Rhetoric doesn’t fit Reality or Sophistries don’t fit Truth?

The guest column by Mr. Mozo contains numerous willful and deliberate inaccuracies, or in some cases, just outright deliberately misleading untruths.

Mr. Mozo states he was “dismayed to read” in late February about the Clerk’s Office having a small number of layoffs to get the expenditures back in line with the revenue.  Thus being dismayed, he then decided to “examine the office budgets for the past nine years to try and understand why this layoff is truly necessary.” 

The article thus begins with the first lie, as Mr. Mozo requested the budget numbers from the Clerk’s Office in late January (while the EELS purchases of the Scottsmoor Partners was under discussion) and they were sent to him January 23rd, weeks before even we had decided the small layoffs would be necessary.

Mr. Mozo then proceeds to deliberately distort budgets by two methods. The first is his use of the budget for 1999/2000 for his baseline.  This is the budget set two years before my term began, as I inherited the budget of 2000/2001.  He conveniently uses budget instead of expenditures for 1999/2000, to cleverly sidestep the fact that it was the year of the great office meltdown due to overwhelming computer problems.  In this year alone $900,000 was spent that was not the Clerk’s money and $600,000 was borrowed from the County Commission.  Although the budget showed 310 employees, there were in fact over 380 employees on the payroll of the Brevard County Clerk’s Office at this point.  Mr. Mozo was an employee of the office at this time and knows the truth, he simply chooses not to use it.

I took office in January of 2001, inheriting an office staff of 382 full and part time employees.  Upon learning of all of the unbudgeted employees working in the office, along with overtime numbers running well over one million dollars annually, we corrected the budget and converted some part-time positions to full time to shave nearly one million dollars from the overtime costs.  In 2001/2002, the first budget prepared in my term of office, we corrected the entire budget to accurately reflect the number of people working and the money truly spent

While an intentionally false baseline was used, likewise ongoing budgetary expenditures were similarly overstated.  The Clerk’s Office maintains two reserve/trust funds, one for Official Records and one for Technology.  Money accrues in these funds and if not spent is carried forward to the next year.  These monies must be used for capital outlay and as such may be used for software, hardware, and records facilities.  The Records fund was at $300,000 when I took office and has since grown to $2.9 million as we have saved the money towards a major software replacement of the courts system.  The Technology Fund started at zero in 2004 and likewise has saved about $1.8 million.  These funds are NOT annually spent out and replenished.  Mr. Mozo knows this quite well, he formerly worked in Recording, and we reminded after the budgets sent to him that these trust funds carry forward each year and are neither spent nor replenished in their entirety.  In fact little has been spent from these funds over the last three years as we saved in anticipation of the recessionary slowdown after the Housing Bubble had passed.  Mr. Mozo conveniently added the trust fund to this years operating budget to distort the FY 2007/2008 spending by over $4.4 million after just as conveniently selecting numbers for 1999/2000 which he knew understated expenses by over $2 million.

The creativity of the percent increases of personnel and expenditures based on deliberately false baselines and endpoints was used to greatly exaggerate the increases we have had over time.  Just as conveniently Mr. Mozo leaves out the fact that million of dollars of our budget over the last years was spent sending money BACK to the County and State and not expended on the Clerk’s Office.

Since the Article V changes in 2004, the Clerk’s Office has returned excess fees to the County and State of almost $5.5 million, as well as sent back to the County about $3.6 million for their state mandated facilities cost and another $1.2 million for insurance billings for Clerk’s employees who do NOT take the County insurance.  Thus over $10 million which our office has returned to the County and State is slyly treated by Mr. Mozo as expenditures of the Clerk’s Office rather than what they truly are, revenue to others, not to us.

I fully take credit for the increased costs of the Internal Audit Department.  As Mr. Mozo knows full well, those costs are covered by the Recording Fees and not the Courts.  The work he so despises is available online (www.brevardclerk.us  Public Records – Internal Audit – Reports) for all to examine.  The reports speak for themselves, most are much less extravagant than he has claimed, some are simply public records information.

Mr. Mozo appears upset we looked at the involvement of his employer, the St. Johns River Water Management District, and the Brevard County EELS program, where he has a volunteer membership sitting on an EELS committee.  The SJRWMD issues involved a property initially considered by EELS, purchased by the buyer at the peak of the market in 2005 and to be sold to the County for $2.2 million in 2007 (sound familiar?).  EELS backed out on the deal, probably even too blatant for them, and we were already evaluating the purchase when Mr. Mozo’s SJRWMD kindly stepped in, and with a few million in guarantees from the City of Melbourne, promptly paid almost $2 million for another broken development windfall.  Currently we are investigating mitigation wetlands the County was forced to buy by the SJRWMD for the Pineda Extension.  Exemplifying another checkered bargain, the County had to pay $20,000 an acre in 2007 for useless land in Volusia County to a seller who amazingly had the foresight to buy the land for $2,000 an acre in 2006.  There are sound reasons why we have been asking the SJRWMD, as well as EELS, questions on the expenditures of Brevard County.

Probably the lowest of the allegations by Mr. Mozo concern the hiring of the in-house attorney.  This attorney was a former employee with an accounting degree who was initially hired as a part-time auditor.  Incredibly, he considered Mr, Mozo, his former co-worker, as a close friend.  Mr. Mozo supported our hiring (although you would hardly know it from the article) and allowing this person a second chance.  Now that the attorney has been drug through the mud thanks to his great friend, my comments would be the man did great work as an auditor, began helping us on smaller legal issues when our contracted attorney had a series of illnesses, and more than earned his $42,000 salary in our office.  It is unfortunate he eventually had to leave employment, but is extremely despicable and deceptive of Mr. Mozo to hang his own friend, whom he recommended for re-employment, out to dry for political purposes.  Well, I guess a lot of truth was missing in this section as well.

Mr. Mozo finally states the layoff are a direct consequence of adding the part-time auditors to the Clerk’s staff, knowing full well the $500,000 projected overrun on the Courts side is completely unaffected by their salaries and the shortfall on the Recording side is due to a drop in Recording and other non-court fees from $9.6 million in FY 2006 to a projected $5 million in FY 2008.

Maybe almost $5 million is nothing to the SJRWMD or EELS, but in our office we have had an overall revenue drop since 2006 of about 20%.  While every other local government entity in the County has had revenues increasing or flat, ours have dropped dramatically and we are, and have for two years, been adjusting.  Mr. Mozo just happened to leave out that 80% of the revenue for the Clerk’s Office is based on Court and Recording Fees, with only about 20% coming from County and State taxes.  When we have more work, we hire and pay for the work with a portion of the increased fees (most goes back to the County and State), and as revenues fall we scale back the number of employees and hours worked and our excess fees returned to the County and State shrink.

Mr. Mozo knows full well our efforts over the last seven years to gain efficiencies in the courts as well as the roadblocks we have faced from others who have no desire to change how things have been done for thirty years.  He knows about our efforts to establish a full-time jail judge, centralize criminal proceedings, and streamline court dockets because he was there.  Oddly enough, these attempts on our part to save thousands of hours annually in labor were left out of the article.

The real tragedy of Mr. Mozo’s article is not the crocodile tears he sheds for the handful of involuntary layoffs, but the root dissension he attempts to create in our office by trying to pit various groups of employees against each other.  He has willfully and deliberately distorted budget and employment numbers knowing full well the mess inherited in 2001, the efforts of all our employees to dig out from it, and the gross inaccuracies in the budget and employee numbers of the prior administration.  By 2003 we had turned the computer system around, re-established the financial ledgers, repaid the $1.5 million borrowed intentionally and unintentionally, and began the changes under Article V in 2004/05 returning millions of dollars to the State and the County.  I am very proud of the turnaround our people put together, and it is unfortunate Mr. Mozo has chosen to wildly exaggerate hiring and expenditures to cover the real ox which has been gored, the EELS program.

Mr. Mozo in his article of errors of commission and omission seemed to have left out his role in the Brevard County EELS Program.  Working closely as an EELS Committee member, Mr. Mozo was given information by Mr. Mike Knight, EELS Director, to use to lay a vicious personal attack on one our auditors who had done reports on the EELS purchases going back to 2006.  In a meeting last year where we were stalled for seven hours over a discussion on an EELS White Paper we had written, to the point where I had to leave, Mr. Mozo spoke after I left to try to tear down the integrity of the auditor (note – not the Reports or the White Paper) using information given him by EELS.  When I questioned how odd the information appeared with Mr. Mozo from EELS files, Mr. Knight promptly lied about allegedly discussing the topic in an open EELS meeting.  Our review of the tape revealed, of course, no such discussion.

The printing of the grossly erroneous article by Mr. Mozo simply exemplifies the ongoing deceit of the Florida Today editorial chieftains.  Early Monday morning I had sent in a letter in reply to the editorial slam given me over the EELS purchases since 2006.  Mr. John Glisch informed me Monday afternoon my letter could not be printed as it was ‘too long and too rambling’, yet at this same time he had okayed for print this deliberately misleading guest editorial by Mr. Mozo.  While I have been accused of political posturing on EELS due to a re-election campaign (pretty shrewd of me to have known two years ago Mr. Needleman was running for Clerk when he himself did not know it yet), this guest editorial is written and printed for the sole purpose of discrediting our true expenditures, efforts, and operations, and to create dissension within our employees by deliberately trying to set them against myself and each other.

Bit, of course, politics would have nothing to do with this editorial!