In 2020, the Escambia County voters approved the creation of the Escambia Children’s Trust that would be funded by increasing property taxes $8-$10 million annually. The Trust’s board next Tuesday will vote on its first group of large grants for out-of-school programs and two sole-source initiatives.
According to its website: “The purpose of the Escambia Children’s Trust is to invest in the well-being of children within Escambia County by maximizing resources and ensuring accountability through investment in and support to community provider programs through a competitive review process.”
Under the sole-source initiatives:
The program committee has recommended the Trust fund the Sheriff’s Office Movie Nights $40,000, the agency’s Public Service Announcements $50,000, Virtual Reality Training Simulator for officers $152,201.14 and a Real Time Crime Center $190,000.
The proposal lists no metrics on how the Trust can determine the $432,501 will improve the well-being of children. There are no numbers on how many children will be served, or even why a Sheriff’s Office Movie Night is better than other similar events in the community.
The Escambia County Sheriff’s Office isn’t offering matching funds from its $77.47 million budget, Law Enforcement Trust Fund or Escambia County Sheriff Foundation.
Is this what voters expect the Trust to fund?
Escambia County never uses metrics to measure outcomes. After the State Attorney slammed Escambia County for how it was wasting Law Enforcement Trust Fund dollars, I reviewed about two years worth of agenda items and watched the meeting videos to see if the BOCC said anything. Most of the expenditures were obviously bogus and often for routine expenses to include $20,000 or $40,000 to pay for a champagne brunch for rich people at the Portfino Island Resort, the type of event people attend to get their pictures in VIP Magazine. When events were given for fundraising activities, vice actual crimefighting, the Sheriff would get campaign advertising at the events. I recall one case where a group of cheerleaders got money supposedly for telling football players not to use drugs. Yeah, right. As a general rule, the commissioners said nothing and voted using a rubberstamp. When the County Attorney openly objected to one expenditure, the BOCC found a back-handed way to give them public (general fund) money after a long sob story, I think by Bergosh. When you look at the actual applications, there’s no explanation of what the money is for or how they spent the money they got the last time. Sometimes the recommendation was to give more money than requested or less with no explanation. I don’t recall any commissioner ever asking why a group was given twice as much as they said they needed. In one case, someone in the Sheriff’s Office wrote that something was an inappropriate expenditure and it looked like Sheriff Morgan handwrote a change to make it seem OK. Again, commissioners said nothing. I doubt they even read the forms. So it’s no surprise that given a county culture of wasteful spending that the Escambia Children’s Trust standing in the shoes of the BOCC are wasting money left and right. You can bet that heads would roll if anyone tried all of these stunts in Santa Rosa County.