Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried is blasting proposed legislation introduced this week by Florida Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Blaise Ingoglia aimed at increasing local government spending transparency — specifically, a provision that would allow removal of local officials found to have committed “financial abuse.”
The legislation, scheduled to be filed ahead of the coming legislative session in the Florida House by Rep. Monique Miller, R-Palm Bay, and in the Senate by Nick DiCeglie, R-Indian Rocks Beach, would increase local government transparency and formally establish Ingoglia’s Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight (FAFO) effort into statute.
The proposal includes a provision that would codify the state’s CFO’s ability to recommend removal of any elected official who is found to have committed “financial abuse, malfeasance or misfeasance.”
“I have heard zero from our new CFO about what he plans on doing to hold our property insurance companies accountable,” Fried said on a Zoom conference call on Thursday. “Instead, he’s bullying our local governments, creating fictitious formulas, and now he wants to overreach even more by putting a clause in there about removing elected local officials.”
More than any recent governor, Ron DeSantis has aggressively exercised the power within his office to remove elected officials from office, including school board members, sheriffs, and most controversially, two Democratic state prosecutors, Andrew Warren in Hillsborough County and Monique Worrell in Orange and Osceola counties.
Worrell rebounded from her 2023 suspension, winning re-election by a large margin in 2024.
“We see how Ron DeSantis has abused that power throughout his eight years in this administration, and so that is just them bullying our local governments that are the ones who are closest to the people,” Fried added.
In addition to those above listed suspensions, Attorney General James Uthmeier threatened other local governments officials in Florida earlier this year in Orange County and Key West when they raised objections to signing 287(g) agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the case of Orange County, Mayor Jerry Demings said in August that he signed an updated agreement with ICE under “protest and extreme duress” after Uthmeier threatened the mayor and all six county commissioners that their failure to do so would result in their removal from office by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Other provisions in the legislation introduced by Ingoglia at a press conference in Tampa on Wednesday include allowing the Department of Financial Services to pursue financial penalties from local governments if they don’t respond to inquiries “promptly,” including by withholding any state funds until they do so.
“If we ask for the information on a Monday, and we’re giving you five days to compile the information — get it in five days; if you don’t, then you face a $1,000 a day penalty,” he said at the press conference.
The legislation comes as Ingoglia continues to make the case that local governments have been engaged in “excessive and wasteful spending” by comparing their fiscal year 2024-2025 budgets with what they were spending in 2019-2020. So far, after reviewing the budgets of 11 local governments this year, he says they have engaged collectively in $1.86 billion in alleged wasteful and excessive spending.
Local government officials who have received those FAFO audits have questioned the accuracy of the methodology used by the CFO’s auditors. Ingoglia has called such criticisms “bogus” and “not well thought out.”
Fried argued that if Ingoglia were serious about cutting excessive government spending, he should look inside the DeSantis administration’s own spending excesses. She referred to a Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald story published last week reporting that the DeSantis administration spent $36.2 million in taxpayer funds last year to purchase ads against the proposed marijuana and abortion ballot measures, both of which were contested by the governor.
“If [Ingoglia] wants to talk about saving dollars and making sure that the people are getting a return to the taxes they have put into this state, he should be focused on what’s happening in Tallahassee,” she said. “Ron DeSantis stole $38 million from the people of this state, and so that’s really where the attacks should be. That’s where his energy should be.”
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