The Flagler County Commission is directing its administration to issue a rebuttal to Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia’s claim that the county government “wasted” $59 million in a five-year period. The commission agreed to do so on Monday after Commissioner Kim Carney characterized Ingoglia’s claims as “crazy stuff” using Flagler County as his “campaign crutch.”
The appointed CFO is running to be the elected CFO. For months, he has held campaign-like events made to look like press conferences around the state to seemingly expose what he alleges to be wasteful spending by county or city governments. He held one such event at the Club at Hammock Beach on March 26, peddling the $59 million claim but with nothing more than a formula to derive the figure.
He did not define waste. He did not refer to specific programs he considers wasteful. He did not explain the $59 million figure–derived from the same formula he applies across the state–which county officials and others quickly determined to be misleading. He has since reused the same claim from time to time on his campaign platforms.
“The CFO craziness popped up again, so I understand it’s all got to do with his campaign,” Carney said at Monday’s commission meeting. “Everything he’s putting out about Flagler County’s waste and all that crazy stuff is coming out of his campaign website or Facebook.” The county attorney’s office issued a request for information from th CFO’s office to understand how Ingoglia derived his figures. There has been no answer, though Ingoglia in his appearance at the Hammock club challenged local officials and others to engage with his office about his numbers.
“Do we have a deadline on that? Is there a deadline, because it’s a $500 a day fine if you don’t respond to a Freedom of Information Act,” Carney said. (The penalty for an unintentional violation of the state’s public record law is $500, but not per day, and $1,000 if the violation is intentional. The maximum penalty, a misdemeanor, also could include up to a year in jail.)
“Can we stay on top of that?” she continued. “In the meantime, do we have some type of a rebuttal? I don’t want to use the word rebuttal. That’s too strong. An informational piece on where the county stands on that.” She cautioned: “It’s not going to go away before the election. He’s going to pound on this and try to get credit on this up through the election, so does the board want more information? Do we want more data?”
Commissioner Andy Dance said the commission itself has to be clearer on directing the administration than it has been since March. “Now is the time to kind of coalesce around a response, and what you want included,” he said. “I think the major accusations from the original press release should be addressed, because the rest of it is just vague from that point on. It’s just generalizations. But there were specific accusations regarding excessive personnel, and different things that can be rebutted, and I think it’s important.”
On March 26, Ingoglia issued a “press release” through his office repeating the $59 million claim as “excessive, wasteful spending” and the accusation that Flagler County “has the highest budget increase among the past fifteen local governments that have been reviewed by the Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight (FAFO) with a 119.2% increase.” He said, accurately, that the general fund budget increased $110 million between 2020 and 2026, and that the county added the equivalent of 80 full-time employees “to accommodate a 32,564 increase in population growth.”
Ingoglia did not note that the largest increases took place in public safety–the Sheriff’s Office, the Fire Department, Emergency Management–nor mentioned the very large increase in the county’s reserves, which had been very low in 2019, and some debt payments in the past five years.
“We didn’t spend your money, we have your money in reserves, so we paid off bad debt that the board had for many years ago,” Commission Chair Leann Pennington said, which helped the county improve its bond rating and lower its interest payments.
“I lived through that from when I came on the board in 2017, and it was bad. It was bad,” Commissioner Greg Hansen said. “We’ve recovered.”
“We just met with the external audit the other day,” Pennington said. “Our reserves are perfect. We are right on track.” The standard for local governments is to have reserves equivalent to two months of operational costs. The county has two months. It is working toward three.
“We’re working on a webpage that will likely be somewhere around the transparency dashboard page that we have now,” Acting County Administrator Adam Mengel said, “and it will review basically off of the faithful audit, and hit all the points that are mentioned in there.” Mengel said the new web page will address the main points of the Ingoglia claims from the March event. “I know the message has changed over the time since then, that there’s been some confusion at best from the CFO’s office,” Mengel said.
Carney had attended the March event, as had numerous local elected officials. “I’m not going to let it go, because it’s definitely being used as a campaign crutch, and I don’t like it,” Carney said. “He’s doing it strategically all over the state. So last week he visited Fort Lauderdale. He’s already been to Orlando. So this is a strategy, and I don’t know why we got picked, but we did… for him to continue to do that on his campaign website is just–we’ve got to do something.”
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