r/localgovernment

GM r/Broward.

Remember that massive BSO payroll spreadsheet I posted here a little while ago? The one that pulled over 250,000 views on this exact subreddit?

https://preview.redd.it/ek9532q3qcjh1.png?width=939&format=png&auto=webp&s=4333ae2c2cfbd2a7d66ca141deb89edc4f2464bb

I recently called Rafael Olmeda, the courts reporter for the Sun Sentinel, and offered him the rest of the deep dive on a silver platter. I gave him the shallow end first:

• A BSO sergeant pulling $457,000 in a single year.
• Six employees in one jail department splitting $2.3 million.
• The Sheriff’s secretary making $187,000.
• A mechanic, of all people, making $225K.
• Agency-wide 2025 overtime hitting $107 million across 1.53 million hours.

His response? He told me he was going to pass.

Why? Because he explicitly told me his readers "lack the attention span" for it. He said it's "too much for them" and they wouldn't be able to "follow along."

I asked him if he meant people just want TikToks and Karen videos. He said yeah.

So, congratulations Broward. The "paper of record" just decided that a $107 million public accountability scandal is too complicated for your little brains, and they won't print it.

I wrote a whole piece on my Substack about this complete journalistic faceplant, why beat reporters in this county have been phoning it in for 20 years, and what the actual numbers look like.

If you can manage to string enough syllables together without getting distracted by a shiny object, you can read the whole thing here. Prove him wrong.

Link to Substack.

Press play. Tick.

PS I am not looking for media suggestions, I have that well covered. This is not my first rodeo. The following front page Herald story from 2010.

https://preview.redd.it/afwpe2fwhcjh1.jpg?width=1101&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6d2b503bf65b5b055350148c5744622c1ffa6ff3

For clerks and volunteer secretaries here: how are you actually handling posting deadlines in practice?

Count back e.g. 72 hours, post the agenda sounds easy. But then there's a holiday weekend lands, or a meeting gets rescheduled, or someone realizes at 11pm the night before that the clock started from a different date than they thought. One slip and the meeting is exposed to a challenge.

What I keep seeing:

- People doing calendar math by hand every single cycle, which is exactly where the errors creep in.
- The last-minute compliance check the day of posting, which just moves the anxiety around instead of removing it. (Though moving anxiety around is a viable strategy. Not knocking that!)
- Rotating boards where whoever inherits the seat also inherits someone else's Word template and file-naming habits, and the institutional memory of how deadlines were counted walks out the door with the previous secretary. (If you are unlucky they also walk with the templates or google drive access.)

So I'm genuinely curious what works for the folks running smaller bodies (neighborhood councils, small commissions, HOAs with open-meeting-style obligations):

- Do you have a shared calendar or checklist that catches the holiday/reschedule edge cases, or is it living in one person's head?
- How do you hand off the deadline process when the board turns over?

Not looking for a vendor pitch, just want to compare notes on how people keep this from becoming a monthly stress spike.

Does anyone here work for a municipality that has a new town manager and is having issues with them I’m the first three weeks of them being there, and the Council is already looking to fire them? Need help!

This is something I’ve always wondered about.

You can report a pothole in one city and it feels like it gets fixed pretty quickly. In another place, the same pothole can sit there for months, get patched badly, and then show up again a few weeks later.

What usually causes that difference?

Is it mostly about money and staffing, or does it come down to how a city organizes and prioritizes maintenance requests?

I’m also curious whether cities that stay on top of small repairs actually save money in the long run compared with places that let roads get worse before dealing with them.

For anyone who works in public works, infrastructure, engineering, or local government, what actually makes a road maintenance system work well?