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UF staffers working remotely under Sasse racked up more than $200K in travel costs

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UF staffers working remotely under Sasse racked up more than 0K in travel costs

Vivienne Serret
 |  Fresh Take Florida

The University of Florida spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on travel for highly paid Republican hires of then-President Ben Sasse, who permitted them to work from home in other states while commuting periodically to the school’s campus, according to newly released records.

The new figures add to mounting questions about unusually high expenditures of public money by the university president’s office until Sasse’s unexpected resignation in July. More than half the $211,824 itemized expenses attributed to six of his senior UF hires working remotely over 17 months was for airfare or train tickets, plus nearly $50,000 more for hotels.

The costs included all their work-related travel, not just back and forth to UF from their home states — including Nebraska, Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. The university finally turned over more than 1,500 itemized expense entries for these employees in response to requests filed July 30 under Florida’s public records law. 

More: University of Florida terminates several Sasse GOP allies following his resignation

More than half the travel expenses specified that they covered campus visits. Others did not always indicate any destination, citing costs for “trip” with no other detail about locations.

In the records UF turned over, lodging costs did not specify whether the employees stayed in budget-style hotels run by popular chains or luxury suites. Most of the rooms appeared to run $150 or $300 per night. Meal costs did not indicate the name or type of restaurant or whether the appointees dined alone.

The itemized expenses include a nearly $3,300 plane ticket to San Francisco for a three-day trip in January, $450.26 for dinner during a three-day campus visit in April, $90.90 for lunch in April, $266 for a one-day car rental in October and $1.78 for a four-mile drive in a personal car in September. It wasn’t immediately clear who at UF approved each expense item.

Professors and administrative staff at the university are limited to spending no more than $19 for dinner or $11 for lunch and car reimbursement of 44.5 cents per mile when traveling. They can spend more on meals when they entertain donors or prospective donors, but the university urges them to “still adhere as closely to the allowable limits as practical.”

Sasse, the former GOP senator from Nebraska, said, “it’s not true” in a statement earlier this month on social media that there was any inappropriate spending by the president’s office. 

“Fiscal stewardship is a fundamental obligation of public institutions — and also because our alumni, donors, and hardworking taxpayers should be confident that such stewardship and oversight have been and are being exercised,” Sasse wrote. “They are.”

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Early in his tenure as UF president, Sasse told professors in closed-door meetings that he recognized it would be difficult to recruit top performers to move to Gainesville, a college town of about 200,000 in an area of Florida known as “the swamp” because of its humid, rainy weather. He proposed more remote teaching, adding new campuses outside Gainesville and using technology to overcome what he described as “traditional notions of place-and-time teaching.”

Gainesville has limited entertainment options, a municipal airport with few direct connections, a surprisingly high violent crime rate and among the most expensive utility rates in Florida. It’s 90 minutes from Florida’s nice beaches.

A spokesman for Gov. Ron DeSantis, Bryan Griffin, said the governor’s office had been in touch earlier this month with the State University System and its Board of Governors, which oversees Florida’s public universities, to look into Sasse’s expenditure of state funds. The state’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, separately urged the same agency to investigate Sasse’s spending, saying his office would provide audit support.

In a possible signal over concerns about the spending, UF has announced that, going forward, all expenses paid out of the university president’s office will be reviewed twice each year and will be the subject of a formal report to the school’s board of trustees. 

Sasse, 52, attributed his decision to resign to a recent epilepsy diagnosis and new memory issues facing his wife, Melissa, who suffered an aneurysm and series of strokes in 2007. He said he also wanted to spend more time with his children, including his college-age daughters and 13-year-old son.

Hired 17 months earlier, Sasse was paid a base salary of $1 million plus a performance bonus of up to $150,000 each year — guaranteed him the job through at least February 2028. The same contract required six months’ notice for Sasse to resign unless the chairman of the board of trustees, Mori Hosseini, waived that provision.

Sasse has said his family would remain in Gainesville, and he will serve as president emeritus and teach classes as a professor at the university. As president, Sasse and his family have been living in a gated, multi-million-dollar mansion on campus next to the law school.

Sasse will be required to leave the mansion by Sept. 30. UF agreed to continue to pay Sasse a base salary of just over $1 million through February 2028 and provide medical, dental, life and disability insurance benefits, according to a contract addendum dated July 18, the same day Sasse publicly announced his resignation.

The salary for Sasse through 2028 was similar to how much UF has been paying its previous president, Kent Fuchs, since he resigned in 2023 after eight years. Fuchs, who has taught engineering students, has agreed to serve as interim president until July 31 next year. UF said it will pay him $1 million base salary as interim president plus a bonus of up to 15 percent, and will create a $5 million endowed professorship in his name in the engineering college.

After Sasse resigned, UF also announced it was rehiring Joseph Glover as its provost, the school’s top academic official. Glover had resigned to become provost at the University of Arizona in April. His new contract with UF pays him $672,000 plus a $50,000 recruitment bonus.

— This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at vivienneserret@ufl.edu.

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