The Broward County Commission held a FY27 Budget Workshop on May 19, 2026, to discuss three major agenda items: a study of law enforcement services at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL), the Supervisor of Elections (SOE) FY27 budget request, and county priorities identified by commissioners. The workshop featured presentations from Sheriff Dr. Gregory Tony and Major Bryant Montgomery on airport overtime costs, followed by a budget presentation for the SOE, and concluded with each commissioner outlining their funding priorities for the upcoming fiscal year.
We're missing uh here she comes in. It's a long time no C. Okay. Good morning, everybody. We got a busy day today, and uh you guys ready to start? Okay. Ready to start? Yeah. Uh based on our last um our last workshop, uh, the sheriff is here uh to address some of the issues that we talked about. We're gonna limit the conversation to the airport. And Sully to the airport. And um, and so I'm gonna give you the floor. All right. Uh first of all, good morning, and thanks for the invitation to come. I think over the last several weeks, this discussion has kind of uh led to the workshop having its meeting. You guys know if I'm not here, I watch all the meetings regardless. I listen to all the commentary, I take notes on it. What this is not going to be, and I want to be clear because I know sometimes there's a concern about is there tension, is there gonna be uh conflict? Conflict can be healthy, right? When they're talking about ideas uh and rationale behind what we're doing. I don't see this one as being a super conflict. I really appreciate it. I said on social media I put out to the media when they asked my concerns about you guys going out and doing the feasibility study. Bravo. That's the way business needs to be done. If we as elected officials and government officials are gonna make decisions on behalf of two million people and impact an airport with almost 36 million plus commuters coming through, it needs to be done through data-driven analysis. So we read the Jensen report is collectively amongst our team that we think it was a thorough first phase, but of course to their own admission. There's a great deal of more research that needs to be done, in my opinion, before this commission would make a final decision. On that, one of the things I want to start with, Mayor, if you don't mind, I'm gonna actually kind of start with something I heard you say, um, and I think is important to kind of correct some of this stuff. You know you made an inquiry as to, and I'm paraphrasing, I can't remember precise how you said it, but about how did we get to a point where the airport budget had increased by 50 percent. Uh I was informed that in the past, since 2020, and the administrator can correct me if since 2020, the airport budget has increased 50 percent. And so I to me, this is uh we're here today really uh to see how we could reduce reduce costs. Okay. And so two men that I have with me today, just to introduce them, some of you know them, some of you probably haven't had a chance to engage with them yet. To my right is Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Di Giovanni. He is the second in command of all law enforcement operations. To his right is commander or major Bryant Montgomery, who leads up responsibility for all critical infrastructures, and that's really probably one of your more closer partners in the sense that he's responsible for the airport aspect, uh the port as well as the courthouse. So I want to start with talking about that because oftentimes what I least seen from this commission, if there's an inquiry, it's because you don't have all the data in front of you or you haven't heard about it. One of the most significant things that has resulted in some of the increases is what we agreed upon, meaning this body, BSO, as well as the county and your your representatives was about the overtime implications and why have we absorbed so much. We've gone from $500,000 back in 2000 look like 20, 21 in overtime to 4.7 million dollars in overtime and then escalating up to where we're operating right now at $500,000 differential. We used to be to now $7.3 million in overtime. So how do we get there? One of the things I want to talk about is the reason we're driving so much overtime outside of the contractual stuff that was agreed upon in Major Montgomery's gonna go through this, is about manpower. For seven consistent years, I talked to this body about increasing ASOs, the airport security officers, and law enforcement uh deputies inside that facility. We haven't gotten to that point yet. But I think you see with the mathematics and when Major Montgomery started talking about this stuff, it pushes the importance of increasing manpower at the airport to include the ASOs. So I'm gonna turn this over just briefly to Major Montgomery to give you an overview on the overtime implications and how we got there, and then we can perhaps talk about potential strategies in the future to reduce that, which is probably gonna go back to my point about personnel and getting the appropriate um ASO numbers back up to what they used to be, as well as increasing the officer uh terms of volume that was required out there, especially knowing we're going to terminal five with almost 50 million people expected to go through there. Especially knowing we're going to Terminal 5 with almost 50 million people expected to go through there. So major let's just do a quick synopsis in terms of the overtime. How's that how the how you've managed that and where did it start?