Florida Democrats Annette Taddeo and Earle Ford compete to face CFO Blaise Ingoglia in November

An interesting point in discussing the Democratic primary election for chief financial officer (CFO), one of the most powerful positions in Florida government, is that there almost wasn't one.

For months, it appeared the Florida Democratic Party would strike out in fielding a candidate to oppose GOP incumbent Blaise Ingoglia, appointed to the position a year ago by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Then, just two weeks before the qualifying deadline, Earle Ford, a former assistant state attorney and federal investigator for the Internal Revenue Service, dropped out of his race for Congress in Florida's 13th District and announced he was running for CFO.

Former Miami-Dade County state Sen. Annette Taddeo joined him, entering the contest just days before the June 12 qualifying deadline.

The CFO heads the Department of Financial Services, which includes the Office of Insurance Regulation and the Office of Financial Regulation. Those offices have oversight over the insurance and financial services industry, which includes banks and credit unions.

In interviews during the Florida Democratic Party's Leadership Blue conference last weekend, the two candidates discussed why they're running.

Name recognition

Taddeo, 59, says she was recruited by Ruth's List Florida, the political group that recruits, trains, and campaigns for Democratic pro-choice women candidates.

She is critical of Ingoglia's high-profile campaign-like visits to cities with his DOGE and later FAFO (short for Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight) auditors who have determined that every local government in the state they trained their focus on is guilty of excessive and wasteful spending, "because we can't figure out where the numbers are coming from or how they're coming up with them."

"I do think that of course you can probably find waste and abuse in lots of levels in government," Taddeo said, but she questions why he is isn't looking at state spending — or overspending.

"You have $1.2 billion for Alligator Alcatraz," she said, referring to the immigration detention facility built in the middle of the Everglades that recently shut down.

"No-bid contracts. No audits. By law in statute, he's supposed to do that and he's not doing it. Maybe he's doing this to get his name recognition up, but also partly to not look at where the real waste and abuse is. When he came here to Orlando and said, 'Oh, look, $6,000 was given to the poet laureate,' I'm like, 'Are you serious ?' Are we supposed to be worried about that when you have Doodie Calls being given millions and millions of dollars?"

(The Phoenix has reported that the state made nine payments to Doodie Calls, a portable toilet provider, totaling more than $92 million, as part of efforts to fight undocumented immigration).

"If you were to describe what is the one job of the CFO, it is to be the watchdog for our money," she added. "Our resources. Not to be the lapdog for whoever is the governor at the time, or whoever is lining up for your political campaign. That is not okay."

Over the past decade plus, Taddeo has run for public office several times, giving her more name recognition than Ford. In addition to her time representing a part of Miami-Dade County as a state senator from 2017 to 2022, she was Charlie Crist's running mate on the 2014 Democratic gubernatorial ticket, which lost by a single point to Rick Scott.

If elected, she says, she can be an independent voice representing the public.

"I think both parties go wrong all the time and people are fed up with it," Taddeo said. "I'm somebody who has criticized my own party [and] voted against my own party when it wasn't in the best interests of the people I represent. You can never forget that. You get there to do good and to move the agenda forward to really, really deliver for people, and the CFO position, you have the opportunity on the Cabinet to be that watchdog. That person that can ask the questions like I always did, even of the Democrats on things that were questionable, and I think that it's really important to have that independent voice, and right now we have a lapdog for the governor," a reference to Ingoglia.

Army veteran

Ford, 40, is a U.S. Army veteran who served for a year as assistant state attorney in Florida's Ninth Judicial Circuit in Orange and Osceola County in 2019. In 2021, he became an estate and gift tax specialist with the Internal Revenue Service until 2025.

"I'm proud of my experience with the IRS. They're good at what they do for a reason," Ford told the Phoenix.

"And I think that's one of the things that pulled me to the CFO position, because I'm a Floridian at the end of the day," he said. "I hate to see the waste of taxpayer money. That's not a Republican or a Democratic issue. People want their government to be efficient. They also want it to be transparent. And they also want accountability. A lot of businesses in local communities rely on government to be on the up and up so that they can compete for contracts, and that's what I want to bring."

Ford calls Ingoglia's high-profile attacks on local governments for their spending habits "disappointing" and says the CFO's office can be more aggressive in taking the property insurance industry straight on. He calls the campaign for property tax reduction an attack on local government "in order to unify power in Tallahassee," and says the whole exercise has been "a distraction."

Insurance crisis

Ford and Taddeo argue lowering property insurance rates, not property taxes, is the policy demand they hear most about from Floridians on the campaign trail. Florida remains the most expensive state in the nation for homeowners' insurance, reaching an annual average cost of $8,292 last year, according to Insurify.

Florida GOP lawmakers have said that the home insurance market is on the rebound. They note how more than a dozen new insurance companies have entered Florida, dozens of others have requested rate reductions, and that the number of policies held by Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state's insurer of last resort, have dropped to their lowest level in 14 years.

The state did so by making it harder to sue insurance companies alleged to have shortchanged claims.

"I know that they're proud of tort reform, and we know that litigation drives up costs, but you also have to balance that out," Ford said about the recently enacted legislation regarding property insurance in the state. "I want to make sure that I'm working with consumers."

He added: "I'm not trying to go to war with the insurance industry, I just want to level the playing field. Because when we have a level playing field, businesses that also deal with the insurance industry, they're going to thrive, but we're also going to have a healthy market as well."

The winner of the Aug. 18 Democratic primary will face Ingoglia. The sitting CFO does have a primary opponent in Frank W. Collige.

The chief financial officer of Florida is one of three Cabinet positions in state government, along with the attorney general and agriculture commissioner, and goes up for election every four years. Together, Cabinet officers help the governor administer a number of state agencies.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: [email protected].

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