the criticism and plans to spend the other $1.1 million more. As for the other parts of the program, McCollum used volunteer time for his school projects, which are great and include a 50 minute curriculum. He found other funds outside of the $2.5m in the settlement to build his cyber crime's MySpace page and SafeFlorida.net website. So, these ads are the most expensive part of the entire Cyber Safety Program.
So what about the ad, how bad is it? Well here it is:
Notice the full screen shot of his name and the style used by the ad are remarkably similar to ads that political campaigns use. Like these ads from Chris Mottola consulting for Bill McCollum's campaigns here and here. He's standing in the same way he is in the "PSA." The contract for all of these ads were awarded to Mottola and starred Bill McCollum. It's pretty clear why Mottola was picked for these cyber crime awarness ads, but we'll find out for sure when the Attorney General hands over the emails related to it all from the FDP's public records request.
Aside from the content of these ads, McCollum is just clearly more interested in promoting himself than preventing crime. The ads were part of a settlement about consumer fraud with AT&T Wireless. Essentially AT&T wireless and other companies violated consumers rights by charging them for third party ringtones and text messages without fair warning. As part of the settlement, they award the state $2.5 Million "for attorneys fees and costs of this investigation and costs of investigations into related matters" and then asked for another $500,000 for "for consumer education and public awareness regarding safety on the internet." Bill McCollum then went back to the legislature and asked them to reverse that.
That all means he used $500,000 to pay for legal fees and investigate related matters of fraud for consumers in Florida. And $2.5 Million for the ads. He didn't ask for $2.5 Million for either of his cyber crime units within the statewide - Nope. He wanted the money for TV ads starring himself. To put this in perspective, his entire statewide prosecution unit budget for 2009 is a little over $6 million (including cyber crimes but much more), and Bill McCollum paid Mottola and his media buyer around $2.4 Million in his last campaign. So this advertising as big as his last campaign's media budget, and it could have increase the entire statewide prosecution budget by at least 40 percent.
This is sickening. Bill McCollum had done some good work on this issue, but now, he is using money, which was given to the state to protect consumers who were cheated, to cheat the taxpayers and promote himself. He needs to stop these ads now, and use the money for the cyber crime unit itself or for ads that are more PSA and less political campaign commercial.
If he doesn't stop these ads and stop cheating taxpayers - the legislature should demand that money be spent to promote safety - not Bill McCollum. They should do it now.
Who's Bill McCollum?