It's a very big deal in his neighborhood.
Brandes is tuned in to bad-apple guardians. He is a member of the Select Committee on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. More to the point, he is the senator for Pinellas Park, home of one of the most publicized Florida stories of suspected unscrupulousness by a guardian of elderly wards in recent times.
The investigators spent more than two weeks pulling hundreds of Johnson's bills from court files and entering them into a spreadsheet. They conducted interviews with family members and in assisted living facilities. They discovered that from Jan. 1, 2010 to Dec. 31, 2012, her invoices added up to $260,000. That gave her an average annual guardianship income of nearly $87,000 -- with little help to her wards to show for it.
What's more, local judges routinely approve the sale of homes belonging to Johnson's wards -- in most cases, the largest asset these wards have -- without obtaining appraisals from a certified appraiser.
And Johnson has used fellow Pinellas Park City Council member Richard Butler (who was her campaign manager) to conduct nearly all of the sales of her wards' homes since 2010. Many of the homes were flipped for sizable profit. Records show Butler has sold 14 of them for a total of $1,252,500.
Brandes' bill, while not a magic pill to fix the whole problem, would at least provide expanded auditing authority for clerks of court to review the practices of court-appointed guardians.
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Jeff Brandes' Bill Would Help Keep Unscrupulous Guardians in Check