Broward Sheriff “Dr.” Tony’s attacks lead to a lesson in reality of governance

By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org

In the halls of BSO headquarters, Sheriff “Dr.” Gregory Tony is accustomed to hearing “Yes, sir!” from his overly fawning command staff. So it didn’t go over well when Broward commissioners recently told Tony no, that his proposal for a 48 percent budget hike – to more than $1 billion – was unworkable. Further aggravation arrived in the form of an independent county audit that pointed the finger at the sheriff for tens of millions of dollars in cost overruns on his pet project, BSO’s new training center.

Tony’s unsociable retorts on social media: Broward County Administrator Monica Cepero “fabricated a falsified and misleading audit report.” County commissioners are “complicit in this destructive narrative/audit” and “are attempting to tarnish BSO’s successful management of this project to justify underfunding our organization.”

And after the International Union of Police Associations ( I.U.P.A.) Local 6020 wrote a joint letter in support of Tony’s budget request with six other union leaders who bargain with BSO, he misleadingly added, “Now, ALL BSO employees are lacking confidence in our County Administration.”

There’s more. But you get the picture.

Commissioner Steve Geller certainly gets it. And in an Aug. 28 reply to I.U.P.A. local 6020 President Don Prichard, he noted “what appears to be a declaration of open warfare against the County Commission” in Tony’s remarks.

Maybe by Tony, but not BSO’s unions. “We saw the sheriff’s letter. We saw it and it made it sound like we have no confidence in the County Commission. That is not true,” said Local 6020 Vice President Greg Lacerra. “I don’t like the games that are being played with us being stuck in the middle of it.”

A TEACHABLE MOMENT

Geller is a career pol who knows how the game is played. He served 20 years in the Legislature, including 11 in the state Senate, before being elected to the commission. He chairs the 50-year-old South Florida Regional Planning Council as well as the Broward County Water Advisory Board. He knows budgets, issues and the reality of governance. So he used the opportunity that arose when the unions’ letter landed on his desk as a teachable moment, though he’s got his own problem with over capitalizations.

“Let’s start looking at some budget numbers for BSO and the rest of the County,” he wrote. “Although the Total County Budget recently is between $7 and $8 Billion Dollars, a significant share is in ‘Enterprise Funds’ that we can’t access, the three main enterprise funds are the Airport, Seaport and Water.”

Tossing in other capital costs and restricted costs such as bond debt, Community Redevelopment Agency dollars, state mandates, required reserves and payments to support other county constitutional offices like the Supervisor of Elections and Property Appraiser, “this leaves us with about $1.385 Billion that the County actually controls spending on,” Geller wrote.

“In 2024, the sheriff’s budget was $743.7 Million, including dispatch, while all County Commission agencies received $642.2 Million. This results in BSO receiving 53.7 percent of the money available to both BSO and the County funding combined, while the County Agencies received 46.4 percent of such funding,” he wrote. “I have no objection to this, since, as I said earlier, the most important duty of Government is to protect its Citizens.”

Public works, parks, libraries, human services, government technology, animal care are just a few of the many other services the county funds in that 46.4 percent, Geller wrote. That’s down from 49.22 percent in 2007, when BSO received 50.78 percent of the combined money, or $450.8 million.

“This trend of BSO receiving both more raw dollars and a greater percentage of the total budget can’t continue,” Geller wrote.

THE SHERIFF’S CITY INCOME

He pointed out that the sheriff also has other big money sources of income because 99 percent of the county is incorporated into cities “which have the primary responsibility for the daily policing. Many of the Cities choose to authorize the Sheriff to handle the policing and/or fire and rescue by contract. The amounts the Sheriff receives from these Cities is not included in the $743.7 million referenced above.”

The numbers are huge. Fourteen cities had such contracts in 2021, according to the latest records available on BSO’s website. For example, Pompano Beach’s five-year contract – from Oct. 1, 2020 to Sept. 30, 2025 – requires the city to pay BSO $4,197,259.83 a month for police services.

That’s $50.36 million a year. A question Geller didn’t ask: How much profit does BSO build into its contracts with cities, and what is that profit used for?

Geller points to specific parts of the sheriff’s proposed budget, calling them “nonsense numbers that a first-year accounting student wouldn’t use… What the Sheriff has done is cumulatively add the same numbers again each year to make it look like there is a monumental shortfall, when this is hogwash accounting. If you ask for the same $1 million dollar project for 4 consecutive years which the County doesn’t provide, the largest amount of a shortfall would be $1 million dollars. Under the sheriff’s cumulative accounting, there’s a $4 million shortfall. Preposterous!”

While the letter from the unions said the county must address “critical staffing and equipment needs,” Geller stated that there was an increase in dispatch positions and just a 4 percent vacancy rate among sheriff’s deputies. Tony’s budget proposal says 168 detention deputies left over two years, attributing it to low pay. He did not disclose the number of actual vacancies.

But Geller says Tony “cherry-picked” numbers to show that 9 counties are paying their detention deputies more. “There are 67 counties in Florida… If 9 are paying more than Broward, that means that 57 are paying the same or less than Broward… In fact, the county that Broward has most in common with is Miami Dade County, and according to page 23 of the Sheriff’s Proposed Budget, Miami Dade is paying correction officers $10,000/year less than Broward pays its correction officers.

“It’s important to understand that according to Florida Law, the Sheriff appears to have complete discretion on how he spends the dollars that we allocate to him” even after a budget is approved, Geller wrote. “If he wants to reduce one area to put more money into Detention Deputy salary or hiring bonuses, he has that authority now.” And the county auditor’s report on the new training facility shows Tony used it by transferring funds “originally allocated to personnel services…necessary to complete this project.”

Said Geller to the unions: “In other words, the Sheriff took dollars that the County had appropriated to personnel salaries and used them for construction on the Public Safety Building. And you’re blaming the Commission for this?”

A FUNDAMENTAL DISCONNECT

County Administrator Cepero has recommended giving BSO a 7.23 percent increase next year and giving the various other agencies a 4.7 percent increase.

Geller told the unions, “To give the Sheriff his requested budget, the one that you’ve asked us to support, that would take the BSO share to approximately 93 percent and leave 7 percent for the County agencies. Alternatively, the County could leave the County Agencies at the current numbers and increase the millage rate [on taxable property] by about 33%.”

That’s more than unlikely, even if Tony appeals the county’s budget to the governor and Cabinet. “I really don’t believe that all those four Cabinet Members, all of whom have higher political ambitions, will mandate a massive millage increase, but if they do I’ll follow their orders. That will be the last politically that we’ll see of any of them or of Sheriff Tony.”

Geller puts his finger on today’s mess. “There is a fundamental problem where the Sheriff gets to advocate for ever increasing amounts of dollars without having to ever raise millage to pay for those services. It’s a great job – look like a hero for all the money that you want to spend on public safety, while blaming those cheap County Commissioners for not giving you ever increasing amounts of dollars. There should not be a disconnect between spending dollars and raising the dollars to spend.”

Commissioners have acknowledged now that they screwed up when they let Tony control spending on the training center and saw it balloon from an estimated cost of $34 million to now about $74 million. So they’re in no mood to be blackjacked by Tony into blowing up their budget to suit his whim.

Geller, who has taken the lead on this, expressed his hope in the letter that “the heated rhetoric can be calmed down.”  He wants to drop the idea of providing the sheriff with a line-item budget and will instead toss out the idea that Sheriff “Dr.” Tony – who began using the title after graduating from Nova Southeastern University in June with a PHD in criminal justice – should figure things out himself at the county’s Sept. 17 final budget hearing.

“My suggestion will be to give him the 53.7 percentage from last year’s budget, give him the 7.23 percent increase suggested by the County Administrator, but give him the amount as a lump sum, and let him spend it the way he sees fit, fulfilling his constitutional authority as Sheriff.”