Tiffany Carr’s money grab cheated Florida’s abused women. We should thank her anyway | Editorial
Florida owes Tiffany Carr a debt of gratitude.
Yes, she has made fools of Florida’s taxpayers and governors since 2003, when her first and most important patron, Gov. Jeb Bush, convinced a compliant Legislature to give Carr’s misleadingly named Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence (FCADV) exclusive jurisdiction over tens of millions of dollars intended by lawmakers to save the lives of victims of intimate-partner violence.
Yes, she ran her “private, not-for-profit” fiefdom like Marie Antoinette. Local shelter directors who enjoyed her grace and favor were rewarded with high praise and fat salaries. Shelter directors who did not bow and scrape could find that public funds appropriated for their communities might be held up for weeks or —months.
Yes, Carr’s salary and benefits — generous by any measure — climbed past $7.5 million in a recent three-year period as she amassed an impressive real-estate portfolio and traveled out of state for her various side hustles.
But let’s thank her anyway. Carr’s eye-popping, jaw-dropping raid on the public purse has cleared the way for a long-overdue conversation about Florida’s addiction to outsourcing the obligations of government to not-for-profits like FCADV.
Under investigation
If Carr had not gotten so greedy, she would still be Florida’s leading fake friend of domestic-violence victims. She’d be on TV, reminding Floridians that during this coronavirus pandemic, shelters are open and judges and pro bono attorneys are on call to help the thousands of children who are cowering, watching their moms being used as punching bags by an abusive partner while we’re all out of school, out of work, “sheltering in place.”
Instead, Carr is riding out the quarantine in one of her pricey homes. Her legal needs are well-served by the high-powered Foley & Lardner, doing an excellent job fending off pesky state and federal investigators, including the House Public Integrity and Ethics Committee, chaired by Rep. Tom Leek, R-Ormond Beach.
Leek’s committee has amassed a trove of testimony showing how easy it is for grifters like Carr to run their nonprofits like a Barbary pirate. In testimony before the committee, Angela Diaz-Vidaillet, the disgraced and recently replaced CEO of the Lodge, a Miami domestic-violence shelter, recounted Carr’s belief that, “It would be another two years before the information (about Carr’s methodology for lining her pockets) would surface in the IRS 990 reports.”
Compliant board members
It isn’t hard to stonewall auditors and investigators when you have a board of directors composed of credulous volunteers or individuals who depend on you for their salaries and the survival of their own organizations. Carr had both, along with the not-for-profit tax status that facilitates delaying the disclosure of information and can hide a multitude of sins.
Government has no such luxuries. State workers have fixed salaries, specific duties and daily accountability to agency heads and division chiefs appointed by the elected officials who hold the purse strings on behalf of the public.
Competent masters of their professions — Dr. Anthony Fauci comes to mind — are willing to spend an entire career working for state or federal wages and the satisfaction that comes from promoting the general welfare.
This is what government is supposed to do, and may soon be doing more of it thanks to Carr. She has made it impossible to ignore the potential for mischief in a system that uses private organizations as pass-throughs for public funds.
Couldn’t get help
We have noted before that government-funded managing entities pushed back hard against SB 1326, a priority of Department of Children & Families Secretary Chad Poppell, who understandably is sick of his agency taking the heat for social-work malpractice at the numerous “private, not-for-profit” corporations to whom the state delegates billions of dollars and much of its power. A watered-down version of the bill passed, but the malpractice will not go away until the Legislature reclaims its power of the purse and puts the fear of God into people who pursue personal interests on the public’s time and expense.
“So while Tiffany Carr was taking money to buy some fancy house in North Carolina, you had almost 800 women who needed help who couldn’t get it,” Rep. Randy Fine R-Palm Bay, fumed from the dais, as the Leek Committee pondered ways to make certain that this never happens again.
The committee’s work has been slowed, of course, by the pandemic.
Eventually, Florida’s women and children enduring the ordeal of being quarantined with their abusers will emerge spiritually and psychologically broken. How will we make amends?
Some will be killed. How do we atone?
The Leek Committee is compiling lists of Florida nonprofits enjoying a sole-supplier status like FCADV, as well as information, including executive compensation, on nonprofits that receive substantial support from Florida taxpayers. They’re going to find a lot of money that can be redeployed to direct services to our families, friends and neighbors who cannot fend for themselves.
Lives can be saved. For that, we can thank Tiffany Carr.
This story was originally published April 26, 2020 at 9:06 AM.