Florida lost the director of its emergency management division with a hundred and three days of hurricane season still to run, and the man the governor named to replace him is keeping his job as transportation secretary at the same time

Kevin Guthrie is no longer the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. He left the agency on Tuesday, a day after Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins named him as his running mate in the race for governor, and Governor Ron DeSantis said he had accepted the resignation.

There is no state document behind this item. The Division of Emergency Management site was checked on this run and its own leadership pages do not name a current director either way, and the governor's news listing carries no release on the appointment. What follows is credited to the reporting of Ana Goñi-Lessan of the News Service of Florida, carried by WGCU, and it was read at source rather than taken from anyone's summary.

DeSantis said he tapped the transportation secretary, Jared Perdue, to replace Guthrie. A spokeswoman for the governor's office said Perdue will be the emergency management director and will remain transportation secretary.

That is one person holding two agencies. Perdue was appointed to run the Department of Transportation in April 2022, after roughly eighteen years at the agency and a spell as secretary of its District Five in Central Florida, and he has overseen the seven billion dollar Moving Florida Forward programme covering twenty major road projects. His annual salary is reported at 297,845 dollars. Nothing in the reporting suggests the transportation job is going to anyone else.

The calendar is why this lands differently in Lee and Collier than in Tallahassee. Hurricane season runs to 30 November. Counted from today that is a hundred and three days. Florida has not been hit by a hurricane since 2024, which is a fact about the last two seasons and not a forecast about this one.

DeSantis was asked about readiness and answered it plainly.

"It's a well-oiled machine. We've got a lot of great people over there. We're not going to miss a beat. But I don't want to be in a situation where there's politics and emergency management. I think you got to choose one or the other."

He also said that if people want to choose politics, more power to them, and that he had not necessarily thought it was something Guthrie aspired to.

Those are the governor's words, and this desk has no independent basis on which to weigh them. What is on the record either way is the experience that left with Guthrie. He was appointed in 2021 and oversaw the state response to more than twenty disaster declarations and six major hurricane landfalls. Ian, in 2022, came ashore in this region. He also managed evacuation flights of Florida residents out of Haiti in 2024 and Israel in 2023, and under his leadership the agency built and ran the state immigration detention facilities, including the one known as Alligator Alcatraz, which closed this summer, and Deportation Depot.

The politics that produced the vacancy resolved against the ticket Guthrie joined. Collins named him on Monday evening, the night before Tuesday's primary. On the Collier and Lee Supervisors of Elections boards, which this desk read for a separate item published earlier today, Byron Donalds took 65.25 percent of the Republican ballots cast for governor across the two counties, and Collins took 16.26 percent. Reporting on primary night carried Donalds as the nominee. No statewide tally has been verified here. Collins himself was appointed lieutenant governor by DeSantis in August 2025, after Jeanette Nuñez left the office to become president of Florida International University.

Nobody is accused of anything in this item. A resignation is not a finding, holding two appointments is not a failure, and no storm is threatening Southwest Florida today. What changed is who answers for the response if one comes, and it changed a day after an election with a third of the season still ahead.