Did Citrus County break public records laws?

During my research into the Right Rudder lease termination, I have made several public records requests and browsing of other public documents. I have found at least two instances of the county releasing documents that are exempt from public disclosure.

Watch the video below to see the full details of those releases. Transcription is available below for those that like to read, but you will need to watch the video for the screenshots.

Transcription
**this is transcribed by AI and may have some grammatical errors. I did my best to correct it to make sense in some places. Please watch the video for the full details, evidence, etc.**

Hey guys Curtiss Bryant here. We are going to talk today on June 25th 2025 about an issue that I found during investigation into the Right Rudder situation so let's jump into it!

The question here is did Citrus County break the law public records violations? I do believe that I found some laws that were broken by Citrus County in regards to public records violations that I found. Now during this investigation I've done a lot of public records requests. I've done a lot of email requests, text message requests, all of those things. I've done some research into other things that are posted publicly and I found a couple different in instances of them violating public
records laws. Let's jump into that!

The first one we found is from the county commission meeting on June 23rd. This was last Monday and I'm going to read to you guys the law that covers this type of stuff so that you guys have it. So you know kind of what I'm talking about when I said that they violated the law.

Public records in Florida are largely available for the public. It's a very public
oriented state, open government state. That means that the general public, for
the most part, has access to a ton of materials that are related to governments how they operate. All of those things. However, there are exemptions built into the law because personal private information, social security numbers, personal financial data, driver's license numbers. Things of that nature are exempt from public
records disclosure.

Now this is the public records law that we're going to be citing here. There's
a whole list of things that are in this, but applicable to what we're talking about here is general exemption from inspection or copying of public records. These are things that aren't supposed to be included in public records. If you ask for a request, they're supposed to redact these things. Take them out of the record.

Section C here is "any financial statement or other financial information necessary to verify the financial adequacy of a prospective bidder which an agency
requires a prospective bidder to submit in order to pre-qualify for bidding or
responding to a solicitation for a road or other public works project is exempt."

This basically means that any company that is putting an RFQ and RFP in for
the project, in this case it's the airport. If they have to provide financial details to show that they're qualified to be able to do it, to have their profitable business they have, business credit checks and things of that nature, all that information is exempt from public disclosure.

Now let's jump into this county commission meeting from Monday. What you'll notice here. In all the county commission meetings you'll hear them talk about the backup material. Basically what happens is by law the county is required to notify the public of an upcoming meeting. In that notification they are supposed to update, about a week or so before the meeting, the agenda that they're going to be talking about. This allows the public to look at that agenda and see what they're
going to be discussing so if there's something of relevance to them they are
able to be notified and attend the meeting to get the relevant information
or to have their feedback heard and all of those things. So the agenda gets
posted about a week before the meeting.

In the agenda there's two different items. Number one is the basic agenda which is just a list of all the different agenda items they're going to be talking about. Number two is the full agenda. This is they take every single item and they have multiple pages about that item. It's multiple pages of the bid includes the company that bid on it, the pricing, all those things. If it's a discussion, there's a backup material they call it, to give the the commissioners and the public more information about that thing or about that topic.

You'll notice here, this agenda is 1300 pages. Routinely the backup material agenda with the full information is thousand plus pages every single week or every
single meeting. This particular one is the same, so this provides a lot of different information. In particular we're going to be talking about the FBO. I found the documents for the FBO.

This is item E14. This is the agenda item for E14. you'll notice here, "discussion and vote on the future of the lease FBO with Right Rudder Aviation". Now
all these documents that are included have a history of the Right Rudder Aviation. It includes the contract. It includes the signed amendments. It includes some background information on the companies. It includes the hiring name of the attorney. So it's a bunch of different information that's provided in this and it's about just short of 200 pages that are included for the Right Rudder situation.

Now diving into this, I looked through every single page and what I started to find was I found their RFQ. So this is the response for request of qualifications. I mentioned earlier that companies are required sometimes to include financial data. In this, Right Rudder included some financial information to give the commissioners and staff at the time, a look into their business and so that
they could validate whether that's a good business and they're able to do
what they said they're able to do. This was included with the RFQ.

Now this information is exempt from public records as we mentioned. Financial data.. personal things.. all those things are exempt from public disclosure. The commissioners can view them privately, but they can't disclose that to the public. If it's a public records request all those things are supposed to be redacted. They were not redacted in the agenda item that was posted publicly.

So in these 1300 pages, you'll see here we're on page 1017. This is going to include all of that information that was supposed to be exempt. It's a violation of the state
law that they are providing this information to the public. Everyone is able to access information and download this information. Let's see what they did.

Now full transparency, I do have Andy's permission to share this. I redacted all the personal information out of it so I'm not sharing anything that's exempt, but I did get his permission to be able to share this for you guys.

Here this packet that was put together by Right Rudder. It's 100 plus pages. You'll
notice here they include different things: personnel, qualifications. They're talking about what the business has some financial information... litigation management... approach transition plan... all of those things are included in this document. We're
going to notice here the financial information and litigation section.

Now in that financial information, Right Rudder included several years of balance sheets. This is one of the balance sheets. Here this is showing all their information. Now again I read I did the redactions here, so I can post them publicly, but they were not redacted in the official agenda item that was posted. All of these bank account financial information was there... checking account balances... how much assets they had... credit card debt... all of those things are included in the balance sheet that was provided online.

This is the profit loss statement. Again this was all private information for the business not available to the public but it was included in the public record that was posted publicly for all the world to see.

This is bank account information. The account number was visible. I redacted that out. Again all these were redactions that I did. Everything here was just copy and pasted and redacted on my end. But the the checking account number was available to the public. The type of account that it was. The current balance. The average balance.

Now these go back to 2018 so it's old data but this was when they first initially applied for the FBO contract to prove that they were worthy of accepting the contract.

This is a credit report. It's the business credit reports. This may or may not exempt, I don't know business credit reports. I don't know if they're available publicly or not, but I out of caution I went ahead and redacted the information there as well. It gives the business credit score. It gives some more information about the creditworthiness of the businesses.

Now they had multiple of these documents. Right Rudder was also partnered with a different company as well when they submitted all this. All of their other companies were involved. They had all the profit loss statements but again I had Andy's permission to share these specific ones um with you guys.

This is a personal credit check for Andy himself, done by Credit Karma. Again this is 2018. It had a full credit score reports, total number of accounts... all of the addresses. Now this was several pages long. I didn't put all those pages in here because it just be a bunch of black lines everywhere, but it's all of the full regular credit report. If you apply for a credit card or you apply for a car loan, you know all
those things, everything that's included on there was included in this report. Again unredacted for the world to see.

Now I noticed this on Tuesday and I did some research into public records laws and things of that nature. I found out that they were likely in violation of
the law. I sent an email to them on Friday because I had another issue
come up we'll talk about here in a second that I also found and I
basically told them "Hey guys uh just writing to let you know know that number
one I'm concerned about the county violating public records laws as I mentioned."

Here I quoted the statute that they were violating and I wanted to make them aware of this potential violation of laws and I did CC Denise Lyn, the county attorney in this, so that they could do that.

Now I looked at the agenda item Monday and what we'll see here is that we notice that there's roughly a 100 or so pages, or whatever the number was, removed from the documents. So you'll notice here attachments Right Rudder, so they did go back through and they did remove that data after I notified them on Friday but they had already left all that information in there and already violated the law prior to that. So huge issue there potential lawsuit.

I don't know what Andy's going to do. That's none of my concern what he decides to do with that information. I'm just sharing with you guys what I found. More importantly during this meeting they released some of this information in the course of the discussion.

I'll show you guys a video here in a second

Commissioner Finegan talking in video:

"because what I noticed was it looked like that couple that had the good ratings as far as business acumen credit everything, he (Andy) was horrible. But I guess because it was a partnership, it looked like the county let that go. So now it looked like the the business minded people that understood, all went away. Then we can see what kind of financial business decisions have happened. I'm guessing, since that's just me looking at backup information information that was new to me, so I just didn't know where where those people went and why."

All right all right so the important thing here is that she did put out that he may have had bad credit or may have had some issues with the credit scores. The things in the backup material, now none of that should have been made public. Again that's a violation of the law by making that information public. All that information is supposed to be private. Now they can have concerns about the business partners and all of that leaving. That's fair to ask. However, if you want to look into that, the business partner died in 2020 in an airline accident there in Inverness. I don't know if Commissioner Finnegan was aware of that, but that is why that company no longer is partnered with Andy because the owner of the company passed away in a tragic accident there in Inverness. But anyway, the point here is that they were outing the personal information that was exempt from public record, likely violating state laws.

Now second issue that I found is June 18th. I did a public records request for additional emails for this whole thing because I want to get a full picture of what's going on behind the scenes. In those emails on June 18th, I received a batch of emails that this is that batch.

So basically what happened here is that I got a batch of emails. I had asked for all the emails between Todd Reagan and the county attorney that was hired, Chris Wilson the aviation attorney, that the county hired back in August of 2024. I wanted to see what communications they were having together during all of this and what led to the termination letters and all that with Right Rudder.

I came across this letter. It was dated August 9th, so this would have been prior to the official hiring of the attorney or might have been the day after. I don't remember the specific dates of August 2024. But in any case, Todd is sharing with the attorney a OneDrive link, which is Microsoft OneDrive, similar to Dropbox. A folder that he put together with a bunch of different information. There was 12 or 13 different folders I think it was. The red folder contains ground lease information for Mr Wilson. The orange folder is T- hanger lease templates. The purple folder includes documents related to pending meeting with American Infrastructure Design, which is the company that's doing the Inverness airport business park. The gray folder is off-site obstructions. That's the FAA stuff.

There's a bunch of different folders in there. A bunch of information... most of that information is public record. It's contracts. It's FAA things. FBO things. You know all that type of stuff. As I dove into this folder, you guys see the structure here, so I screenshotted the structure of what the folders look like because I'm looking through this and I was like okay you know some of this stuff is on here I wanted to get a structure of what the structure looks like with this folder.

Now I started looking at this and it says "financial analysis". I wanted to see what the financial analysis folder had in it, so I clicked on that and opened it. This was the financial analysis folder. You can see here, on the left, talking about airport appraisal. Crystal River Airport appraisal. Those I believe were presented to the board in 2022. There was afinancial study that was rented to the aviation advisory board. Citrus County airport financials. We hired consultants to help us move the county forward and help us get appraisals on the different airport facilities so that we could look at different lease agreements and see that everything is done at fair
market value and all of that.

However I noticed here the CGC James Chen check banking is available. Now mind you this was a link that was sent to me in an email as part of a public records
request. There was no password or anything needed to this so I just clicked on the link and went to this drive folder and I had full access to the entire folder system. There were no pin numbers. There was nothing like that. It's not like I hacked this information. It was just information that was widely available if someone had the
link. If someone hacked anything in the county, they were able to access this information. You know how people do all that stuff throughout the internet and
all of that, but importantly here under the this James Chen checking banking information.

As I clicked on that and I looked and I saw all of the financials for the Crystal River Airport. Now I don't have permission to share the specific details of these. I can't share screenshots or anything like that to show you guys. I received a letter from the county saying that I was accessing information that was deemed exempt and was to no longer have access to that information and to delete all my records for the for those specific items that were exempt. So I'm not going to share a screenshot or anything with you guys for that there but basically it's the same stuff
that you guys saw with Andy and what he had there. It was monthly financial statements. It was full checking account screenshots and bank statements that were multiple pages long and had every single transaction that they did every month. It had the account numbers. It had all of that information that was readily available to the to the public in that public records request that was sent which
is then subsequently allowed to be searched by other people because they sent it to me. Or it could have been found accidentally online by other people. I did verify with James that that information was not meant to be disseminated to the public.

So again we have the county breaking public records laws by putting this information out there into the public. That was that issue I wanted to update you guys on that I found.

I'll continue to update you guys on these stories. I do a lot of behind the scenes research. I've gotten 1,600 email, countless text messages that I'm going through. So I will keep you guys informed on what is going on with the airports and what is going on behind the scenes and as I find things like this that are potential violations of laws or things that I think the public should know about. I will make those notifications and make a video on those to make sure you guys are are
aware of that.

Again my goal with all of this is accountability. I want to make sure that the government is accountable to the people make sure that there's a transparent process. Make sure that there's no things that are going on outside of the public purview that needs to be known by the public. So that's the goal with all of these videos and as I find things I will share them with you guys publicly. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon and I will be back shortly I'm sure with some more information

Thank You