If Broward County is wasting hundreds of millions of tax dollars year after year, then specific examples should be rampant and easy to find. Right?
But that’s not the case. Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia has made broad generalizations that are long on innuendo and short on specifics. His headline-grabbing crusade against “waste, fraud and abuse” in Broward would be more credible if he would show us where — and the more examples, the better.
Ingoglia’s anti-government stance is old news (his X handle is Government Gone Wild or “GovGoneWild” for short). He deftly exploits public distrust of government and hopes people will accept his spin at face value, never pausing to ponder what county taxes actually buy.
The CFO’s traveling DOGE carnival came to Pembroke Pines Tuesday, where he accused Broward of $190 million in “excessive, wasteful spending” over the past five years.
Waste through addition
The figure, which the county calls inaccurate, is from comparing the current year general fund with that of five years earlier, allowing for inflation and population growth.
“The government expansion itself is waste, fraud and abuse,” Ingoglia said.
To call that waste, fraud and abuse is unfair and intellectually lazy. To apply such logic in reverse, are we to believe that county government was more efficient in 1980 or 1970 solely because it was so much smaller? Pure nonsense.
“Thus far, we have been unable to verify the sources of data used to arrive at these values,” County Administrator Monica Cepero told commissioners in a memo.
She said the general fund grew by $536 million from fiscal 2020 to 2025, not by $618 million as the CFO claims. That’s still a huge number and the county owes taxpayers a full, easy-to-follow explanation why.
Cutbacks in jobs
Broward’s online 43-page “budget-in-brief” is a good start.
For example, it states the new county budget eliminates 159 full-time positions and includes a one-time $80 million in start-up costs for the new position of elected tax collector — a change demanded not by the county, but by the Legislature, where Ingoglia served for a decade.
Broward has no general obligation bond debt and has a AAA bond rating with all three major rating agencies. The newly adopted $8.8 billion budget includes a small cut in the property tax rate for the first time since 2017.
But as this editorial board has noted, the county, until this year, has been far too generous with Sheriff Gregory Tony’s excessive budget demands.
Make no mistake, government wastes money. The larger the government, the greater the likelihood of waste.
The more scrutiny of how our tax dollars are spent, the better.
Hurting their own cause
But Ingoglia and his DOGE sidekick, Gov. Ron DeSantis, do their cause of efficiency a disservice by tossing around broad claims of waste, fraud and abuse without specifics.
“There wasn’t any meat there,” Broward Mayor Beam Furr rightly said.
If wasteful spending is so rampant, where are the no-show jobs? The lavish take-home SUVs? The no-bid contracts with built-in escalation clauses?
We aren’t buying the CFO’s spin — and you shouldn’t, either.
Ingoglia and the governor later issued a press release claiming Broward spent $890,000 on training in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) since 2020, including training that pushes gender fluidity and transgender ideology; $175,000 on creating virtual art in the Metaverse; and $44,000 in support of gender equity.
The county has not responded to those assertions, but this gets to the heart of the matter. Liberal Broward and its all-Democratic county commission has embraced programs that offend Tallahassee’s anti-woke, right-wing orthodoxy. But that criticism ignores real differences in political values from place to place.
By now, everybody should know that the whole thrust of this DOGE exercise is to inflict maximum public-relations damage on counties to build a statewide political consensus for a major rollback of property taxes, possibly eliminating them entirely on homesteaded property.
Ingoglia is right on one point: his focus on a lack of housing affordability in Florida, especially for first-time homebuyers. His argument is that high property taxes (made worse by the unfairness of the decades-old Save Our Homes tax cap) greatly frustrate the homebuying dreams of young people by shifting a disproportionate amount of the property tax burden to them.
His point is that if Broward commissioners really cared about solving the housing affordability crisis, they would dramatically lower property taxes, and they haven’t done so.
But the solution is not to demonize counties with lazy bromides and bad math. That will only make things worse.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
