Good morning.

I do believe Mr.

Sturmer is online and would be appropriate if the chair wants to bring the meeting to order to call roll call.

So I call the meeting to order.

Would everybody state their name for the record?

Good morning, Regina Polk with the State Attorney's Office.

Good morning, Nate Ingewald, Executive Chief Assistant, Public Defender's Office.

Good morning, Jack Siler, Private Attorney.

Dan, you want to say your name?

Good morning, Daniel Spermer, appointee for the Broward League of City.

And Michael Fischler, appointee for Broward County Bar Association.

Welcome everybody.

Happy holidays.

We can get started.

More approval of both the minutes.

Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

Approved unanimously.

So at this point, with your permission, I'll proceed to provide my remarks.

Please do.

Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Fischler and members Falk, Giraud, Siler, and Sturmer.

I am pleased to present the Broward Office of the Inspector General's second annual report covering fiscal year 2024, my first complete fiscal year as Broward County's Inspector General.

For the record, I am Carol Jody Brees, Inspector General for Broward County.

To begin, I'd like to highlight three of the OIG's significant achievements during the reporting period.

First, this year featured the conclusion and reporting of two lengthy and complicated investigations.

Both were about gross mismanagement of city contracts, one for waste management disposal and the other for parking management services.

Second, as we expected would happen based on a successful assessment during the 2023 fiscal year, and as we reported to you verbally at the committee's workshop in February, the Commission for Florida Law Enforcement Accreditation or CFA voted to renew our CFA accreditation for the third time.

More than 29,000 employees, more than 450 separate divisions and departments, 170 elected officials, and more than 20,000 registered vendors.

The approved budget for fiscal year 2025 is $3,605,000.

Staffing remains at 20.

We sought but were denied an additional three investigator positions for fiscal year 2025.

However, the county's overall budget for fiscal year 2025 saw no net increase in positions.

After the election last month, we requested a supplemental budget from the county of $659,810.

The amount that we asked the school board to pay the county as the initial fee for our services for the remainder of the current fiscal year, fiscal year 2025, to get us to September 30.

This initial fee contemplates three additional staff and 115,800 for reconfiguring our office space to accommodate the expected school board changes.

Assuming the supplemental budget were approved, our total budget for fiscal year 2025 would be $4,264,840.

Our 20 staff is comprised of 10 agents and auditors to do investigations and contract and procurement oversight, three managers for said investigations and oversight, three attorneys, and three administrative staff.

Our personnel changes this year included the retirement of our intake manager and the promotions of our Deputy Inspector General, Audit and Contract Procurement Oversight Manager, and investigations manager.

We have contingently hired two special agents to fill our remaining vacancies, and we are awaiting their background investigations.

All told, the OIG identified approximately $2.9 million in questionable expenditures this fiscal year for a total of $46.7 million to date.

That averages $3.6 million per year for the fiscal years that we've been in existence.

Our greatest impact is what we save through the immeasurable effect of deterrence and through our program's recommendations that result in structural changes that perpetuate savings into the future.

We refer to any other type of information we receive from the public as a TIP.

We received 377 tips and 40 complaints during this reporting period.

We saw that 33 of the 40 complaints, or 83%, were submitted through our new reporting method, a website form through a portal on our restyled website that we made available in February.

That means that seven were hard copy complaints this year.

As we received 28 hard copy complaints during the 2023 fiscal year, we believe that not only is the web portal increasing the overall number of complaints, but it is also providing complainants with a convenient alternative to mailing or personally delivering a hard copy complaint to our office.

Of the 377 tips we received this year, 24 or 6.3% resulted in investigative matters.

Of the 40 complaints we received, three or 7.5% resulted in investigative matters.

Presumably, this provision was designed to minimize politicization of the OIG and its processes.

Thus, we have also implemented the policy to hold tips 60 days prior to an election and to conduct no overt activity on anything pending during the 60 days prior to an election, where an original allegation or additional allegation involves a qualified candidate in a contested race.

Pursuant to these guidelines, we held 35 tips and complaints in abeyance and conducted no public activity on nine investigative matters between June 21 and November 6.

Here is a brief rundown of the final reports, closing memoranda, and compliance reviews we completed and reported to the public this year.

The OIG issued a final report concluding that a former finance director of the City of North Lauderdale engaged in gross mismanagement for his failure to properly manage the financial aspect of a city contract for solid waste services when the service provider, WastePro, overbilled the city's residents and commercial customers and did not pay all the franchise fees it owed the city.

In total, from January 2012 through September 2021, we found that Waste PRO's overbillings amounted to approximately $2,589,753.48 cents.

Applied a higher rate than agreed to for commercial customers.