FLORIDA BULLDOG – Watchdog News You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

FloridaBulldog.org | Fort Lauderdale, Florida | Est. 2009

PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: April 9, 2026 Source: FloridaBulldog.org — Florida’s Independent Nonprofit Watchdog Newsroom

FLORIDA BULLDOG NEWS SUMMARY — APRIL 2026

Coral Reefs vs. Port Everglades | Broward’s Fire Rescue Power Struggle | Miami Judge’s First Amendment Fight | Li’l Abner Evictions & Congressional Earmarks

Florida Bulldog, the state’s independent nonprofit investigative newsroom, presents its April 2026 news summary — four essential stories drawn directly from the pages of FloridaBulldog.org and published in the past three months. Each story is the product of original reporting by veteran journalists who follow the public records, documents, and sources that powerful institutions would rather keep out of reach. From an environmental battle over Florida’s last healthy reef to a billion-dollar port project, from a sheriff’s unraveling grip on Broward’s fire and police services to the First Amendment defense of a Miami appeals court judge, to a deeply reported investigation into congressional earmarks that benefited a developer while 3,000 vulnerable residents were evicted — these are the stories that define accountability journalism in Florida in 2026.

Florida Bulldog is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization funded entirely by readers and donors. We accept no advertising and answer to no corporate owner or political interest. Every story we publish is freely available at FloridaBulldog.org. We ask only that you read these stories, share them, and — if they matter to you — support Florida Bulldog with a tax-deductible contribution.

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Port Everglades Dredging vs. Florida’s Last Thriving Coral Reef

By Kailey Aiken | FloridaBulldog.org | April 9, 2026

Coral reefs across the east coast of Florida, once teeming with sea life and bursts of color, have become a shadow of what they once were — deteriorated into barren, monochrome plains. The causes are many, scientists say: rising ocean temperatures, disease, coastal development, and the accumulated damage of decades of human activity. But in the waters just off Fort Lauderdale, a remarkable exception has persisted. Researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Shedd Aquarium have documented approximately 10 million corals thriving in and around the main shipping channel of Port Everglades — including more than 40,000 colonies of staghorn coral listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. It is, by scientific consensus, one of the last healthy coral strongholds on the U.S. mainland. Florida Bulldog reporter Kailey Aiken has investigated what stands to happen to it.

What stands to happen is the Port Everglades Navigation Improvements Project, a $1.35 billion federal initiative led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deepen and widen the port’s shipping channels to accommodate the massive Neo-Panamax cargo ships and supertankers that now define global trade. The project would dredge some 400 underwater acres — blasting the seafloor with explosives potentially more than 200 days per year over five years, spreading sediment plumes across reef habitat that scientists warn cannot survive burial. NOAA has reviewed the Army Corps’s own environmental analyses and called them “unintelligible,” lacking “fundamentally important information,” and containing “significant factual and analytical flaws.” NOAA’s Southeast regional administrator wrote in a letter to the Corps that the project “would result in the largest impact to coral reefs permitted in U.S. history.”

The historical precedent for what could go wrong is only 30 miles down Florida’s Atlantic coast. Between 2013 and 2015, a similar Army Corps dredging project at PortMiami spread sediment far beyond its predicted boundaries, smothering more than 250 acres of reef. The Corps initially reported that just six corals had been killed. A 2019 scientific study found more than 560,000 corals were killed — with harmful impacts extending up to six miles beyond the dredging site. “These are animals that are attached to the bottom, and they can’t move,” Shedd Aquarium research biologist Ross Cunning told Florida Bulldog. “So when they’re buried by sediment, they die.”

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The economic stakes of what could be lost are not limited to the intrinsic value of the reef ecosystem. Florida’s coral reefs serve as natural breakwaters that reduce storm surge wave energy by up to 95 percent along Florida’s coastline. In a state facing rising sea levels and increasingly intense hurricane seasons, the reef system off Fort Lauderdale functions as a multi-billion-dollar natural insurance policy for the communities behind it.

Port Everglades officials and the Army Corps have argued that the current dredging plan is the most environmentally sensitive ever devised for a project of its scale — with nearly half of the project’s budget earmarked for environmental mitigation, coral relocation, and restoration. But scientists who have studied both the Port Everglades and PortMiami reef systems remain deeply skeptical. A recent analysis found that millions of corals would be left behind to die even under the most aggressive mitigation scenario — and that no amount of coral planting can replicate the centuries-old reef structure that would be destroyed.

As of April 2026, the Port Everglades Navigation Improvements Project remains in regulatory limbo, with environmental review proceedings ongoing and no final approval granted. Conservation organizations including Earthjustice and Miami Waterkeeper have been actively engaged in the review process. Florida Bulldog’s reporting by Kailey Aiken places the scientific, economic, and regulatory dimensions of this story in the context that South Florida residents need to make sense of what is at stake — and what choices remain available before an irreversible decision is made.

Broward Commission Eyes Dismantling BSO’s Fire Rescue Empire

By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | April 7, 2026

It is beginning to look like the Broward County Commission has had enough of controversial Sheriff Gregory Tony — and is taking active steps aimed at dismantling large chunks of his Broward Sheriff’s Office. On the agenda for the commission’s April 14 meeting is a motion to direct the county administrator to “outline the process necessary to bring the Broward County Department of Fire Rescue” — contracted out to BSO since 2003 — “back under the operational control of Broward County.” Florida Bulldog editor Dan Christensen obtained and reported the details of a political showdown that, if it proceeds, would be the most significant restructuring of Broward’s public safety apparatus in more than two decades.

The move would immediately strip more than 890 BSO fire rescue and emergency services personnel out from under the sheriff’s operational control — and eliminate approximately $220 million in annual revenues that BSO’s own budget projects it collects for those services. The same agenda item asks the county to consider findings from a consulting study — still under wraps — “regarding forming a law enforcement agency” to replace BSO at Port Everglades and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Losing those two contracts alone would cost BSO $28.5 million in port revenues and $41.6 million in airport revenues.

Broward Commissioner Lamar Fisher, the sponsor of the agenda item, told Florida Bulldog the county has repeatedly tried to give the sheriff’s office additional funds — only to find the money did not go where it was intended. “At the end of the day the issue is that we can’t dictate to the sheriff, whoever sits in that seat, how to spend those monies,” Fisher said. “He can spend whatever dollars he gets however he wishes. And that’s frustrating at times.”

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The commission’s move comes at a moment of accelerating fragmentation for BSO. Pembroke Park ended its contract and launched its own police department in 2022. Deerfield Beach voted 4-1 in January to end its BSO contracts and is preparing to re-establish its own departments. Pompano Beach hired a consulting firm to study independence — and found it would cost more, prompting a recommendation to extend the BSO contract for another year. The cumulative picture is of a sheriff whose grip on Broward’s public safety infrastructure is weakening from multiple directions simultaneously.

The timing is also shaped by a separate Florida Bulldog investigation that found tens of millions of dollars in internal inconsistencies in BSO’s own budget documents — discrepancies that cast doubt on the reliability of the figures Tony presented to Tallahassee in his appeal for $73 million in additional county funding. Broward County’s Independent Auditor reviewed the numbers at Florida Bulldog’s request and found that in at least one major unit, revenues appeared to exceed costs by nearly $5 million.

The April 14 Broward County Commission meeting may mark a turning point in the long and complicated political relationship between the county government and its constitutional sheriff. For the more than two million residents of Broward who depend on BSO for fire rescue services — and for the dozens of municipalities that contract with the agency for police protection — the decisions made at that meeting and in the months that follow will shape the structure of their public safety services for a generation.

Miami Judge Bronwyn Miller Invokes First Amendment in Florida Supreme Court Ethics Fight

By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | April 1, 2026

Miami appeals court Judge Bronwyn Miller is trying to make a First Amendment case out of the ethics charges she is fighting before the Florida Supreme Court — in a legal battle that has drawn national attention and pits the independence of the judiciary against the rights of individual judges to speak their minds. Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has covered the case from its origins and now reports on a 69-page motion filed by Miller’s attorney, Warren Lindsey, arguing that the text messages at the center of the Judicial Qualifications Commission’s ethics charges are protected speech under the First Amendment — and that if the Florida Supreme Court removes Miller from the bench, she has a ticket to federal court to challenge that removal.

The JQC claims that Miller — a judge on Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal with more than 20 years on the bench, up for a retention election in November 2026 — wrongly pressured her former boss, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, to fight harder in the court-ordered resentencing of Corey Smith, a convicted mass murderer Miller had prosecuted as an assistant state attorney two decades earlier. Private texts from Miller to Rundle were disclosed, revealing pointed critiques, tactical advice, and blunt assessments of the lawyers, witnesses, and judges involved in the resentencing. The JQC charged Miller with ethics violations, finding probable cause she violated canons covering integrity, interference in pending cases, and preservation of public confidence in the courts.

Among the texts cited in the charges: Miller called a prosecution motion “extremely weak.” She texted that a judge “needs to be disqualified.” When a new prosecutor assigned to the case had written a novel with a sadomasochistic motif, Miller texted: “Why in the world would you have a misogynistic pervert anti-death penalty campaigner work on a death penalty case involving the murders of women and vulnerable people?” Rundle responded that the prosecutor “is credentialed.” Miller replied: “Ted Bundy was too,” followed by a vomiting emoji. The prosecutor was fired two weeks later.

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Miller’s defense rests on two arguments: first, that there was “no nexus” between her private texts and her role on the Third District; and second, that applying judicial conduct canons to private communications about matters unrelated to cases before her does not withstand First Amendment scrutiny. “Are judges not called to task to make difficult decisions which require strongly held convictions and opinions?” the motion asks.

The subtext of the First Amendment argument, as Florida Bulldog’s Marcus reports, is strategic: by framing the ethics case as a constitutional free speech issue, Miller preserves a potential pathway to federal court should the Florida Supreme Court — whose DeSantis-appointed majority has shown limited tolerance for judges who deviate from conservative norms — rule against her. A federal civil rights lawsuit challenging a state court’s removal of a judge on First Amendment grounds would be an unprecedented and highly significant legal development.

The Florida Supreme Court’s eventual ruling in the Miller case will shape the standards governing every judge in Florida — including the thousands of trial and appellate judges who handle the cases of Florida citizens every day. Florida Bulldog will continue to report on every development as the Miller proceedings make their way to a final resolution.

Gimenez and Diaz-Balart’s Li’l Abner Earmarks and the $400,000 in PAC Donations

By Dan Christensen and Cassidy Winegarden | FloridaBulldog.org | March 22, 2026

The evictions of approximately 3,000 vulnerable working-class and elderly residents of the Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park in Sweetwater dominated local news for months last year. What escaped public attention during those months, Florida Bulldog has revealed after nearly a year of investigation into thousands of public source records, was the $400,000 that quietly changed hands from the private developer who kicked the residents out to the political committees of Miami Republican Congressmen Carlos Gimenez and Mario Diaz-Balart — who had used federal earmarks to obtain $10 million in grants for the same developer’s affordable housing project on the former park site.

The developer is Raul F. Rodriguez, 47, CEO of CREI Holdings LLC. In their certification letters to the U.S. House Appropriations Committee requesting federal earmarks, both Gimenez and Diaz-Balart declared they had “no financial interest” in the Li’l Abner III affordable housing project. Yet federal election records show Rodriguez gave $150,000 to the Gimenez Victory Committee just six weeks after Gimenez wrote his earmark request letter — 12 times more than any other Gimenez donor gave. Rodriguez contributed $250,000 to the Mario Diaz-Balart Victory Fund just 11 days after HUD publicly announced it was poised to release $4 million for CREI’s project.

The House Ethics Manual states that “a political contribution tied to an official action may raise other considerations. It is impermissible to solicit or accept a campaign contribution that is linked to any action taken or asked to be taken by a Member in the Member’s official capacity — such as an earmark request that a member has made or been asked to make. Accepting a contribution under these circumstances may implicate the federal gift statute or the criminal provisions on illegal gratuities or bribery.” Neither Gimenez, Diaz-Balart, nor Rodriguez returned multiple requests for comment from Florida Bulldog.

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Florida Bulldog’s reporting documents the full timeline of how the earmark money flowed. Diaz-Balart first sought funding for the Li’l Abner III project in April 2022, requesting $20 million. He ultimately secured $4 million that December. The $250,000 Rodriguez contribution arrived after HUD announced it was ready to release the $4 million. Miami-Dade’s housing department paid the $4 million to CREI on April 16, 2025. Gimenez secured a $6 million earmark for the project in February 2026 and received his $150,000 Rodriguez contribution six weeks after submitting his earmark request.

The investigative question at the center of this story — whether the timing and sequence of earmark requests and PAC contributions constitutes the kind of “official action linked to political contribution” that the House Ethics Manual flags as potentially criminal — is one that Florida Bulldog raised explicitly in its questions to both congressmen. What is documented beyond dispute is that while both were quietly working behind the scenes to direct millions of federal dollars to the developer who was evicting their constituents, neither made a single public statement offering sympathy, criticism, or acknowledgment of the plight of the 3,000 residents whose evictions played out on every local television screen.

This investigation, by Dan Christensen and Cassidy Winegarden, required nearly a year of records analysis — scouring thousands of federal election records, congressional certification letters, HUD grant documents, Miami-Dade county records, U.S. Senate lobbying filings, and FEC campaign finance data. It is the kind of sustained, resource-intensive investigative journalism that requires a dedicated nonprofit newsroom with the institutional independence to follow a story wherever it leads, regardless of who it implicates.

ABOUT FLORIDA BULLDOG

Florida Bulldog is Florida’s independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan statewide investigative newsroom, founded in Fort Lauderdale in 2009 by award-winning journalist Dan Christensen. A federally tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization and proud member of the Investigative News Network, Florida Bulldog covers government, politics, law enforcement, the courts, education, business, the environment, health, and public safety across Broward County, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and all of Florida. No advertisers. No corporate owners. No political agenda. Nonprofit, independent, nonpartisan. No fake news.

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