Does Miami-Dade have enough officers? New sheriff says no, wants more funding

Miami-Dade County’s new sheriff wants another $50 million in tax funds to beef up police staffing and hiring, as well as to cover ongoing expenses related to the local investigation of the 2021 collapse of condominium towers in Surfside.

The request from Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz went out to Miami-Dade commissioners in a memo Friday. While Cordero-Stutz took over the former county police department earlier this month and assumed control of its $875 million budget, commissioners and Mayor Daniella Levine Cava have authority over approving additional tax dollars for the newly independent agency.

In November, Cordero-Stutz, a Republican, won Miami-Dade’s first sheriff election in six decades after a change in Florida’s Constitution required the county to create an independent sheriff’s office by the start of 2025. During the campaign, Cordero-Stutz, then a senior commander at the county police department, criticized the police budget proposed by Levine Cava, a Democrat, for not having enough money for overtime and for hiring new officers.

In her memo, Cordero-Stutz said the Levine Cava budget that commissioners approved in September counts on savings from the Sheriff’s Office not filling nearly 190 vacant officer slots on a payroll with roughly 3,200 “sworn” law enforcement positions. Including civilian positions, the Sheriff’s Office is budgeted to have roughly 4,500 jobs, according to county budget documents.

That attrition strategy “effectively eliminated the Sheriff Office’s ability to fill any sworn positions” this year, Cordero-Stutz, using the term for jobs filled by law enforcement officers instead of civilian employees.

In a statement Saturday, Levine Cava noted that police funding has gone up each year since her election in 2020.

“We are in the process of reviewing the proposal presented by the Sheriff, and will continue to ensure our officers have the resources they need to do their jobs while also being good fiscal stewards of taxpayer dollars to protect our entire community and economy,” she said.

Levine Cava’s budget included $32 million to fund extra expenses requested by the sheriff’s office as well as from three other agencies led by newly elected officers: elections supervisor, tax collector, and clerk and comptroller.

With her funding request, Cordero-Stutz said she wants the 6% increase in the current Sheriff’s Office budget to:

• Pay for two extra recruitment classes at the county’s police academy, with funding for 90 trainees.
• Increase overtime pay from a budgeted $29 million to $48 million.
• Add another $2 million to pay the engineering firm Miami-Dade hired to investigate the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo complex, which killed 98 people. The memo says the firm, Lerch Bates, “has fallen behind schedule” due to the “complexity and tedious nature of the work” and needs more time analyzing thousands of documents recently brought into the investigation. The probe by the county homicide squad is ongoing while a federal investigation into the cause of the building collapse is underway, too.

This story was originally published January 25, 2025 at 11:46 AM.