Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony wants a political fight with local officials who set his budget, and they should fight back.
After Tony forced Deerfield Beach officials to part ways with the sheriff’s office after a 35-year partnership, he’s now accusing Broward County commissioners of jeopardizing safety by not approving his grandiose budget request in its entirety.
Tony wanted 9% more money, much of it, he claims, to raise the pay of chronically underpaid BSO deputies who quit for better-paying jobs elsewhere.
Commissioners gave Tony a 3% increase, a bigger boost than any other unit of county government, in a year when 159 positions were eliminated.
For the sheriff, the difference is significant: about $47 million. It would all come from the property taxes paid by Broward homeowners and businesses.
Tony may still win this fight. If he does, it will be bad news for Broward taxpayers.
Enough already
In the contorted reality of Florida politics, sheriffs are elected by county voters, but their budgets are set by county commissioners. This undermines accountability and confuses taxpayers.
Sheriffs can demand all the money they want without having to take political heat from tax-weary residents.
According to the county, the sheriff’s office will get $834 million in local taxes next year, more than most other county programs combined. More than half of every local property tax dollar goes to the sheriff’s office.
But in a Sun Sentinel opinion essay, Tony, a Democrat, falsely accuses Democratic commissioners of short-changing public safety. It’s an explosive accusation made worse in this case because, as Mayor Beam Furr noted in an op-ed response, Tony didn’t even bother to make his case for his higher budget at public hearings.
Sticking it to taxpayers
True to form, Tony prefers to play politics.
As state law allows, he’s threatening to take his case to Gov. Ron DeSantis and the three elected Cabinet members, one of whom, Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, has publicly tangled with county officials over spending. (There’s one probable vote for the sheriff.)
In a political scenario dripping with irony, those four Republicans, in their role as the state Administration Commission, have the power to overrule county commissioners, approve Tony’s higher budget — and stick Broward taxpayers with the bill.
Given a choice between siding with law enforcement or local politicians, who do you think they’ll pick?
But look closer. The extra money would come from the same source, property taxes, that DeSantis wants to eliminate or sharply curtail for being so unfair.
Because salaries are the driving force behind Tony’s demand for a big budget increase, county government has a duty to educate Broward taxpayers about how the sheriff spends county tax dollars.
Many six-figure salaries
The reality is, plenty of people who don’t risk their lives on the streets of Broward are doing very well.
A comprehensive list of employee salaries, provided to the Editorial Board in a public records request, shows at least 195 employees make more than $150,000 a year each, not including benefits. The list, dated July 25, did not include employees who work undercover.
Tony’s chief of staff earns $184,000 a year. His executive assistant draws a salary of $155,000.
A BSO captain who’s assigned to be the sheriff’s driver earns $180,000 a year. Some detention deputies in the county jail earn up to $107,000 a year. A grants coordinator makes $84,000.
The question is not whether these high salaries should be cut. It’s whether they are currently underpaid. They clearly are not.
Broward’s big boondoggle
Tony’s arguments about low salaries might have credibility if he had a better record of spending our money wisely. He does not.
Special to the Sun Sentinel
Even the shower curtains have Sheriff Gregory Tony’s name on them.
A glaring example is the boondoggle known as the BSO Training Center that opened last year at a wildly inflated cost of $74 million, more than twice as much as proposed, as a result of a near-total lack of adult supervision by the county bureaucracy that paid for it.
A county audit showed that Tony diverted at least $4.8 million from salaries to project costs, some of it by intentionally delaying filling positions, County Auditor Robert Melton said.
The training center is notorious for other reasons, such as $553,000 spent on what the auditor called “excessive branding,” featuring the sheriff’s name on walls, equipment and even shower curtains.
Commissioners need to remind DeSantis and the Cabinet of all that waste.
The record is clear: Giving more tax dollars to this sheriff has already proven to be a bad idea.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
Originally Published: October 22, 2025 at 3:04 PM EDT