While Palm Beach County and its 39 cities have complied with the state DOGE team’s request for detailed financial information, some municipal leaders said they can’t understand why they were forced to waste resources on what some described as a time-consuming and tedious task.
“This is information the state already has,” South Bay City Manager Leondrae Camel said. “Also, from a home rule perspective, each municipality should have the opportunity to manage their own communities.”
County Commissioner Gregg Weiss, a Democrat, voiced similar concerns about the governor’s efficiency team.
“It’s not very efficient because all of the information they are asking for they have,” Weiss said. “We have to submit our audited financial statements to the state each year.”
But when they visit cities and counties, the DOGE teams will have access to internal computer files that detail how money is spent.
READ MORE: 'A huge imposition': DOGE audit underway in Broward
Camel, who is president of the Palm Beach County City Management Association, said the undertaking has been difficult for cities both large and small.
He estimated it took his city’s 21-member staff 32 hours to complete the detailed spreadsheets the state demanded. Mostly, he said, they copied information from the city’s audited financial report into the state-mandated spreadsheets.
In Jupiter, which is a behemoth compared to tiny South Bay, the town’s finance director and another worker spent about 10 hours compiling the data, a city spokesperson said. It also paid $2,400 to an auditing firm to put the data in the form required by the state.
Like other cities, Lake Worth Beach had to ask for multiple extensions because it didn’t have time to assemble all of the information while it was busy crafting next year’s budget, City Manager Jamie Brown told city commissioners at a July meeting.
“It is a pretty massive document as far as what is being requested,” Brown said of the information that was sent to the state last week.
Acting County Administrator Todd Bonlarron said he didn’t know how much time staff spent fulfilling the state’s request.
“I don’t know off the top of my head, but it wasn’t too significant,” he wrote in an email. “The most time was just categorizing the expenditures in the spreadsheet, but overall it was a good exercise for us.”
State DOGE started with Broward, Gainesville
Failure to respond to the DOGE’s team’s demands carries potentially expensive penalties.
The state can fine municipalities $1,000 a day for every day they ignore a request for information. If the state asks for 50 pieces of information and a local government doesn’t respond, it would face possible $50,000-a-day fines that would double every day.
At a news conference last month in Fort Lauderdale, DeSantis said he launched the team to mimic one created by President Donald Trump and headed by multibillionaire Elon Musk until he left Washington in May in a falling out with Trump.
DeSantis said he started looking for wasteful spending by state agencies and universities and is now branching into local governments.
While Palm Beach County leaders said they expect a visit soon, it isn’t at the top of the governor’s list.
Having already put “boots on the ground” in Broward County and Gainesville, the state team’s next stops will be Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Orange counties and Jacksonville, DeSantis announced in a press release last week.
And to quiet skeptics who believe the government efficiency team is targeting Democratic strongholds, the state’s newly minted chief financial officer, Blaise Ingoglia, said his auditors will review spending in Manatee County, where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2 to 1.
“You thought we were only auditing blue counties? Guess again,” the former state lawmaker from Central Florida said in a July 24 post on X, announcing his team would be reviewing spending in the Gulf Coast county.
“In order to get real property tax relief, leaders in both red and blue counties need (to) take a serious look at wasteful spending,” Ingoglia wrote, using the moniker @GovGoneWild.
And, even though Hillsborough County historically has been reliably blue, the Tampa area recently flipped and Republicans now hold a roughly 16,500 voter registration edge over Democrats, state records show.
Ammunition against property taxes?
Chris Hand, a lawyer and onetime aide to the late Democratic Gov. Bob Graham, said he suspects DeSantis is gathering ammunition to convince skeptical lawmakers to eliminate property taxes. DeSantis floated the idea this year without success. It is to be considered by the Legislature next year.
“I don’t think there’s any question that the governor and his team are trying to gather some evidence from county and city governments to either eliminate altogether or reduce property taxes around the state,” Hand told WJXT4 in Jacksonville last week.
However, DeSantis has said the effort, much like the one spearheaded by the chainsaw-wielding Musk, is to protect taxpayers from out-of-control spending.
Ingoglia said he began work in Broward County because it “unfortunately in my mind is one of the worst offenders.”
DeSantis said that Broward’s budget has increased 50% since 2020 even though its population has increased only 5%. He blasted it for spending $800,000 on a float in the Rose Bowl parade. County leaders balked, saying the money came from tourist tax revenues that are targeted for advertising the county as a destination.
The state DOGE team also said Jacksonville’s spending has far outstripped its population gains.
“Although Jacksonville has taken steps in recent years to reduce millage rates on residents, rising property values have pushed annual property taxes up by over $400 million since 2020 — a 57% increase,” it wrote in a letter to Jacksonville’s mayor. “The growing burden on property owners far outpaces inflation and the modest growth of population over that time.”
What PBC numbers showed
Palm Beach County is likely to face similar criticism.
According to information the county provided the DOGE team, its total budget has increased 35.6% since 2021 to $8.8 billion while its population has increased 2.9%.
The total budget includes money the county receives from state and federal grants, gasoline and sales taxes, water and sewer fees and other sources. Its income from countywide property taxes has increased 29% in the past four years.
The sheriff’s budget, which accounts for almost 50% of county property tax spending and includes the county’s jails, has increased nearly 29% from $723 million in 2021 to $932 million in the current fiscal year. While the County Commission can reject the sheriff’s budget, he can appeal any cuts to the governor and Cabinet.
The county budget also includes money spent by other constitutional officers, including the tax collector, property appraiser and elections supervisor.
While DeSantis has lauded the state’s cost-cutting, the growth of its budget has outpaced population growth. Since 2021, the state budget increased by 16 percent to $117.4 billion while the population has increased 6.3 percent to 23.3 million.
The DOGE team has also indicated county school boards should be prepared to explain their spending. While in Broward County, it complained about “large contracts” awarded by both the county and the school district.
Attorney General James Uthmeier pledged to get involved. “We will support DOGE’s investigation and hold any bad actors accountable,” he wrote on X.
Weiss said he welcomes any help the DOGE team can offer to shave spending and increase efficiency. But, he said, simply looking at numbers doesn’t tell the entire story. County services are complicated and multifaceted. The needs of its residents aren’t necessarily the same as those in other counties.
But, he said, the county will cooperate fully.
“We’re an open book,” he said. “We have nothing to hide.”
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
