‘Open your books,’ Orange County Comptroller warns Glen Gilzean

Orange County Supervisor of Election's Office

Orange County Commissioners voted Tuesday to cut off funding for Elections Supervisor Glen Gilzean’s office, saying he’d already received enough money to last the rest of the year as officials raised more concerns about Gilzean’s spending.

Gilzean vowed to fight the county in court.

Following Tuesday’s vote, Gilzean sent out a statement that accused the county of making political attacks against him and illegally freezing his office’s funds.

“Withholding almost $1 million from the office will mean staff and vendors may not be paid and damage the office heading into a pivotal transition and set of municipal elections,” Gilzean’s office said in a statement. “If the county goes through with this, our office will be compelled to file for an emergency writ of mandamus, which we will win, and compel the county to follow the law.”

Comptroller Phil Diamond said Tuesday he has a confidential informant who tipped him off that Gilzean transferred $1.1 million to a Central Florida nonprofit that officials hadn’t known about before in early October.

That’s on top of the $2.1 million Gilzean gave this fall to Valencia College for scholarships and $1.9 million to a career training center which the center later returned amid the spending controversy.

When Diamond’s office sought to obtain bank records to confirm the new $1.1 million, Gilzean gave them the “runaround” and refused to release public records and financial information, said Diamond, who declined to name the agency that allegedly got the money.

“Open the books, Mr. Gilzean,” Diamond said at the Orange County Board of Commissioners meeting Tuesday that Gilzean did not attend. “We have a right to know how you’re spending our money.”

But Gilzean argued he already gave Diamond what he’s been asking for.

“Care to correct the record, Mr. Mayor?” Gilzean wrote on X with a screenshot of bank records emailed Monday afternoon.

Diamond’s spokesperson Cathy Glatt said the department’s IT found Gilzean’s email bounced because it exceeded the server’s file size.

“Having seen the Supervisor’s post, we now understand why we did not receive this email,” Glatt said Tuesday night. “The Supervisor should have received a ‘non-delivery receipt’ indicating that his email did not go thru. All that said, the quickest way for us to get these records will be for our auditors to pick them up from the Supervisor’s office.   They will go over there tomorrow to pick up the records.

Orange County already dispersed $9.6 million of Gilzean’s $19 million budget – nearly half – for this fiscal year that began Oct. 1, so county officials said Tuesday Gilzean should have enough to pay his staff.

Gilzean is in the final weeks of the job. He did not run for a full term and is being replaced by Karen Castor Dentel who will be sworn in Jan. 7.

“Is there a backup when the new supervisor comes in? Does she have what she needs to run a city of Belle Isle election coming up, and any other elections that are coming up in the non-traditional election year.. If there, for some reason, is an overuse of funds, how does she bounce back from this?” Commissioner Mayra Uribe said. “ I don’t think this has ever happened in the county.”

An anonymous informant who Diamond said he found to be credible “gave us a number of serious allegations” although Diamond only brought up the $1.1 million payment to the unknown nonprofit.

It’s the latest saga in the spending controversy that started after Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said last month he was blindsided by Gilzean’s spending. Gilzean had a duty to return the surplus from his budget back to Orange County government’s general funds instead of spending it on non-election related expenses, Demings has charged. Demings has threatened litigation over what he called improper use of taxpayer dollars.

“The alarms are there is what I’m saying to the public,” Demings said Tuesday. “We have limited dollars, and we have to have priorities. We make decisions on how we would spend those dollars for different things within our community. Essentially what the supervisor has done and his arrogance … He said, ‘I’m smarter than all of those people on the Board of County Commission. I’m doing something that has never been done before.’”

Meanwhile, Gilzean has countered that he is a constitutional officer who has the power to decide how he spends the budget he inherited after he was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to finish the election supervisor term.

Gilzean argued paying for scholarships at Valencia can help build voter engagement among young people and could pay off for the community with Valencia campuses being used for early voting sites. For the career center, Gilzean said he wanted to pay for job training for his office’s temp workers who helped run the elections and are now out of work.

“The cost-savings our office achieved last year helped pave the way for two innovative programs central to the mission of this office to increase voter outreach while putting a college education within the reach of low-income students across Orange County Schools. In addition, our office also returned more than $700,000 in unused funds to the county,” Gilzean said last month.

“Unfortunately, that’s not enough for Mayor Jerry Demings and some of his colleagues.”

Former Orange County Supervisor of Elections Bill Cowles – whose retirement in January was the impetus for Gilzean to get appointed as elections chief – also jumped into the fray Tuesday.

“One of the hallmarks of my 35-year career as the duly elected Orange County Supervisor of Elections, was to be a good steward of the taxpayers’ monies. From Fiscal Year 2020 to Fiscal Year 2023, we returned over $6.7 million to the County taxpayers. Excess funds belong to the Board of County Commissioners, so they can put it to the best use for the people,” Cowles said in a statement.