When County Clerk Pam Childers won the 401a lawsuit, she demanded three commissioners who were in the fund to hand the money in their retirement accounts over to her. The funds included the same contributions that would have been made to their Florida Retirement System but without the deduction for the FRS overhead. Bender was in the 401a plan the longest, which explains why his check was the most.
| Bender | $ 143,491 |
| Barry | $ 28,586 |
| May | $ 25,076 |
| $ 197,153 |
Now, the commissioners receive the same contribution as before but it goes into accounts with FRS. The retirement contributions paid by the taxpayers are the same, regardless of the plan.
- When the PNJ reported the reimbursement in May, Childer shared something curious. The reimbursement would have been $390,000 if she hadn’t stopped making contributions in January 2022. Why that specific number?
Because her legal bills for the lawsuit were over $438K – something the PNJ never asked her.
| 1/30/22 | 110731 | $ 458.75 |
| 2/28/22 | 110915 | $ 11,213.75 |
| 3/27/22 | 111257 | $ 2,703.25 |
| 4/30/22 | 111405 | $ 12,137.25 |
| 5/30/22 | 111731 | $ 2,593.50 |
| 6/26/22 | 111802 | $ 32,565.00 |
| 7/31/22 | 112223 | $ 4,264.75 |
| 8/24/22 | 112267 | $ 10,686.07 |
| 9/25/22 | 112459 | $ 9,924.75 |
| 9/30/22 | 112586 | $ 6,212.50 |
| 10/25/22 | 112677 | $ 20,495.25 |
| 11/30/22 | 112936 | $ 46,990.50 |
| 1/6/23 | 113384 | $ 40,983.00 |
| 1/27/23 | 113829 | $ 542.50 |
| 1/31/23 | 113837 | $ – |
| 2/28/23 | 114216 | $ 269.50 |
| 2/28/23 | 114383 | $ 57.00 |
| 3/31/23 | 114463 | $ 37,920.00 |
| 4/30/23 | 114653 | $ – |
| 5/31/23 | 115091 | $ 1,957.20 |
| 10/1/23 | 116059 | $ 531.25 |
| 12/1/23 | 116529 | $ 1,181.25 |
| 1/2/24 | 116708 | $ 833.75 |
| 1/31/24 | 117133 | $ 3,555.00 |
| 2/29/24 | 117289 | $ 97,235.53 |
| 3/31/24 | 117545 | $ 29,443.50 |
| 4/30/24 | 118013 | $ 1,641.00 |
| Fleming | $ 376,395.80 | |
| Dannheisser | $ 61,992.00 | |
| Total | $ 438,387.80 | |
But, Rick
Childers may argue that she had to hire the attorneys. However, Fleming stretched the case over two years with motions that he repeatedly lost, driving up his bills. He could have gone to trial in the spring of 2022, saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Why didn’t Childers rein him in and demand they go to trial?
- Why wasn’t she monitoring the bills?
- She also had the option of using her in-house attorney, Codey Leigh.
- She also had the option of joining the commissioners in asking for an Attorney General’s opinion.
- Did she drag out the lawsuit so that the ruling would be announced in the 2024 election cycle?
These are hardly the actions of a good steward of taxpayers’ dollars.
C Reed: No, that is not the moral of the story. 1) The issue probably needed to be sided by a judge, but why did Pam have her attorney drag out the fight over two years with frivolous motions, incurring these huge legal bills? Based on the final ruling, the case was a simple matter of law, which could have been decided in 2022, not 2024. 2) Also, the issue wasn’t the “misappropriation of funds.” No funds were misappropriated. The taxpayers contributed the same amount in the 401a and FRS for the commissioners. The issue was the commissioners’ 401a accounts had more money because they didn’t have the FRS overhead.
I’m confused – is the moral of the story here that we should have just let the three commissioners incorrectly contribute to the fund that was deemed to illegally benefit them, because it would have saved the County money? If they kept contributing to the fund, wouldn’t their total amount of money received have grown to be larger than the legal fees in the long run? Sure, the legal fees are high – but as a resident of Pensacola, I don’t have a single issue with those funds being used to call out the corruption and misappropriation of funds that was happening in the first place. And I think that the cost incurred shows good judgement from Pam that the fight is worth pursuing, because it can deter future behavior by those trying to skirt the law. Letting this slide would have created a snowball effect that could cost way more in the long run.