More than a dozen Broward cities and multiple taxing authorities recently received checks they hadn\u2019t expected.<\/p>\n
Miramar got more than $373,000. Oakland Park got $180,000. Tamarac got $91,000. A huge beneficiary was the North Broward Hospital District, which got $4.8 million.<\/p>\n
Taxpayers provided that money. It reflects excess fees collected on behalf of taxing authorities last fiscal year, other than property taxes, such as fire safety and stormwater protection, that were not spent and which by law must be returned.<\/p>\n
But nobody is celebrating a windfall.<\/p>\n
A tense battle<\/p>\n
Instead, the money is the subject of a tense behind-the-scenes battle between the county and Tax Collector Abbey Ajayi. The county wants that money, saying it should have received it as payment for covering many of Ajayi\u2019s first-year expenses.<\/p>\n
An interlocal agreement between the county and the tax collector shows a $13 million \u201ccharge for services\u201d by the county to reflect first-year costs of the tax collector\u2019s office. The tax collector accuses the county of creating a budget \u201cdiscrepancy\u201d that does not exist.<\/p>\n
At the root of the dispute is the rocky transition from a county-run revenue office to Ajayi, an independent elected official who took office in January. The transition went from bad to worse quickly.<\/p>\n
Unable to schedule a face-to-face discussion with Ajayi, an exasperated County Administrator Monica Cepero sent Ajayi a letter last week, laying out her criticisms in writing and guaranteeing that the fight would become public, which is does here for the first time.<\/p>\n
The county demands that Ajayi pay it $15.1 million to cover nearly a year\u2019s worth of providing administrative overhead for the tax collector\u2019s office. For example, the tax collector has no system yet in place to make payroll and to track employee benefits.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Tax Collector\u2019s Office owes Broward County a total of $15,147,618.81,\u201d Cepero wrote. \u201cPlease remit the outstanding funds by Dec. 31, 2025.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ajayi was outraged by the demand and several more \u201ccorrective actions,\u201d such as requiring monthly reimbursements to the county for her personnel costs until her own payroll system is in operation.<\/p>\n
In response to the county, the tax collector\u2019s lawyer, Timothy Qualls, fired back with a six-page rebuttal to County Attorney Andrew Meyers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe county cannot lawfully supervise, manage or override the Tax Collector\u2019s statutory responsibilities, and its current approach treats a constitutional office as though it were still subordinate to County administration,\u201d Qualls wrote.<\/p>\n
The tax collector claims in her response that she repeatedly asked the county for more money to pay for increased public demands for services \u2014 \u201cyet those requests went unanswered,\u201d Qualls wrote.<\/p>\n
The burden is on Ajayi<\/p>\n
Each side says the other is wrong. In our view, the county is much more in the right.<\/p>\n
The burden falls on Ajayi as an untested constitutional officer to show a high level of fiscal responsibility and to work cooperatively with the county.<\/p>\n
To understand how this happened requires a little history.<\/p>\n
Ajayi has had to build an organization from scratch. Until this year, the county collected all taxes and fees, but Broward voters elected Ajayi in 2024 to be an independent tax collector. She now does work that the county used to do, and in the county\u2019s view, she\u2019s doing it poorly.<\/p>\n
The county stands by its demand for the $15.1 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe (county\u2019s) letter was accurate, necessary, and offers a productive path forward,\u201d said county spokesman Greg Meyer. He said the two sides plan to meet face-to-face Thursday \u201cin the latest attempt to resolve this accounting discrepancy.\u201d<\/p>\n
City managers unhappy, too<\/p>\n
A countywide city managers\u2019 group is also upset with Ajayi.<\/p>\n
The group\u2019s president, Assistant Hollywood City Manager Adam Reichbach, said cities were \u201ccaught off guard\u201d by Ajayi\u2019s decision to charge them a 2% administrative fee to collect non-property tax fees.<\/p>\n
He said cities were not notified of the charge until after they adopted budgets for this fiscal year. \u201cWe never budgeted for that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Under the old system, the county collected those fees but did not charge a fee of its own, Reichbach said. In his view, \u201cthose dollars rightfully belong to the county.\u201d<\/p>\n
Call in the lawyers<\/p>\n
Now the lawyers are involved \u2014 not a good sign.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce the lawyers get involved, it becomes a different conversation,\u201d said Ajayi\u2019s intergovernmental affairs director, Wally Eccleston. \u201cWe\u2019re coming at it from very different places, but the law is on our side.\u201d<\/p>\n
If this dispute is not resolved quickly, it risks undermining\u00a0 Ajayi\u2019s credibility, which could complicate her re-election in 2028. Serving as a constitutional officer is a high-paying job with no term limits. It\u2019s a fast track to a highly lucrative state pension.<\/p>\n
By law, Ajayi also must take over all five local drivers\u2019 license offices from an inept state bureaucracy by June 2027. That\u2019s a monumental test of service-delivery skills under the best of circumstances.<\/p>\n
If it isn\u2019t fixed, this dispute would add another chapter to Broward\u2019s history of dysfunctional government \u2014 and that benefits nobody.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a dozen Broward cities and multiple taxing authorities recently received checks they hadn\u2019t expected. Miramar got…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77260,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[2853,249,251,250,114,482],"class_list":{"0":"post-77259","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-lauderdale","8":"tag-editorials","9":"tag-fort-lauderdale","10":"tag-fort-lauderdale-headlines","11":"tag-fort-lauderdale-news","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-opinion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77259","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=77259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77259\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}