The battle over millions of dollars of Orange County taxpayer money being wasted on the downtown Orlando SunTrust building continued recently when Mayor Teressa Jacobs and the rest of the Board of County Commissioners blew through yet another deadline, costing county residents $127,000.
The SunTrust building, which the county rents at a rate of $1.2 Million a year to house the Property Appraiser and Tax Collector offices, was granted a $760,000 tenant improvement budget when the new 5 year lease was signed in 2014. Both Property Appraiser Rick Singh and Tax Collector Scott Randolph have asked to be moved out of the expensive, hard to access building, but the county board turned a deaf ear.
Photo courtesy of the Orlando Sentinel
The tenant improvement budget would be used for improvements and upgrades to the offices, such as new paint, replacing 30-year-old damaged and mildewed carpet, and safety and security upgrades for staff and visitors. Whatever wasn’t used could be applied to lower the steep rent.
However, the money had to be spent by June 30th 2015, a deadline that Orange County Director of Administrative Services John Terwilliger and his staff were unable to meet. Mr. Terwilliger, who overseas all county controlled properties, and his staff could not enact the improvements quickly enough. Even after an amendment to the lease agreement was signed off on by the building managers and the Orange County Board extending the deadline to December 31st, neither Mr. Terwilliger or the board moved fast enough to avoid the lost month of rent offset ($127,000) from being wasted.
Whether through laziness or incompetence, this is a running theme for both Mayor Jacobs’ commission and Mr. Terwilliger, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds to deck out the posh and expensive Clerk of Courts office during the period his wife Lydia Gardner served in that position. This type of nepotism-in-action has been something plaguing Central Florida over the last 30 years as local politics move from the “good ‘ol boy” network of the past toward what will hopefully be a brighter future with local government more representative of the growth and change going on in the county.
With a unanimous vote, the board concluded a few weeks ago to simply forgo most of the suggested changes for a property they claim now they are looking to eventually stop using. However, with the board’s record of saying they don’t want want to waste taxpayer funds while renewing a 5-year lease on a property, and bungling the lease negotiation by not having the building manager pay for needed improvements, the odds don’t look good that there will be a better resolution to this issue when it has to be addressed again in the coming years.
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