PASCO COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) — After more than a year of secrecy, the pop music entertainer Pitbull finally released the terms of his deal with Visit Florida that reveals he earned $1 million dollars to promote tourism—money that You Paid For. That disclosure comes two days after Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran filed suit to make the contract public.
“I want to applaud Pitbull,” said Corcoran. “It wasn’t his fight.” Corcoran insists that Visit Florida, the private marketing company paid $78 million by the state to promote tourism, should never have agreed to keep the deal confidential.
The centerpiece of Pitbull’s deal is the “Sexy Beaches” video that Visit Florida agreed to pay $250,000 for him to produce. The video features Pitbull cavorting around Florida beaches and hotels with a bevy of scantily clad beauties and features risqué lyrics not meant for young ears.
The contract also paid Pitbull an upfront fee of $250,000 just for an initial talent fee and use of his name and likeness. Other fees required Pitbull to embed positive references to Florida in his various appearances including New Year’s Eve Special he performed for the Fox Network from Miami. He also was paid to promote the #LoveFL hashtag in various live performances and social media postings and to hold International “meet and greets” with key travel executives.
Corcoran recently had a sneak peak of the contract before it became public. Tuesday, he told Eight On Your Side he was “disgusted” by what it revealed and elaborated more after the contract became public Thursday. “It’s the concept that we take money out of the hands of hardworking taxpayers–a million dollars–and we give it to a guy to produce a video because we’re supposedly targeting millennials. That completely and utterly flies in the face of what should be a proper expenditure of taxpayer money,” Corcoran said.
House Democratic Leader Janet Cruz said she’ll let taxpayers judge whether the Pitbull contract was a good deal for the State but agrees with the Republican Speaker that it should not have been secret in the first place. “There is no excuse for a lack of transparency when it comes to how taxpayer dollars are being spent,” Cruz said in a statement released Thursday.
Pitbull’s production company PDR Productions, Inc. insisted that all terms of the contract remain confidential in the one year deal made with Visit Florida in July 2015. But, visit Florida received a lot of heat for failing to disclose the terms since most, if not all of the funding comes form Florida taxpayers through appropriations by the Florida Legislature.
In an exclusive interview Tuesday, Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran told Eight On Your Side he was drafting a lawsuit to force disclosure of the contract and House lawyers filed suit hours later.
Corcoran said at the time he could go to prison for disclosing the terms he’d seen on a “for your eyes only” basis. Corcoran is pushing to cut funding for Visit Florida, a private agency that receives about $78 million a year in tax money to promote tourism and says he’s determined to go after any agency that tries to hide the spending of tourism promotion tax dollars.
“I don’t care if its state, local, federal who’s hiding behind trade secrets and they think that allows them the right to go out there and spend and waste taxpayer money without any accountability and any transparency they will find that’s not the case and we will root that out and we will fix it,” Corcoran said.
Pitbull released the terms of the deal on his Facebook page Tuesday morning and said:
“*FULL DISCLOSURE* http://bit.ly/2hxnaia It’s been an honor to represent Miami and the Sunshine State. I’ve taken Miami and Florida worldwide — WAY before any contract, and will do so way after. I love my home state. When asked to take on a New Year’s show, I INSISTED it be live from Florida.#LOVEFL Since birth…..and till the day I die. Dale”
“It is unfortunate that it took litigation to lift the veil of secrecy on this particular contract,” Corcoran said in a statement Thursday. “This was a long unnecessary journey through claims of trade secrets, threats of prosecution, and corporate welfare paid for by taxpayers. The people’s House will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal to protect the taxpayer and ensure transparency is the rule and not the exception in state government. It is my hope that the coverage this issue received will foster a larger discussion of the proper role of government in the free market and the need to end the idea that government as ‘venture capitalist’ is good for our economy.”
WFLA News Channel 8 will have more on this story tonight at six.
