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Miami, Florida - Miami-Dade County calculates public safety budgets to the dollar, overtime to the hour and tax rates to four decimal places. It does not publish a report card on the people inside those systems: retention, burnout, confidence in leadership, workload and intent to leave. Nobody outside County government can measure what those institutions are doing to their own workforce.
The scene that said too much
A fatal cargo-plane crash at Miami International Airport on September 6 produced two very different demonstrations of public safety. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue (MDFR) reached the scene in less than 30 seconds, County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said. Before the first media briefing, cameras captured a dispute over who would speak first. The Mayor’s chief of staff, Chris Hudtwalcker, argued that the Mayor should open because the County operates MIA and MDFR. Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz replied that this was public safety and that she would go first. She had the gun.
The disagreement then became an exchange of letters. Sheriff Cordero-Stutz wrote that the episode “must not occur again.” The Mayor defended the County’s broader emergency-management role. The contrast was hard to miss. The firefighters handled the emergency. Senior officials argued over the microphone.
That moment is more useful than another ceremonial press release because it raises the central question of this article: are Miami-Dade County’s public safety institutions organized around the people doing the work, or around the structures and personalities at the top?
A billion-dollar Sheriff’s office, still arguing about staffing
After the September 17 budget hearing, County Mayor Levine Cava said that County Commissioners had approved roughly $66 million in additional general-fund support, bringing that component of Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO) funding close to $1 billion, while the Sheriff’s total budget was about $1.2 billion. Sheriff Cordero-Stutz told County Commissioners that the office was “woefully” understaffed, that starting salaries were a problem, that stations needed repairs, and that $62.5 million in collective-bargaining costs were obligations the MDSO had to pay.
That $62.5 million figure has a specific workforce meaning. It funds a contractual 7.5 percent salary increase for all 3,227 deputies over the coming twelve months. The mayor’s administration offered a 6 percent budget increase against the sheriff’s proposed 12 percent, arguing that attrition and existing vacancies meant the smaller figure would suffice.
Sheriff Cordero-Stutz also warned that without the requested funding, planned academy classes and additional hiring would be affected. The County Mayor’s administration said the proposed budget already funded 200 new positions.
The vacancy number exists. The reasons do not.
This article’s central question—why are positions vacant in the first place?—has a partial public answer, and it came from the County Mayor. Levine Cava told the hearing that there are 300 vacancies in the sheriff’s office, and said that it did not make sense that the sheriff could not meet the obligations of the collective-bargaining agreement. So the County can count 300 vacancies. It does not publish why those 300 positions are empty.
Retirement after a full career, resignation after seven years, transfer to another agency and termination all produce an empty position. They do not describe the same workforce problem. Miami-Dade should publish them separately, along with tenure at separation and one-, three-, five-, and ten-year retention.
Recruitment is not retention
Recruitment photographs beautifully. Retention does not. A new academy class produces badges, families and podiums. An experienced employee leaving usually produces a vacancy code.
If MDSO believes compensation is the principal driver of staffing problems, an anonymous employee survey can test that. If retirement is the principal driver, separation data can demonstrate it. If scheduling, burnout, supervision, promotional practices, or workload are contributing, those can be measured too. Miami-Dade is spending heavily to solve a staffing problem that it has never publicly measured.
Separation at the top is also workforce data
The agency’s own command staff turned over in public this year. On March 16, 2026, MDSO removed three assistant sheriffs: Eric Garcia, who ran Patrol Services; Brian Rafky, who headed Support Services; and Shawn Browne, who headed Investigative Services. An agency spokesman said Garcia and Browne were leaving MDSO and that Rafky was staying on at a lower rank. It was the first major staff realignment since the County’s police department became a sheriff’s office in January 2025.
Eleven days later, the agency named three replacements: Andrew Glass, Fernand Charles Jr., and Javier Ruiz. Andrew Glass is not former Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) Commissioner Mark Glass, discussed below. They are different people. The agency called the removals routine and essential. It did not describe a performance finding, a reorganization analysis, or a reporting-structure change. Three command-level exits, one demotion, and an undersheriff retirement in a single year is separation data. The county publishes none of it in that form.
Follow the overtime
Overtime should not be treated as one giant accounting bucket. Vacancy coverage, minimum staffing, court appearances, investigations, emergency activations, special events, and reimbursable details tell taxpayers very different things about an agency. MDSO’s FY 2026-27 budget narrative reviewed for this article includes a $6.5 million increase in overtime for proactive patrol services providing enhanced security and increased presence at places of worship in response to intelligence-driven threats.
Protecting threatened religious institutions is a core public-safety function. The financial questions are still elementary: How many institutions receive enhanced coverage? What neutral threat criteria are used? How many overtime hours are involved? How much is temporary threat response versus recurring presence? What portion, if any, is reimbursed? Operational security does not require publishing tomorrow’s patrol plan. It also does not require hiding aggregate accounting.
The chaplain who is also the senior advisor
MDSO’s Government Relations page identifies Rabbi Mark Rosenberg as “Senior Advisor to the Sheriff | Chief Chaplain.” On the same page, the position of Head of Government & External Affairs is listed as “TBA.”
Those titles raise a governance question: what does the Senior Advisor advise the Sheriff about? Personnel? Government relations? Command appointments? Community relations? Intelligence? Security policy? Resource allocation? The answer matters because MDSO is simultaneously budgeting millions for enhanced security at places of worship. A public job title carrying access to the Sheriff should have a public description of its authority.
Rabbi Mark Rosenberg and Undersheriff Mark Glass: the relationship predates MDSO
The professional relationship between Rosenberg and former FDLE Commissioner Mark Glass is documented by FDLE itself. In its official review of 2024 accomplishments, FDLE said it was a leader in securing Jewish schools and congregations and that Glass worked with faith leaders, including Chief Chaplain Rabbi Mark Rosenberg, providing safety and security information to Jewish and other faith communities.
Mark Glass is not entering MDSO’s senior command generally. He was selected as Undersheriff—the agency’s second-in-command—following the August retirement of Christopher Carothers, who spent more than 30 years rising through the ranks of the agency. Cordero-Stutz informed her deputies of the selection by email on a Friday afternoon. Rosenberg already holds the title Senior Advisor to the Sheriff.
Who recommended Mark Glass for Undersheriff? Was Rosenberg consulted? Did he participate in discussions about the appointment? When did discussions begin? What communications preceded the appointment? Those questions do not require guesswork. Calendars, emails, texts, meeting records, and appointment materials can answer them. They are questions. They are not findings.
Mark Glass’s immigration-enforcement record is public
Under Mark Glass, the FDLE announced in July 2025 that its sworn law-enforcement members statewide had become federally certified under ICE’s 287(g) program. Glass said the credentials better equipped FDLE personnel to enforce immigration laws and support federal partners.
FDLE’s year-end 2025 report also said the agency participated in Operation Tidal Wave, coordinated statewide immigration-related law-enforcement activity, and provided daily exterior security and investigative resources supporting detention and deportation operations at Alligator Alcatraz and Deportation Depot. The receiving agency has its own record. MDSO also signed a 287(g) agreement. Cordero-Stutz previously said her deputies would not outright ask residents their immigration status during interactions. Miami-Dade County is home to one of the largest immigrant populations in Florida.
Glass’s new Miami-Dade portfolio therefore deserves precise definition. As undersheriff, will he oversee intelligence, homeland security, immigration cooperation, 287(g) activity, or interagency enforcement operations? Does the agency’s stated practice on immigration-status questions change under his command? The sharper question is not whether his record exists. FDLE published it. The question is what Miami-Dade intends to do with that experience—in its second-highest office.
Where does chaplaincy end and governmental influence begin?
Put the public record in sequence. Rosenberg is Chief Chaplain. Rosenberg is also Senior Advisor to the Sheriff. Rosenberg had a documented professional relationship with Mark Glass at FDLE. Glass led an FDLE that expanded its role in immigration enforcement. Glass is now MDSO’s Undersheriff.
The public-interest question writes itself: what governmental authority does the Senior Advisor to the Sheriff possess? Publish the duties. Publish the reporting structure. Identify whether the role participates in personnel recommendations, executive meetings, or security-resource discussions. Government created the title. Government can explain what the title means.
Independent technology: show the business case
During the final budget fight, Cordero-Stutz said MDSO would gradually move toward having an independent IT department. There may be sound operational reasons for a law-enforcement agency to control sensitive criminal-justice systems, intelligence, evidence, and cybersecurity. But independence has a price: personnel, benefits, pensions, software, hardware, licensing, cybersecurity, contractors, storage, and procurement.
The September 17 hearing also raised approximately 35 technology employees associated with roughly $2.2 million. That hearing figure should be reconciled against the final adopted transfer and personnel records before it is treated as a final expenditure. What does the independent system cost compared with the system it replaces? That should be a spreadsheet, not a mystery.
How the Sheriff’s budget actually closed
The final increment did not come from a policy debate. At 1:00 a.m., County Commissioners approved a motion by Chairman Anthony Rodriguez to give the Sheriff’s Office an additional $11.5 million—money that had been returned to the County Commission by the Miami-Dade Tax Collector.
Cordero-Stutz did not rule out asking Tallahassee to intervene. Under Florida’s constitutional-officer structure, an independently elected Sheriff can appeal to the state over budget needs, a process that can force the county to cut other services. A billion-dollar public-safety agency closed its budget year at one in the morning with another constitutional officer’s leftover funds.
Champlain Towers: another $1.347 million, after NIST published the engineering answer
MDSO’s FY 2026-27 budget narrative reviewed for this article includes $1.347 million for continuing expenses associated with the Homicide Bureau investigation into the Champlain Towers South collapse and the agency’s engineering agreement with Lerch Bates.
The context has changed since previous budget cycles. On June 22, 2026, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released the technical findings of its National Construction Safety Team investigation. NIST concluded that the failure at Champlain Towers most likely began in early June 2021, about three weeks before the collapse, when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck slab failed. NIST attributed the building’s low margins against failure primarily to severe and widespread deviations in the original structural design from the codes and standards of the day, and to deviations in construction from the design drawings. A full written report with supporting evidence and formal recommendations is still being prepared.
NIST conducted a technical investigation into why the structure failed. MDSO’s Homicide Bureau is conducting a criminal investigation. Those are different inquiries, and a criminal investigation can properly continue after a technical cause is established. The budget question is narrower than the investigation. Lerch Bates was retained for engineering work. NIST has now published the engineering conclusion. Does the county’s engineering agreement still cover the same deliverables it covered before June 22?
The useful questions remain financial and operational: How much has the firm received in total? What were the original milestones? Which milestones moved? What has been delivered? What remains? A complex investigation can take years. Five years of continuing expenditure makes a detailed public accounting more important, not less.
MDFR: the other half of the accountability equation
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue (MDFR) operates at similarly enormous scale. For FY 2026-27, the County proposed a Fire Rescue District operating millage of 2.3965 mills, projected to generate $692.385 million in ad valorem revenue for district operations. The County adopted the FY 2026-27 budget at the second and final hearing on September 17.
MDFR is also very good at announcing personnel milestones. In April 2026, 73 recruits graduated in Recruit Class 159, the largest probationary firefighter class in department history. Eight days later, MDFR announced 78 promotions: 16 captains, 45 lieutenants, and 17 professional staff. Miami-Dade County clearly knows how many people it recruits and promotes. Now show taxpayers how many it keeps.
MDFR’s own budget document shows the overtime curve
The county’s FY 2026-27 proposed budget for MDFR lists overtime as a selected line item, in thousands of dollars. FY 2023-24 actual: $36.538 million. FY 2024-25 actual: $55.058 million. FY 2025-26 budget: $53.343 million, against a projection of $60.194 million. FY 2026-27 proposed: $60.188 million. Those five figures describe a roughly 65 percent increase in overtime actuals over two years, a current year projected to finish about $6.9 million above its own overtime budget, and a proposed budget that adopts the overrun as next year’s baseline.
The County did not budget the overtime down. It budgeted the overrun in. The same document states the department’s objective as “Ensure proper staffing and reduce unscheduled overtime.” The single performance measure listed under that objective is “Full-time positions filled”: 2,902 in FY 2023-24, 2,977 in FY 2024-25, 3,110 budgeted in FY 2025-26, and 3,244 targeted for FY 2026-27. The department names overtime in the objective and then measures hiring instead. No overtime measure appears under the overtime objective.
Audit the command structure with numbers, not adjectives
The useful question is not whether MDFR needs command officers. It does. The useful question is whether executive, command, administrative, advisory, and medical staffing has grown proportionately with frontline operations. The FY 2026-27 proposed table of organization gives a starting point. The Office of the Fire Chief goes from 30 positions to 39. Budget/Planning/Grants/Administration goes from 272 to 265. Technical/Support Services goes from 251 to 250. Suppression and Rescue goes from 2,557 to 2,690. Total positions go from 3,110 to 3,244.
Precision matters here. The budget document attributes the change in the Chief’s Office to the transfer of nine positions from Budget/Planning/Grants/Administration as a result of the departmental reorganization. It is a transfer, not net growth. The Chief’s Office grew 30 percent in one budget cycle by internal transfer. The budget document records the movement. It does not explain the reorganization.
Take MDFR organizational charts and payrolls from 2016, 2021 and 2026. Count senior command and administrative positions. Compare their combined compensation with frontline firefighter and paramedic staffing, vacancies, retirements, resignations, and overtime. If management grew faster than frontline operations, the numbers will show it. If it did not, the same numbers will clear it.
The response-time targets are not improving
MDFR reports average Fire Rescue dispatch time as 29 seconds in FY 2023-24 and 34 seconds in FY 2024-25, with a target of 32 seconds for both FY 2025-26 and FY 2026-27. The department’s target for next year is slower than its result two years ago.
Average response time to structure fires inside the Urban Development Boundary: 6:13 in FY 2023-24, 6:25 in FY 2024-25, and a 6:35 target held flat through FY 2026-27. Average response time to life-threatening calls inside the boundary: 7:52, 7:52, and a 7:55 target held flat. Response time is the one workforce-dependent outcome the county does publish. It is flat or slipping while overtime rises.
The Cominsky-to-Jadallah transition
Alan Cominsky once led Miami-Dade Fire Rescue. Raied “Ray” Jadallah later became Fire Chief, while Cominsky moved to the Chief Fire Marshal role. The change is plain: the person heading the entire department moved into a narrower portfolio under a new chief. The public-interest questions are equally plain: What management analysis supported the change? What responsibilities moved? What problem was the restructuring intended to solve? What measurable improvement followed?
The retirement wave is scheduled, and the response is one position
The FY 2026-27 proposed budget adds one Investigations Specialist 1 position to support increased recruitment workload for sworn and professional staff, resulting from the first year of mandatory retirements associated with the extension of the Deferred Retirement Option Program from five to eight years. The stated cost is $100,000. The County knows a mandatory retirement wave begins this fiscal year. It has not published how many employees it expects to lose.
The plane crash put leadership on camera
Return to Miami International Airport. MDFR reached the crash in less than 30 seconds. The political dispute that followed concerned speaking order and jurisdiction. That scene is the article in miniature: frontline employees performed, while senior leadership competed to define who was in charge. Leadership is not measured by who reaches the microphone first. It is measured by what happens to the organization after the cameras leave.
Mental health cannot be a brochure
Deputies, firefighters, paramedics, and dispatchers encounter homicide, suicide, fatal crashes, domestic violence, catastrophic injury, and mass-casualty events as part of their jobs. A wellness program is useful. It is not a measurement of workforce health. The County already knows how to run a recurring survey. MDFR’s budget document states that the department maintains a customer feedback program that surveys 20 percent of randomly selected EMS patients, and that results are published internally to support performance monitoring and improvement.
MDFR surveys its patients every year. It does not publish an equivalent survey of the employees who treated them. The meaningful questions are whether employees trust the resources, whether they use them, whether they believe confidentiality is protected, whether they fear career consequences, and whether workload or organizational conditions contribute to burnout. Ask anonymously. Ask every year. Publish the aggregate results.
The pattern is not bad luck
Taken one at a time, each item below is a budget line or a personnel action. Taken together, they describe how the two departments are being run:
1. MDFR budgeted $53.343 million for overtime in FY 2025-26. It projected finishing the year at $60.194 million, $6.851 million above its own figure.
2. The FY 2026-27 proposal sets overtime at $60.188 million. Management did not correct the miss. Management adopted it.
MDFR states that its objective as reducing unscheduled overtime. The only performance measure listed under that objective counts full-time positions filled. Management is not tracking the outcome it says it is pursuing. Average dispatch time was 29 seconds in FY 2023-24 and 34 seconds in FY 2024-25. Management set the FY 2026-27 target at 32 seconds, slower than the department’s own result two years earlier, and recorded it as a goal. Miami-Dade added roughly $66 million in general-fund support to an agency carrying 300 vacancies. It published no separation-cause data. The county bought hiring capacity without diagnosing why the positions emptied.
MDSO removed three assistant sheriffs, demoted a fourth commander, named three replacements within eleven days, and lost an undersheriff to retirement. It published no analysis. MDFR moved nine positions into the Office of the Fire Chief, a 30 percent increase in that office, and explained the move in a single clause.
None of this required a source, a leak, or an anonymous quote. Every item above comes from the county’s own budget documents and its own public statements. That is the accountability question the missing report card would answer. Not whether individual employees are performing. Whether the people setting the budgets, the targets, and the command structures are.
Two public-safety systems. One missing report card.
Miami-Dade can calculate a Sheriff’s budget of roughly $1.2 billion. It can calculate $62.5 million in bargaining obligations covering 3,227 deputies. It can count 300 vacancies. Fire Rescue can calculate a district millage to four decimal places and project $692.385 million in ad valorem revenue. It can count 73 recruits and 78 promotions. It can track dispatch time to the second and overtime to the thousand dollars.
What the public cannot readily obtain is a comparable annual report answering: Do employees trust leadership? Are they burned out? Do they believe promotions are fair? How many intend to leave? Why do they leave? How much overtime are individuals actually working? Has management grown faster than frontline staffing? Those are not soft HR questions. An exhausted firefighter, burned-out detective, departing dispatcher or veteran employee who has lost confidence in command, is an operational public-safety issue.
Miami-Dade does not suffer from a shortage of announcements. What it lacks is a public report card written from data that senior leadership does not control.
Publicly funded. Privately miserable?
The County knows what another recruit costs. It knows what overtime costs to the thousand dollars, three years running. It knows what another contract costs. It knows what property owners must pay. And when a plane crashes, its senior officials apparently know exactly where they believe they belong in the speaking order.
What Miami-Dade County still does not measure publicly with the same intensity is the condition of the people actually doing the work: the firefighters who reached a burning aircraft in seconds, the deputies answering calls while politicians fight over budgets, the homicide detectives carrying cases for years, the paramedics walking repeatedly into other people’s worst days, and the dispatchers who hear emergencies before anyone else arrives.
Those employees are not background scenery for press conferences. They are public safety. Miami-Dade spends billions maintaining the institutions around them. The missing accountability measure is whether those institutions are maintaining the people inside them.
