Gov. Ron DeSantis says it wasn’t his fault that gas stations didn’t have generators in the wake of Hurricane Milton, but that despite statutes mandating generators in many circumstances, he has no appetite to tighten what he calls a “loophole” in the law.
While Florida law dictates that gas stations should be able to operate with “an alternate generated power source for a minimum of 72 hours … no later than 36 hours after a major disaster,” the law grandfathered in facilities built before 2006, and offered exemptions for gas stations based on arbitrary population cutoffs.
In counties with 300,000 people or more, the law applies to stations with “16 or more fueling positions.” In counties with between 100,000 and 300,000, the threshold is 12 fueling positions. And in smaller counties, the state says eight is enough. Chains with more than 10 locations must make a portable generator available, but the law seems to let smaller providers off the hook.
“I think that it was written in a way that if you want to conduct your operations to not be covered by that, you can. So I think there’s a lot of them … they’re in kind of like a loophole. They’ve made it that way,” DeSantis said Monday at SeaPort Manatee.
Over the weekend when rolling out public fuel depots, DeSantis talked tougher about gas stations failing to buy basic equipment that could have made a difference. He said that while “a lot of these gas stations, quite frankly, are supposed to have generators, very few of them have used them that I’ve seen, especially in the areas that were the hardest hit.”
The chief executive has backed down from such condemnations though, explaining the business case for these companies not to bother with quick power fixes, even as he offered vague assurances to “look at the issue.”
After all, Florida is more efficient than ever in restoring electricity.
“I think some of these stations, they reckon because we prestage all these linemen, they’re probably not going to be out for two, three weeks, like maybe in the past. And so I think they think it’s cheaper to maybe just kind of wait,” DeSantis said, adding that roughly 1 in 10 accounts are out now in Sarasota and Manatee, roughly four days since Milton exited the state.
DeSantis’ “sense” of the issue “is that you have to figure out how much do you want to be dictating from the state or how much do you want to just work collaboratively on some of this stuff. And to say we’re just going to mandate almost anything, I don’t know that that’s necessarily the best approach. I mean, the fact is, these are private businesses, the fuel supply is a private sector. We are not Venezuela.”
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