CFO Blaise Ingoglia’s Disinformation Campaign at Local Governments’ Expense

Last week Blaise Ingoglia, Florida’s chief financial officer, invited Flagler County’s top elected officials to their own public flogging. They had all submissively trooped into a room at the Hammock Beach Club for Ingoglia’s latest campaign stop disguised as a press conference–county commissioners, Palm Coast City Council members, constitutional officers, all of them wondering who Ingoglia was about to destroy next for what he calls “overspending.” 

Gov. DeSantis appointed Ingoglia CFO on July 21. Since September, he’s been holding pseudo press conferences around the state to flog local governments over their excesses. He holds up rectangular flash cards to the camera to show by how much. Jacksonville: $200 million. Hillsborough, $279 million. Alachua, $85 million. Seminole, $48 million. Manatee, $112 million. Miami, $94 million. Miami-Dade, $303 million. He’s done at least 14 of these. 

Last week it was Flagler County’s turn: $59 million.

The figures are supposedly the result of what he calls “high-level spending comparisons and audits.” Audits take weeks and months. These aren’t audits. They’re back-of-the-envelope tabulations a high school intern can do in five minutes based on Ingoglia’s crackpot formula: calculate population growth and inflation, add a 10 to 15 percent inefficiency factor, and compare that to actual general fund budget figures between 2019 and 2025. If the difference exceeds Ingoglia’s arbitrary benchmarks, it’s overspending. It’s robbing taxpayers. It’s fraud. 

It’s a brilliant rhetorical appeal to taxpayers’ outrage. It’s also bullshit. 

You can start with his measures. Let’s assume there’s zero inflation and zero population growth. Does that mean your local budget should never grow? If your community’s wealth wasn’t growing–no property value increases, no growth, no value added to existing businesses, no financial investments, no dividends from investments–then maybe you could make the argument that your government budget should be static, too. 

That’s not how things work. Even in a low-to-zero-inflation and zero population growth environment, dozens of other factors affect your local economy, for good or ill. Increases in property value, business, household and personal wealth are among the most recognizable and dependable. When those values increase, our local government’s budgets increase and we expect more from it–handsomer parks, better transportation, better schools, more environmental protection. 

Ingoglia fixates on population and inflation because they’re the easiest to talk about simplistically. They’re also the dopiest factors to pick on. They matter. But nowhere near to the exclusion of so many other factors that play into what we prize most: standard of living, or what we more recently have redefined as quality of life. So Ingoglia’s premise is almost fatally flawed from the start. Not to mention the constitutional inconvenience that he has no business butting into duly elected local governments’ business, especially when he’s exploiting them as campaign fodder. 

But let’s play his game. Let’s accept it at face value. Even then: Ingoglia doesn’t provide any documentation for his claims other than those crude figures. He has no documentation. His method is a firehose of fallacies, such as the absurdity of applying the same formula to Duval or Miami-Dade as blindly as he does to Flagler, as if local budgets were the same cookie-cut. 

He uses the word “audits” and makes it sound as if he has a huge, dedicated staff of DOGE-diggers. Really? Did he or his staff meet with local government officials to go over the numbers, ask questions, verify accusations? Of course not. Can he provide a single concrete example of overspending–a single one, just one unnecessary employee, one wasteful program, one pointless capital project, one dispensable “bureaucracy”? 

He does not. He cannot, because he hasn’t looked at the budgets. Because the moment you look closer, his accusations collapse under the weight of their own dishonesty. 

In Flagler he points, accurately, to the general fund increase from $92 million in 2019 to $203 million this year. 

Let’s look at what Ingoglia ignored. The sheriff’s budget increased 87 percent in that span.  Fire rescue, FireFlight and Emergency Management increased 80 percent. Ingoglia considers those sacred cows. But if you just take the budget increases for the sheriff, fire services and general fund reserves, which improved from $9 million to $46 million (is Ingoglia suggesting that fiscal prudence in a hurricane-prone county is a bad idea?), you end up with $70 million of the increase in those six years. That’s 63 percent of that net increase in the size of the budget right there. 

The county took over the $2.9 million 911 operation from the sheriff, which looks like a decrease in the sheriff’s budget and an increase in the county’s. Is Ingoglia suggesting that 911 is a luxury? Granted, the library budget doubled from $1.3 million to $2.7 million, and heaven knows our own county commissioners have been bitching about that for over a year. But on a per capita basis, it’s still one of the lowest budgets in the state. Volusia County, for example, spends twice as much on its libraries per resident. St. Johns spends one and a half times as much. Flagler’s libraries are barely catching up. In other words, Holly Albanese’s library system is still one of the most efficient in Florida, Nexus Center included. Ingoglia should’ve been down here  handing Albanese and the county an award for that, not a guillotine. 

A bit more: Flagler County’s share of the medical examiner’s budget has more than doubled to $1 million, so has the clerk of court’s budget. The supervisor of elections’ budget has almost doubled. Is Ingoglia suggesting that taxpayers would rather have an extra $50 in their pocket instead of justice and fair elections?

We could do this all day. Examine the budget line by line, and Ingoglia’s blanket attacks are revealed for what they are: nothing short of an ignorant slander against government as he fabricates public outrage to win office and to win passage of an expected constitutional amendment abolishing homesteaded property taxes. 

He claims “we’re having a property tax revolt here.” Floridians are in revolt over higher property taxes. When was the last time you saw a homesteaded property owner complaining at a local government budget hearing in September? Those chambers are notoriously empty, year after year. There is no revolt. Here’s why: our homesteaded property taxes are declining. 

In inflation-adjusted dollars, I paid the county’s general fund $927 in property taxes for 2025, and $2,280 overall. In 2019, I paid the county $1,013 ($796 in unadjusted dollars), and $2,708 overall ($2,086 unadjusted). My county taxes have fallen 9 percent, my overall taxes have fallen 16 percent. The county has lost that purchasing power. It is making it up on the back of the non-homesteaded, like businesses and renters, who are subsidizing government services for the rest of us. 

A revolt? More bullshit. Yet Ingoglia is campaigning to eliminate homesteaded property taxes, worsening an already unfair system: “The goal here is elimination of property taxes on homesteaded properties altogether,” he says. 

Not that the non-homesteaded are hurting that much. Take my neighborhood Publix on Belle Terre, which has no homestead exemption. In 2019. It paid the county $54,000 in unadjusted dollars. In 2025, it paid $53,800, because the county’s tax rate fell in the meantime and Publix’s assessed value increased marginally. In inflation-adjusted dollars, Publix is paying about $15,000 less than it was paying in 2019. That’s the purchasing power county government lost on that tax bill. It’s government that should be in revolt. 

But demagogues like Ingoglia know that repeating an appealing lie often enough and to unquestioning cameras and moronic talk show hosts will always get more applause and votes than documenting and verifying claims. Intellectual honesty isn’t hard work, especially for a government bureaucrat like Ingoglia who has the benefit of a staff and suck-up vassals like Joe Mullins to spread his propaganda. But it’s a hassle, and it gets in the way of an election and of scoring cheap points by slandering the reputations of elected officials vying for their own reelection.

That’s Ingoglia’s end game: to trample local governments in a mush of malicious disinformation and reckless anti-government rhetoric on his way to his own electoral glory. Don’t fall for it. Our local governments aren’t the fraud. Blaise Ingoglia is. 

Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.

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