The Broward School Board has authorized its lawyers to take legal action against County Tax Collector Abbey Ajayi over her office’s decision to withhold $5.5 million from school referendum dollars.

The action, approved Tuesday, allows General Counsel Kathy Dupuy-Bruno’s office to “pursue any and all legal avenues and any and all tangentially related actions” on behalf of the school district, “including but not limited to initiating conflict resolution and/or formal litigation against any party, relating to the recovery of the commissions withheld by the Broward County Tax Collector and /or others,” according to the agenda item.

School Board members became livid in January after they learned that the tax collector’s office, which started operations in January 2025, had withheld the $5.5 million, or 2% of the $275 million generated annually from a referendum that voters.

The referendum was passed in 2022 to enhance employee salaries, safety and security and mental health. The district is asking voters to renew the referendum in November.

District officials said prior to the creation of the tax collector’s office, the county’s financial office collected the money and never withheld a commission.

As a result, board members said they were unaware of this expense when they approved the district’s annual budget last year, and the district has already been dealing with more than $80 million in cuts due to a huge enrollment spike.

“I think it is incredibly disheartening that it has to come to this, but we owe it to the taxpayers, and we owe it to our families to make sure that the money that people voted on is going towards our teachers and our safety and security and mental health,” Board member Rebecca Thompson said.

Thompson said she thought litigation might be a good idea when she saw that the Sarasota School District was suing the Sarasota Tax Collector’s Office over a similar issue.

Ajayi’s office said in a statement to the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “The Tax Collector’s office remains committed to working with the School Board and all Broward County entities. Transparency, accountability and reliable public service remain the core of our mission.”

Ajayi defended the tax withholding in an op-ed published in March in the Sun Sentinel, saying the withholding complies with a state law that has been on the books since 1971.

“The Tax Collector’s Office does not have discretion to waive, alter or selectively apply this commission,” she wrote. “We are administering the law as written.”

She wrote that “what some critics think is a ‘new charge’ is, in reality, the implementation of an existing legal structure that has long governed tax collection in Florida.”

The tax collector’s office advised the district earlier this year that notice was sent to the district in February 2025.

The tax collector’s office “provided an advanced notice, in writing, to ensure sufficient time to adjust respective budgets,” Nadia Alcide, chief of staff for Ajayi, wrote to district officials in a January email.

However, the letter was addressed to a satellite office in Oakland Park, and district officials said it never made it top district officials. The district never received any prior notice by phone or email, district spokesman John Sullivan said. District officials said they were not able to come to an agreement after holding an in-person meeting with Ajayi.

“The District maintains that the Broward Constitutional Tax Collector’s ‘February 2025’ correspondence was not directed through customary executive, legal, or operational channels utilized for matters of substantial fiscal and legal significance, including the Superintendent’s Office or the Office of the General Counsel,” the agenda item states.

“The District further maintains that it did not operationally receive sufficient notice to meaningfully evaluate, budget for, or mitigate the impact of the implementation methodology ultimately utilized by the Tax Collector’s Office,” the item states.

Alcide’s email said any unused fees collected by the office will be refunded to local governments at the end of the fiscal year, as required by state statute.

Board member Adam Cervera said at Tuesday’s meeting that he believes the money belongs to the district, not the tax collector.

“I never thought this taking was proper,” Cervera said. “And the statutes and explanations that I was provided, I was still never sold that this was the proper course of action taken by the county tax collector’s office,” he said. “I’ve been screaming from the mountain top since January that we needed to take action to right this wrong.”