The Joint Legislative Auditing Committee approved a request to audit the city of Cape Coral on Monday after two Southwest Florida state lawmakers shared concerns in Tallahassee related to the alleged misuse of building department funds.<\/p>\n
Rep. Mike Giallombardo (R-Cape Coral) and Sen. Jonathan Martin (R-Fort Myers) allege the city’s building department is breaking state law by using permit money in unauthorized ways.<\/p>\n
The audit request comes after the Cape Coral Construction Industry Association shared hundreds of pages of documentation with state lawmakers, they say, that proves the department has been misusing funds.<\/p>\n
Florida Statute 553.80 mandates that building department funds be used solely for building code enforcement.<\/p>\n
Giallombardo said he believes the city has been using building department funds to cover expenditures on hurricane overtime, fire department expenses, payroll for scanning clerks, a $10 million issue related to a failed building purchase, and nearly $3 million in unexplained fund transfers.<\/p>\n
At Monday’s hearing, Giallombardo said financial concerns are just the beginning.<\/p>\n
“Contractors, engineers, private providers have documented hundreds of pages of operational failures to include arbitrary rejections, inflated valuations, contradictory requirements, and a permitting system that the building fund helped pay for,” Giallombardo said. “It has never worked correctly. Across the board, we’re seeing a pattern of discriminatory enforcement, inconsistent valuations, operational dysfunction, and financial practices that undermine the intent of Florida law.”<\/p>\n
WINK Investigates has exclusively obtained the data Giallombardo cited and is currently reviewing hundreds of pages of documents.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, a spokesperson for Cape Coral said in an email the city will fully cooperate with the audit, but did not yet respond to Giallombardo’s claims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Joint Legislative Auditing Committee approved a request to audit the city of Cape Coral on Monday after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,32103,211,210,28,897,32102,1521,26625],"class_list":{"0":"post-50627","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cape-coral","8":"tag-cape-coral","9":"tag-cape-coral-construction-industry-association","10":"tag-cape-coral-headlines","11":"tag-cape-coral-news","12":"tag-florida","13":"tag-fort-myers","14":"tag-legislative-auditing-committee","15":"tag-southwest-florida","16":"tag-state-law"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}