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•🛑 Hiring Freeze: Okaloosa County will pause most non-essential hiring as an independent audit reviews its financial efficiency.
•📊 Audit Pushback: Some commissioners, like Carolyn Ketchel, voiced frustration over the audit’s necessity, while others, including Drew Palmer, see it as a way to prove fiscal responsibility.
•💰 Financial Growth: Over the past decade, the county’s reserves have grown from $9M to $35M, while maintaining a low property tax rate of 3.83 mills.
Okaloosa County will freeze most hiring while they audit themselves, DOGE style, but commissioners insist they have been efficient with taxpayer money.
Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his own version of the Federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that, in the governor’s sixth year in office, will begin to look into government waste and inefficiency at the state, county, and municipal levels.
RELATED: Walton County Passes A DOGE Resolution.
County Administrator John Hofstad explained to the County Commission at their Tuesday meeting that Chairman Paul Mixon had drafted a letter requesting a “deeper dive into our audit and our expenses and revenues here in Okaloosa County.”
The letter also requests a pause on hiring non-essential general fund positions while the county’s accountancy firm, Warren Averitt, performs the audit.
“We’ve made great strides in our financial stewardship here in Okaloosa County, considering where we are today versus where we were 10 years ago,” County Administrator Hofstad said. Hofstad noted that the county had increased their reserves from $9 Million to $35 Million in the last decade, increased their bond rating, and kept the county’s property tax rate “at one of the lowest in the state” at 3.83 mills.
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Commissioner Carolyn Ketchel (R – Shalimar) has served on the Board for almost 12 years and let it be known that she did not like the implications of the audit. “I’m good with moving forward. The frustration I have is that both the state government and the county governments are required to have a balanced budget. We have really lived within our means in the last 10 years, we there has been no fluff in this county. I’ll stake my reputation on that, and this irritates the tar out of me,” Ketchel noted, “I’m very frustrated by this whole thing that’s happening, because they’re looking at us like perhaps there’s fluff in our budget and there’s not, but an audit will prove that. So I’m willing to go forward.”
Related: County Commission Votes to Buy Red Lobster Building in Fort Walton Beach
“I understand the bristling at this,” newly-elected Commissioner Drew Palmer (R – Destin) said to the rest of the dais, “But I welcome the opportunity to demonstrate that Okaloosa County is conservative and that we are good fiduciaries of the public money. So although I do understand that, I do want to make sure that you know, as we move forward with this, this is not a reflection on how we feel about staff, except that it should be looked at as an opportunity for us to demonstrate how how good of a job that our staff in our county does in this sort of environment.”
Commissioner Trey Goodwin (R – Fort Walton Beach), began his time on the dais after unseating Don Amunds. Amunds was a commissioner when investigators revealed fraud, waste and abuse at the Okaloosa TDC. The man at the middle of the investigation, Mark Belligner, would be accused of graft on a grand scale. His death by suicide marked one of the biggest scandals in Okaloosa County history.
“There used to be a time when, when that was a serious problem in Okaloosa County, and we’ve, we’ve done a real good job, I think, under our current leadership, of flushing that out and getting rid of those bad elements,” Goodwin said, “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t efficiencies that could be appreciated by looking at our practices, our policies, our procedures, the tools that we have available for our employees to do their jobs. You know, whether that’s leveraging technology or doing things in a more streamlined fashion that saves staff time and, in turn, saves time and resources for our constituents.”
