Scott Randolph to put armed guards at Orange County tag agencies
Orange County Tax Collector Scott Randolph, shown here with his wife Susannah Randolph, a congressional candidate, won his lawsuit against Orange County Thursday.

Scott and Susannah Randolph

Orange County Tax Collector Scott Randolph said he will be hiring armed guards to secure the county’s tag agencies.

Randolph, a Democrat up for re-election, said he resisted the idea of armed security for a long time but, in the wake of Sunday’s Pulse nightclub massacre, resolved it is the right thing to do.

“There are scary people out there,” Randolph said.

Occasionally, he said, they show up at one of the county’s seven tag agencies. A few months ago, he said, an angry customer vowed to come back and “shoot the place up.” That person never came back and police were not able to track him down to his knowledge.

“This is really at the prompting of our employees. They deal with angry customers all the time,” he said.

The guards would be in plain clothes. Randolph said a handful of other county tax collectors in Florida already employ such guards. He would be able to piggyback off existing state contracts. His office would find ways to pay for it “by squeezing the budget.”

Scott Powers

Scott Powers is an Orlando-based political journalist with 30+ years’ experience, mostly at newspapers such as the Orlando Sentinel and the Columbus Dispatch. He covers local, state and federal politics and space news across much of Central Florida. His career earned numerous journalism awards for stories ranging from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster to presidential elections to misplaced nuclear waste. He and his wife Connie have three grown children. Besides them, he’s into mystery and suspense books and movies, rock, blues, basketball, baseball, writing unpublished novels, and being amused. Email him at [email protected].



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