How lobbying and campaign donations shaped a Florida transportation law

Florida has a new transportation law that changes how new vehicle brands can be sold in the state.

The bill, which takes effect later this year, didn't make many headlines when it passed or when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it in April. The reporting mainly focused on a provision dealing with license plate frames.

Independent journalist Jason Garcia with the newsletter Seeking Rents did report on the new law.

Garcia reported how donations and lobbying are behind a new requirement that many automakers introducing new vehicle brands in Florida distribute them through multiple dealership groups instead of just one.

The interview below was edited for brevity.

So what's the story here?

There was this really unusual provision tacked into an otherwise seemingly mundane transportation bill, and boiling it all the way down, it essentially is a new law that is going to require car companies — I'm glossing over some details — but it's going to generally require car companies that want to sell new brands in Florida to use multiple car dealerships, multiple middlemen car dealers, if they want to bring that car to Florida, they're going to have to use at least three.

It turns out this is an idea that was lobbied through the Legislature by one car dealer in particular, Braman Management, which is the Miami-based company founded by the billionaire Republican mega-donor Norman Braman.

And from the records we were able to get out of the Legislature, it seems as if Braman Management was upset about a potential deal with a car company in Spain, CUPRA. It wants to come to the U.S., and it has been talking about a potential exclusive distribution deal with Penske Automotive Group.

Of course, Florida and most other U.S. states have these ridiculously arcane laws that you and I can't just buy a car from any car manufacturer that we want. We have to go through these middleman dealers for most cars.

So to comply with that, CUPRA has been in talks to distribute exclusively through Penske. Braman apparently did not like that so got the Legislature to essentially pass a law that makes that impossible.

(Anthony Pordon, an executive vice president at Penske Automotive Group, told WUSF the following over email: "Discussions with CUPRA regarding distribution have been paused. There is no definitive timeline for next steps at the present time." CUPRA is owned by the Volkswagen Group, and Braman owns one of the company's Audi dealerships in Florida.)

You used public records to get information. What exactly did you find?

Car dealers generally, and Braman specifically, are some of the biggest donors in all of Florida politics.

We got emails showing that a lobbyist for Braman Management gave this legislation to the Legislature.

Specifically, this lobbyist emailed the language to a guy by the name of Rep. Mike Redondo, a Republican from Miami. That very same week, Braman companies donated $20,000 to Redondo. So we had a $15,000 donation the day before they provided the language that came in through a political committee that Representative Redondo controls, and then $5,000 in bundled hard dollar contributions to his regular campaign account that followed a few days after he had taken the legislation, which he submitted into drafting, which is basically the process that a legislator has to do in order to get the ball rolling on a piece of legislation.

But it didn't stop there. So I'll just give you one other particularly eye-popping example. This idea was eventually filed as standalone legislation before it got slipped into this transportation package at the very end.

The Senate sponsor of this bill was a guy by the name of Jay Trumbull, a state senator, he's a Republican from the Panama City area. That same month, November 2025, so just before the 2026 session began, Braman gave $50,000 to Jay Trumbull via a fundraising committee he controls.

Why does this all matter? Why should Floridians care?

One is sort of the way we still have these antiquated laws controlling and limiting people's ability to buy cars from wherever they want to buy them.

This would be like Florida having laws on the books that say you can't buy a Mac directly from Apple, you can only buy it through Target or Walmart or Best Buy.

That's an absurd proposition, and yet it is exactly how Florida, and so many other states, still treat car sales specifically.

We've got a lot of legislators in Florida that love to tell us how much they love the free market. So I think it shows how this is a system that exists solely because the entrenched lobby preserves it that way, and that the interests being represented when they change dealership laws are the dealers themselves.

If you have any questions about state government or the legislative process, you can ask the Your Florida team by clicking here.

This story was produced by WUSF as part of a statewide journalism initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.