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 Collier Sheriff continues to defend overtime budget: Overtime records drive this story by Larry Hannan of the Naples Daily News on the Collier County sheriff’s eye-opening overtime budget. Among the revelations in this story: A building supervisor with the office made more money with salary and overtime combined than Sheriff Don Hunter. “Roger Fussell, who is in charge of inmate work areas throughout the county, had a base salary of $58,295 but he made $72,863 in overtime. That means an income of $131,158 in fiscal 2004.” Hunter earned $123,800 during the same fiscal year. The sheriff department shelled out $8.1 million in overtime during 2004, prompting Collier County commissioners to declare the overtime as out of control. This story also features a link to an Excel spreadsheet showing the overtime and base salaries earned by more than 1,200 Collier County sheriff’s office employees. The public records handbook profiles budgets on Page 53.
November 1, 2004 Voters double-dip in Ohio, Florida: Public records again spotlight a serious dual voting problem inside Florida and out in this story by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Voter registration records analyzed by reporters Scott Hiaasen, Dave Davis and Julie Carr Smyth show "hundreds of voters could easily cast ballots Tuesday in both Ohio and Florida because they are eligible to vote in both states and have received absentee ballots from election officials in Ohio.” The story says up to 400 people voted in Ohio and Florida in the same election over the past four years, records show. “In the 2000 presidential election, about 100 Ohio voters also cast ballots in Florida - where the presidential race was decided by just 537 votes.” This revelation follows those by the New York Daily News regarding dual registration and voting in New York and Florida and an Orlando Sentinel report evaluating duel registrations and voting in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. As with the other stories, this one points out that “virtually nothing prevents transient voters from casting ballots in multiple states, testing a system that relies more on the honesty of individual voters than on any checks and balances.” The Plain Dealer story includes a sidebar that explains how reporters checked one set of registrations against another to discover the duality problems. Those problems would not be exposed if not for a successful lawsuit against the state some months ago that opened Florida’s central voter registration file to the public. The public records handbook covers voter registration records on Page 372.
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