Letters sent to all of Florida’s cities, towns and counties last week by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ newly formed Department of Government Efficiency Team asking local governments to admit to any financial shortcomings before the state DOGE staff begins combing through public records and data could not have come at a worse time for Vero Beach.
Vero, which last month came under enforcement by the state for failing to complete and file its 2022-23 audit, is currently up against a hard June 30 deadline to file these financial statements with the Florida Auditor General and convince bureaucrats at a half-dozen alphabet agencies to pull whatever levers are necessary to re-start the flow of state funds to Vero.
Any funding not restored to the city due to the non-compliance with state statute will be forfeited at close of business on June 30 when the state’s fiscal year ends.
Potentially more serious than the hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales tax revenue expected to be forfeited – because sales taxes are a special case and cannot be restored – is more than $32 million in pending grant funding the city was banking on to help offset construction costs of its planned new wastewater treatment plant at the airport complex.
With all of this in play, City Manager Monte Falls and City Attorney John Turner headed to Tallahassee Monday evening to try to meet with members of the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee on Tuesday, presumably to offer a desperate mea culpa and try one last time to extract the city from part or all of the state’s enforcement actions and penalties.
Had anyone from the city bothered to respond to notices from the state last fall asking for an explanation, that groveling would not be necessary.
Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s meetings, Falls and his staff face two new affronts to efforts to keep Vero’s financial woes out of the public eye.
The governor’s DOGE Team is giving local governments the opportunity to come clean about any lurking financial issues they’re having, with an April 8 deadline to respond. The Florida DOGE Team will be using artificial-intelligence and data mining tools to sift through financial reports, budgets and other government records.
“Please submit your response to [email protected] no later than April 8, 2025 to ensure timely review and, if necessary, assistance from state authorities. If we do not receive a response from you within 45 days, it will be presumed that your municipality is in possible statutory violation and in need of assistance,” the letters read.
At least one City Council member, Taylor Dingle, when contacted on Friday had not been told of the DOGE letter or the new April 8 deadline to report any financial irregularities to the governor’s staff.
Meanwhile, the Board of Directors of the Taxpayers Association of Indian River County on Monday announced that it had formed a Vero Beach Audit Task Force to hold the city’s feet to the fire until the state funding has been restored.
“The Vero Beach Audit Taskforce’s mandate from the Board is to ensure that, from a citizen oversight perspective, the City of Vero Beach successfully submits both the overdue and current financial audit before the end of the state’s fiscal year on June 30th, 2025. To determine the precise nature and amount of taxpayer dollar losses and penalties from the failure to submit the audited financial statements by January 15th,” Taxpayers’ President Lance Lunsford said.
The three-person task force will also investigate the status of the pending grant awards.
A long-time Grand Harbor resident who now lives out west of town, H. Rock Tonkel will work with long-time Central Beach resident and former Finance Commission member Mark Mucher and attorney Keith Jackman to sort out the full implications of Vero’s noncompliance with state filing requirements.
Vero Finance Commission Chair Bob Jones, meanwhile, whose panel meets quarterly, said he does not plan to hold an April meeting. He praised city finance staff and said he did not want to put any added pressure on them to produce quarterly budget reports or to give a status report on the pending audit.
He said the Finance Commission would meet next “as soon as it makes sense, and it doesn’t make sense for us to meet if there isn’t an ability to give us facts that we can digest ahead of time, you know, and, so we do not have one scheduled.
“If I had to guess, it would be May, June, because, you know, the priority needs to be to make the, you know, their latest reporting deadline happen,” Jones said.
Was Jones told about the March 18 state DOGE letter to the city?
“I have no knowledge of the DOGE process being applied to cities,” he said.
