How Tallahassee’s airport capital improvement fund subsidized friendlier coverage for the mayor and his pals – and attacks on his foes
If you only read the headlines, you’d think the great ethics scandal in Tallahassee was… an unpaid hospital board volunteer making a campaign contribution.
That’s the breathless premise of Tallahassee Reports’ Oct. 29 piece “TMH Board Member Donates to Matlow Campaign During TMH-FSU Negotiations.” The target: Sally Bradshaw — a longtime civic figure serving on the TMH board without compensation — whose family donated $3,000 to Jeremy Matlow’s campaign while TMH and FSU sparred over governance … a full five months after Matlow expressed opposition to the TMH-FSU deal.
TR framed the timing as suspicious. Here’s what it left out: Bradshaw didn’t gain a job, a contract, or any personal benefit. She is — literally — an unpaid volunteer trying to keep the community’s hospital accountable to the community. She has donated hundreds of hours to the cause, all while trying to run a local independent bookstore in the middle of an expansion.
Meanwhile, there’s a different money story Tallahassee should be talking about: the years-long pipeline of public dollars quietly routed to the nonprofit behind Tallahassee Reports — and how TR’s posture toward City Hall shifted right when those payments started.
Follow the money
Let’s pause the narrative and walk through the paper trail.
We pulled checkbook data from the City and requested public records from the County. We reviewed the fund sources. We traced where the payments went and what they were coded for. Once you see the pattern, the rest of this story stops being a theory and starts being a ledger:
• City of Tallahassee checkbook: recurring payments to the Red Hills Journalism Foundation (TR’s nonprofit), tagged to program areas like Marketing & Promotions and Energy Efficiency & DSM.
• Fund source revelation: within the City ledger, the “Fund Name” field shows Airport RR&I Fund and Electric RR&I Fund — restricted capital funds intended for runway and grid maintenance, not underwriting news coverage. (RR&I stands for renewal, replacement and improvement).
• Leon County ledger: from 2020–2025, Leon County paid the Red Hills Journalism Foundation monthly (mostly $700–$750), coded to Community & Media Relation.
Even Blueprint dollars went to Stewart, for purposes and reasons that aren’t fully clear.
In other words: airport maintenance dollars, electric utility capital funds, sales tax infrastructure funds and County communications money have flowed into the nonprofit behind Tallahassee Reports for the past five years.
Bottom line: When you total it all up, since 2020, Steve Stewart’s Red Hills Journalism Foundation has raked in $100,000 of taxpayer dollars for his website.
The Advertising vs. Subsidy distinction
Before anyone reaches for a strawman, let’s be clear about something. Local governments have long advertised in local media. When I worked at the Tallahassee Democrat, the City bought hurricane preparedness ads, public notices, legal ads, and utility conservation messages, among other things. That practice is normal, transparent, and healthy in a functioning civic ecosystem. If this were simply about the City buying display ads from Tallahassee Reports — nobody would blink.
But that is not what happened here.
In addition to conventional advertising, the City and County routed recurring payments to Tallahassee Reports’ nonprofit parent — including through the airport and electric utility “Renewal, Replacement & Improvement” (RRI) funds — capital accounts intended to maintain runways, substations, transformers, and critical infrastructure. These were not line-item display ads with rate sheets and run schedules. These were monthly transfers to a media nonprofit.
Did these happen outside traditional procurement channels? Is there a rate card? Publicly available scope? Placement report or deliverables? Red Tape Florida has public records requests pending on these questions.
So, did anything about Tallahassee Reports coverage change when the money started flowing? Did this plucky right-wing independent blog continue shining the light on all five Democrats on the Tallahassee City Commission?
You bet it did.
What changed at TR — and when
Before December 2019, TR routinely blasted the City’s “insider” culture. Then public payments began flowing. Since then, the outlet’s most aggressive “watchdog” pieces have exclusively targeted the Mayor’s opponents on the Commission while minimizing or reframing controversies that reflect poorly on senior City leadership.
We reviewed Tallahassee Reports’ City Hall coverage from 2020 to today — the period after the City began sending recurring payments to the Red Hills Journalism Foundation.
Here’s what we found:
• Multiple stories targeting the commissioners in the minority on the board (Matlow and Porter)
• A high-profile takedown of an unpaid volunteer (TMH board member Sally Bradshaw)
• Headlines repeatedly highlighting a lone dissenting vote as the narrative
• Not a single headline or lead story critically scrutinizing Mayor John Dailey, Commissioner Dianne Williams-Cox, Commissioner Curtis Richardson, or City Manager Reese Goad
To ensure fairness, we excluded routine “meeting notes” pieces and focused only on coverage that assigns blame, casts judgment, or frames political motives. The pattern was unmistakable: when Tallahassee Reports criticizes, it almost always runs in one direction.
And for the record: If anyone can surface a Tallahassee Reports story from this period that meaningfully holds the City’s ruling bloc accountable, we will gladly add it here. Patterns are strongest when they can withstand scrutiny — and this one does.
PRE-2020, it was a different story.
Check out this list of stories critical of the mayor, the city manager and their current-day allies:
- Insiders get their man: Reese Goad hired by a lame-duck City Commission (Sept. 17, 2018). Framed the manager hire as an insider play by the outgoing commission; Richardson was part of that body.
- City lobbying fees up 500 percent from 2011 to 2019. (Nov. 14, 2019). TR framed this as a sign that the current regime was being unduly influenced by the political class.
- Ceremonial vote reveals city commissioners’ views on City Manager Goad (Oct. 31, 2019). Reported Dailey calling a public “vote of confidence” for Goad—again positioning the pro-Goad majority (Dailey/Williams-Cox/Richardson) for critique.
- Who is lobbying for Reese Goad to be city manager? (July 5, 2018). Highlights the efforts of consulting firm Vancore Jones – widely known to be a key ally and advisor to Dailey and Goad – as a driving force behind the city manager search.
- Commissioner Curtis Richardson: “Are Businesses Leaving the City?” We have the answer (April 14, 2016). A story that mocks Richardson for suggesting businesses aren’t leaving the city when the data showed that they are.
And of course, there are more.
A watchdog becoming dependent on government dollars is not an abstraction — it’s a pressure system. It doesn’t need an explicit quid pro quo; it only needs a steady check and a narrowing sense of who the “real problem” is.
Bradshaw vs. the insinuation machine
Back to the Bradshaw “story.” If corruption requires someone to gain something, where’s the gain? There isn’t one. An unpaid board volunteer made a legal donation and, if anything, paid a reputational price for insisting the hospital preserve community control. The piece asserts impropriety by headline implication — and by carefully avoiding context about her non-compensated status. What Bradshaw actually did was exercise her First Amendment rights to support a candidate who had just announced for mayor.
Compare that with the TR silence around more obvious optics: the Mayor John Dailey’s Seminole Boosters money and the Doak vote
In February 2022, Mayor John Dailey supported a $20 million Blueprint contribution for FSU’s stadium. In the run-up, his political committees hauled in more than $23,000 from Seminole Boosters/FSU-affiliated donors. That timing drew calls — from media and party organizations — for him to return the money before the vote. He didn’t. He defended it. Then the funding went through.
By the way, instead of going to infrastructure and bathroom repairs, as promised, it went to a new Jumbotron.
That episode checked every optics box the Bradshaw non-story does not: private benefit to a political brand; aligned donor pool; a decisive vote for a powerful institution; the public interest questioned in real time.
Yet the “watchdog” outrage energy appears to have been rationed differently.
Take a moment and try to Google all the critical TR stories on the Mayor’s swollen coffers. I’ll wait.
Who’s paying — and from what pot — matters
The City’s choice of fund sources is the tell. Airport RR&I Fund and Electric RR&I Fund are capital renewal and replacement funds — the buckets used to maintain runways, terminals, and the electric grid. Using them to underwrite a journalism nonprofit is… novel. Those funds are supposed to keep planes safe and lights on, not buy “community coverage.”
Leon County’s payments are cleaner on paper — openly coded to Community and Media Relations — but they raise the same core question: why are public information budgets subsidizing a news outlet that increasingly trains its fire on a certain faction of the City commission instead of the government cutting the checks?
This is a textbook Red Tape Florida moment — where the machinery of government becomes a tool for insiders instead of a guardrail for taxpayers. Instead of transparent ad buys, the City tucked media payments behind fund codes and internal transfers, turning infrastructure dollars into quiet political currency. It’s bureaucracy not as public service, but as cover — a system flexible enough to reward allies and insulated enough to assume no one will ever notice.
What readers deserve, and what officials should answer
For City/County leaders:
• Who authorized using airport and electric R&R funds to pay the Red Hills Journalism Foundation? What was the procurement/legal theory
• What contracted deliverables were produced — and where are they?
• Did any official request or imply favorable coverage or targeted stories?
• Why a nonprofit transfer instead of standard ad buys with deliverables and placement reports?
Red Tape Florida has made public records requests seeking answers to these questions.
Call the thing by its name
Let’s retire the romance. Tallahassee Reports has never been “the free press” in the civics-textbook sense; it was a right-leaning outlet that held City Hall to account — until City Hall and the County started cutting checks. Now it uses public money to support … Democrats, like the mayor and his allies on the commission.
Then TR hammers other commissioners and community actors who cross the insiders’ agenda. That’s not journalism. That’s a publicly funded spin factory with a byline.
And suddenly the Bradshaw dust-up looks small. If you can funnel airport and utility funds into media influence, don’t point at an unpaid volunteer and cry “corruption.” Call it what it is: the city buying its own cheerleaders.
Bottom line
The City and County and Blueprint should end this arrangement immediately. This is such a brazen propaganda operation that 1980s Pravda “reporters” would blush.
Until that happens, conservatives who once looked to TR for alternative news should now see it for what it is – a vehicle to defend the Democrats that makeup the majority on the Tallahassee City Commission … and to attack its enemies.