THE WASTE WE PAID FOR
Every neighborhood has that one lady who calls the cops because a kid walked by with a hoodie on. Broward looked at that and said, "Great idea. Let us give her a budget, staff, subpoena power, and a press office."
The result is the Broward County Inspector General. Less useful than tits on a bull and twice as likely to charge at anything red.
The office was created to keep an eye on waste, mismanagement and abuse. Instead, it became the most reliable source of it. They write reports so thick you could change a tire with them. They send out press releases with the rhythm of a political campaign. They treat every misunderstanding like the Warren Commission.
The best part is they do it with confidence. Loud confidence. You know the type. The person who says, "I POST ON FACEBOOK, I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT."
The City Manager Case
Nothing shows it better than the pulp saga over the Fort Lauderdale City Manager's residency. It started with an old charter line that says the city manager must live in the city. He already owned a condo in Fort Lauderdale and his family lived there for a while. But his marriage hit a rough spell, and his wife moved out for some time. He spent some nights at his wife's home as they tried to work things out. Normal life. Most adults would treat it that way.
The Inspector General treated it like betrayal.
Like an office full of bitter exes, they pulled toll transponder data, property records and license updates. They reconstructed his movements like they were tracking someone over an international border. They practically counted pillows and toothbrushes. They even treated marital reconciliation as evidence! If they could have subpoenaed his marriage counselor, they would have done it with a straight face. You half expected them to scold him for not posting a sign-in sheet above his headboard.
Everything they touch follows the same pattern.
Tamarac had a vendor selling political T shirts at Oldies in the Park. There is a general community norm to keep city events apolitical. The mayor told him to pack it up. That should have been the end of it. The only place it did not end was inside the Inspector General's office. They answered with a seventy-seven-page constitutional seminar complete with staged photographs of t-shirts staged like they were shell casings. Then, of course, came the press release. Always the press release.
And here is the part that gives away the game. If they had been selling MAGA hats, does anyone truly believe this group of cat ladies would have stirred from their cubicles to defend political expression??
They would have called it neutrality. Instead, they found a chance to make a political point, and they took it.
A political committee that stumbled into subpoena power
After you read enough of these files, you stop seeing an oversight office. They operate like a political shop dropping oppo:
- Small incident.
- Long report.
- Immediate press release.
The first stop is never the city manager, the clerk or the finance director. The first stop is the inbox of every reporter in town.
The Budget Numbers
They were created to protect tax dollars but their own budget has almost doubled since 2012. From about $1.89 million to more than $3.6 million. While inflation only rose about thirty-six percent during that time. The IG budget rose ninety percent. Same office. Same bodies. Same product. Just a much bigger price tag.
What Are Taxpayers Buying?
Well, Margate watched the IG treat the wrong gift form for gala tickets like a crime thriller. Fifty-six pages on $350 guest admissions to the Mayors' Gala. They even pulled Facebook family photos as evidence. That triggered a seventeen-page countywide gift sweep. Not because anyone stole a dime but because someone checked the wrong box.
Tamarac got thirty-seven pages plus an appendix unraveling a six-hundred-dollar dinner bill in Washington. The result? "No misconduct." But it still came with a press release, because the press release is the point.
They were supposed to guard against waste, fraud, and abuse.
And here is the punchline:
We finally found the waste. It is the Inspector General!
This is an office with the instincts of a mall cop and the judgment of a neighborhood gossip chain. They confuse paperwork errors with felonies. They burn through public dollars producing dramatic reports about nothing. Chase people over t-shirts, dinner checks and marriage issues, and build surveillance files to see if someone was sleeping in the same bed as his wife.
If they ever spent even half this energy on real corruption, Broward might get its money's worth. Instead we got a political operative shop with subpoena forms.
The only real mystery is how long Broward will tolerate the joke.