Here is my clock. Seventeen months. Two lawsuits. One writ. And a payroll number that changed by $2,825,774.81 after I published it.

What I Actually Asked For

March 2025. W-2 payroll information for the corporate officers of a taxing district. Not medical records. Not Social Security numbers. Not anyone’s home address. What the executives of a hospital district funded by your ad valorem property taxes were paid in a calendar year.

That request sits about as close to the center of Florida’s public records law as a request gets.

Seven Months, Then a Lawsuit

By October 2025 I was still writing letters. On October 10, 2025, I wrote to Broward Health’s outside council:

“The District’s continued slow dribble of records to me is neither ‘continuous’ nor in good faith… You will see some of the records the District continues to stonewall go back to March 2025. That’s some seven (7) months.”

On December 18, 2025, BPIRG (Broward Public Interest Research Group, LLC) filed a Verified Petition for Writ of Mandamus. Nine months after the first request, the only remaining way to see a payroll table was to ask a judge.

Deferred

On January 5, 2026, we moved for issuance of the writ. On January 16, 2026, Broward Health asked for more time. On February 4, 2026, the court granted the District’s extension, denied our motion for judicial default as moot because of that extension, and as to the writ itself entered an order stating that “the Motion is DEFERRED for further hearing.”

Not granted. Not denied. Deferred.

Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.630(d) does not offer that third option, DEFERRED. If the complaint shows a prima facie case, the court “must issue … an alternative writ in mandamus.” And § 119.11(1) says that when an action is filed to enforce the public records law, “the court shall set an immediate hearing, giving the case priority over other pending cases.”

Immediate. Priority. Deferred.

This is what I mean when I say transparency is perishable. A record produced before a board votes is oversight. The same record produced after the vote is history. Delay does not have to deny you anything to defeat you.

The Answer Was a Lawsuit Against Me

On March 9, 2026, Broward Health filed its Answer. The same day, in the same case, it filed a Third-Party Complaint against me personally. Three days later it objected to all three sets of discovery. Two weeks after that it moved to seal the Verified Petition and its exhibits.

I will be careful here, because I am a defendant now and precision is not optional: I am describing conduct on a docket, not motives in anyone’s head. Read the sequence and reach your own conclusion.

That is not a records dispute. That is a records dispute converted into a lawsuit about the requester.

The Number, and Then the Other Number

In the first days of April 2026, the records finally arrived. Thirty-four corporate officers, in a table with columns for gross wage and for federal (Taxable Income Paid), Social Security, and Medicare withholding — the fields of a Form W-2.

Shane Strum, President & CEO: $4,645,992.00.

On April 14, 2026, Broward Health filed a second table, labeled “Public Records #1739 Correct Totals-04-07-2026.” One bare “Wages” – not Taxable Income Paid column. No withholding data. A footnote: “These figures are for 2024 and include incentive compensation.”

Strum, on the corrected table: $1,820,217.19.

$4,645,992.00 and $1,820,217.19 — a difference of $2,825,774.81, on one line, inside two weeks.

The reductions were not spread across the roster. Whaley went from $2,316,807.00 to $844,057.22. Clark went from $1,275,014.00 to $495,577.77. Most of the other officers’ figures moved by less than $800. And the corrected table quietly added the General Counsel, Linda Epstein, at $621,303.34 — she had not appeared on the first one at all.

I do not know which table is right. No document produced explains the gap. What I know is that the District, by writing the word “Correct” on the second one, told the court its own first production was wrong — and the replacement is not W-2 data on its face, which is what was asked for.

Dismissing My Own Case Did Not End It

By May 2026, the motion for issuance of the writ we had filed in December 2025 still had not been decided. On May 18, 2026, BPIRG dismissed the petition rather than ask an appellate court to order the trial judge to follow the rule.

That was my error, and I want it on the record as mine.

Dismissing our petition only dismissed the BPIRG v. North Broward. However, it did not dismiss the case of Broward Health’s Complaint against me personally. . On June 8, 2026, the District moved for its attorney’s fees against BPIRG under the “improper purpose” provision.

Six Days

So, we refiled, clean: July 10, 2026, a new case, eight counts. It drew a new judge.

On July 16, 2026 — six days later — Judge Michele Towbin Singer granted the Verified Petition, found a prima facie case on each of the eight counts, issued the alternative writ, and shortened Broward Health’s time to respond to ten days. Service was affected July 21, 2026, at 9:30 a.m. The response was due July 31.

Six days is what Rule 1.630 looks like when a judge follows it. That is the benchmark for everything above on this page.

Two Rules, Enforced Differently

Then the local rule arrived. The local rule requires a case involving the same parties as an earlier pending case to be assigned to the judge who had the earlier one. A new judge cannot keep it.

Hold the two rules next to each other. Rule 1.630 is a statewide Rule of Civil Procedure, backed by a body of case law, and it says a court “must issue” the writ on a prima facie showing immediately. The related case rule is a local administrative rule in Broward County. We were held to the strict letter of the local Broward County rule, immediately. The new Judge vacated her compliance with the state rule as she transferred the case. Broward Health couldn’t ask for more. The state rule went unenforced from January until today except for a brief few days in July and now, we’re back in front of the same judge that ignored the State rule in the first place.

That is not a technicality. That is a choice about which rules bind whom.

Where It Stands

On July 23, 2026, Broward Health served me personally with 84 requests for production, 30 requests for admission, and 23 interrogatories. Responses are due August 24.

On July 28, 2026, the court heard Broward Health’s motion to vacate the show-cause order and send the case back to the earlier Judge — three days before its own response to the writ was due.

The Judge signed a transfer Order on August 3, 2026 and vacated the Show Cause Order (explain why the Court shouldn’t order the records production e.g. the Writ). The Writ now goes back to the original Judge back where it started without the rule 1.630 ever being applied. If the rules aren’t fairly applied this time, I am committed to vigorously insisting however I can.

What Is Still Locked

I still do not have a verified W-2 figure for the CEO of a public hospital district for 2024. I do not know what the 2025 number is. I do not have an explanation, from any document, for $2,825,774.81. And the motion for issuance of the writ we filed in December 2026 has never been decided by anyone.

The Questions That Follow

Why does a payroll table take seventeen months? Why does a records case produce a third-party complaint against the requester? Why seal a petition? Why move to vacate a writ instead of answering it? Why is the “correct” number missing the withholding columns that made the first one verifiable?

I am not going to answer those for you. The sequence is the answer.

Your County Runs on the Same Clock

None of this required anyone at Broward Health to be a villain. It required an institution with lawyers, a budget, and an incentive to run out the clock — and a requester who had to decide, at every step, whether the next filing was worth it.

Your school board has the same incentives. So do your city, your sheriff, your water district. The public rhetorically owns those institutions. Without records, it cannot spot check their public transparency. You (and me) just fund them.

Neither BPIRG nor I will quit. Being right is not the same as prevailing against something larger and more patient. But the clock is a public document too, and it is still running. The big question is “What is Broward Health & Shane Strum hiding?”

Eventually, the truth will come out, the question will eventually be answered, and those officials who spent so many public resources hiding will be held to account – wherever they may go.

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

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Because the next set of records is already being fought over.
And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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The request itself was narrow. Early in 2025, Broward Public Interest Research Group, LLC (BPirg) asked Broward Health for W-2 compensation information for corporate officers. No Social Security numbers. No private medical information. Just compensation figures from a publicly funded hospital district.

Broward Health acknowledged the request within days. Then the response stopped. Weeks became months. BPirg followed up, sent formal statutory notices and kept asking for the same records.

By September, nothing responsive had arrived. I later described the district’s production in court filings as a “slow dribble of records” that was “neither continuous nor in good faith.”

In December 2025, nine months after the request, BPIRG filed a Verified Petition for Writ of Mandamus in circuit court — in plain English, we asked a judge to order the district to comply with Florida law. A motion seeking issuance of the writ followed in January 2026. Partial records finally arrived in April 2026, after litigation was underway.

The number was striking. The path to it was worse.

A straightforward request had taken more than a year, a lawsuit and repeated pressure. The partial records that finally arrived raised fresh questions about executive compensation, internal controls and what the governing board knew.

That experience captures the real test of transparency. The test is not whether an agency has the word in its mission statement. It begins when someone asks for the record behind an official claim.

The public does not need to see everything — just enough to verify

Government produces more information than any ordinary person can follow contracts, invoices, payroll records, emails, budgets, legal opinions and board materials. Citizens will never know everything known inside an agency. That gap is permanent.

But the public does not need to inspect every transaction. It needs the ability to spot-check. When an agency says a contract was competitively awarded, someone should be able to review the proposals and scoring records. When officials claim a program is saving money, someone should be able to see the invoices and the analysis.

These rights do not belong only to journalists or lawyers. Florida’s Sunshine Law allows us to watch public decisions being made. The Public Records Law allows them to examine the records behind those decisions. At the federal level, the Freedom of Information Act serves a similar purpose. The details differ, but the principle is plain: public business must be open to public inspection, subject to lawful exemptions. We do not need a press credential, a law degree or an official’s permission to request a public record because we (the public) own the records, the public agency is only the custodian of the records.

A records request is not an accusation. Often it is simply a question: Does the documentation support what we were told?

That matters more now. Local newsrooms have fewer reporters covering more institutions. Professional journalism remains essential, but citizens can no longer assume that someone else is checking every consequential claim.

Delay sends a message of its own

A prompt response can strengthen trust even when the requester disagrees with the underlying decision. We can oppose a policy and still believe the process was honest, the numbers were real and the decision was made in public view.

Delay changes the question. After weeks of silence, shifting explanations or unexplained cost estimates, a citizen stops asking, “What do the records show?” The question becomes, “Why is it so hard to see them?”

That suspicion does not require proof of corruption. It grows from the agency’s own conduct. A press release cannot repair it.

Compare that with an agency that returns records within a few business days, cites the specific exemption when something is withheld and asks whether the response was complete. No lawsuit. No chase. The citizen may still disagree with the underlying decision, but the institution has earned the benefit of the doubt. Trust came from behavior, not messaging.

Openness changes how an institution works

An agency that can produce records without a chase is usually one that expects its work to be examined. That expectation is healthy. Emails are written with more care. Contracts receive closer review. Budget claims need support. Officials become less comfortable saying one thing in public when the files say another.

A genuinely transparent agency publishes supporting material before a decision is final, keeps records searchable, responds promptly and names the precise legal basis for anything it withholds. Those are not PR moves — they are ordinary operating habits of a well-run institution.

Good people still make bad decisions. Boards can be misled. Honest institutions can develop routines that protect insiders from scrutiny. That is exactly why trust should rest on systems, not personalities.

Trust requires participation

Public agencies have a duty to conduct business openly. Citizens have a role, too: use the rights the law provides.

Request the contract. Read the agenda packet before the vote. Check the payroll record. Compare the public statement with the invoice. Attend the meeting. Verify the facts.

Sometimes the records will confirm exactly what officials said. When that happens, say so. Prompt compliance and accurate claims deserve recognition.

Trust is built in ordinary moments: an agenda posted on time, a contract attached before the vote, a narrow exemption explained, a record produced without a chase. One document at a time, the public learns whether an institution merely wants to be believed or is willing to be checked.

Trust, but verify!

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

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Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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The hearing did not go the way I expected.

The reason was not a ruling that Broward Health had produced the records. It was not a finding that the records were exempt. It was not a decision that BPIRG’s petition lacked merit.

The hearing turned on a procedural issue that should have been disclosed and addressed when the new case was filed.

I am not going to ask a public agency for candor and then ration my own.

BPIRG made a mistake. I made a mistake. Here is exactly what happened, what the judge did, and what remains unresolved.

What we got wrong

BPIRG filed its first public-records case against Broward Health in December 2025. In May, BPIRG voluntarily dismissed its petition and complaint without prejudice. Broward Health’s separately pleaded claim against me remained under the old case number and continued to be litigated.

In July, BPIRG filed a new petition. The new case is not a copy of the old one. The first case placed four records requests into one mandamus count and added a separate claim for declaratory and injunctive relief. The new petition contains eight request-specific mandamus counts. Four requests overlap with the first case. Four are additional. The production history had also changed.

I viewed them as materially different cases. I also understood BPIRG’s May dismissal to have ended BPIRG’s original dispute with Broward Health, while the remaining third-party dispute involved Broward Health and me in different roles.

That was my understanding. It was incomplete.

A Broward administrative order says that when a new circuit civil case involves the same parties and the same cause or causes of action as a case dismissed without prejudice, the new case is supposed to return to the division assigned to the first case. At a minimum, the old case needed to be identified so the judges and clerk could decide whether the order applied.

Our Civil Cover Sheet said that no notice of a known related case had been filed. The petition used the phrase “after first suit was filed,” but it did not identify the old case number, Judge Daniel Casey, or the May dismissal.

That was not enough. We should have disclosed CACE-25-019383 directly and explained why we believed the two actions were different.

The moment in the hearing that mattered

During the hearing, we initially told Judge Michele Towbin Singer that the petition referred to the earlier case and that the disclosure appeared on the face of the petition.

Judge Singer looked for it.

It was not there in any meaningful way.

That exchange hurt us. There is no honest way to write around it.

The court did not make a finding that BPIRG or I intentionally concealed the earlier case. But the omission was real, our initial description was inaccurate, and the judge’s concern was understandable.

My explanation is simple: I believed the dismissal ended BPIRG’s original case for this purpose, and I viewed the remaining Broward Health-versus-Lewis dispute as different from BPIRG’s new eight-count public-records petition. I was wrong about what the local assignment procedure required us to disclose.

Intent matters when someone accuses you of hiding something. Accuracy matters even more when correcting the record.

What Judge Singer said she would do

Judge Singer raised the controlling administrative order during the hearing. She indicated that the assignment procedure appeared to apply and that Judge Casey should act on transferring the new case to his division.

When Broward Health raised the approaching deadline under the July 16 show-cause order, Judge Singer said she was going to vacate it. She also deferred Broward Health’s motion until Judge Casey acts.

There is an important limit on what I can tell you today. I have not yet reviewed a signed post-hearing order.

Until that written order appears, I will not tell you that a transfer has been completed, what part of the July 16 order was vacated, or which deadlines remain in force. A signed order controls. I will publish and explain it when it is available.

This was a setback

My last reports described BPIRG’s voluntary dismissal and new filing as a “table flip.” I praised the speed with which Judge Singer reviewed the new petition and issued an alternative writ.

The seven-day order was real. So was the procedural problem I had not accounted for.

This morning’s hearing was a substantial setback. It likely changes the judge who will hear the new petition. It may eliminate or suspend the immediate deadlines and discovery authorized by Judge Singer’s July 16 order. It also created a credibility problem that BPIRG has to repair directly, not bury beneath more argument.

Calling this a victory would be dishonest. Calling it the end of the public-records case would also be false.

What the court did not decide

No judge has ruled that Broward Health complied with the eight public record’s requests.

No judge has ruled that the requested records are exempt.

No judge has determined what responsive records exist, what was produced, what remains withheld, or which statute supports each withholding.

The current petition was not dismissed on the merits. Judge Singer said Broward Health’s motion would be deferred pending action by Judge Casey.

The assignment question and the public-records question are different questions. This morning was about the first one.

The second one is still waiting for an answer.

The records still matter

The petition concerns eight subjects:

• · Executive W-2 payroll data;

• · Gala participant and expenditure records;

• · Records from the September 19, 2024 meeting;

• · Executive employment agreements;

• · Organizational charts;

• · Closed-session transcripts;

• · FAU/Broward Health Academic Practice Plan records; and

• · Pension and Investment Committee agendas and minutes.

These are not abstractions. They concern how a taxpayer-supported hospital district pays executives, documents Board activity, structures public business, and accounts for decisions made with public money.

Broward Health’s motive for resisting or delaying production is not the legal test. The useful questions are more basic: What exists? What was produced? What remains withheld? What exemption applies? When will the nonexempt records be delivered?

None of those questions was answered this morning.

What BPIRG will do next

First, we will obtain the signed order and the complete transcript. I will not fill missing parts of the record with assumptions.

Second, we will correct the related-case record directly. The old case should have been identified. The differences between the two petitions can be explained without pretending that the first four requests do not overlap.

Third, we will follow the assignment process. Fighting over which judge receives the case should not become a substitute for deciding whether Broward Health complied with Chapter 119.

Fourth, once the assignment is settled, BPIRG will ask the court to return to the procedure Florida law provides for public-records mandamus cases: review the petition, require a record-based response, identify any claimed exemptions, and set an expedited schedule.

Why I am telling you this now

Readers have followed this case because I have asked you to trust documents over institutional explanations. That rule applies to me too.

I could write a piece blaming the local rule, opposing counsel, the clerk, or the judge. That would be easy. It would also avoid the central fact.

We thought we had more than a few references to the previous case – with the partial productions in that previous case. We did not believe we were hiding anything. The Court felt different.

I believed the two actions were materially different, and they are materially different in scope and structure. But four requests overlap, the parties to BPIRG’s claims are the same, and the local administrative order had to be addressed. My belief does not erase those facts.

Transparency cannot mean publishing only the documents that make you look right. It has to include the document that corrects you.

So, this is the correction.

BPIRG took a procedural hit this morning. We will repair the disclosure record, accept the assignment process, and put the public-records questions back before the proper court.

I made the mistake. I am responsible for correcting it.

Now, let’s go get the public records!

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

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Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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Short Notice

But first, here’s the short notice, and that is the point. The court issued the hearing notice last Friday afternoon. The hearing is tomorrow. It’s Broward Health’s motion, so they will speak first, followed by Broward Public Interest Research Group, LLC (BPirg)’s lawyer Rhoda Sokoloff.

The public is invited:

Tuesday, July 28, 2026. 8:45 AM to 9:30 AM.
on Zoom, from your kitchen or wherever you enjoy your morning coffee:

https://zoom.us/j/91926028850

It is a public hearing, in a public courtroom, about a public hospital district funded by property taxes. You do not need a reason to attend. You do not need to say anything. You just need the link and a bit of patience – which will be rewarded. Instead of learning about history, you can be a part of it.

One request, and I mean it. Attend as an observer. Stay muted. Camera off unless the Court asks. Do not type in the chat. Do not record — Florida courts prohibit recording a proceeding without permission, and a hearing is not a comment section. Show up, stay quiet, and watch. Courtesy and respect are not optional!

The Motions:

Here is Broward Health’s motion (I’ve left off the exhibits):

Nbhd Motion To Vacate Osc And Transfer Filing

259KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

And here is BPirg’s opposition to that motion:

Bpirg Response Opp Motion To Vacate

699KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Hearing Follow-up

I will do some comprehensive Hearing analysis and commentary in my next post, and as usual will respond to any comments on my Substack site after the hearing.

One note: Your participation by showing up and listening to the hearing is both important and impactful and will be noticed by the Court, Broward Health and, of course, me. And I appreciate your support!

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Subscribe now

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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For confidential encrypted tips: Signal: DanLewisReport.91

Broward Health kept the old fight alive. BPIRG started a new one. Seven days later, a judge issued the writ. Three days after that, Broward Health asked her to take it back.

It’s about public records. Broward Health believes that its records belong to them and are private and confidential. Florida’s Public Record’s laws say that all the records of a taxpayer supported public agency, like Broward Health are owned by the public unless exempted by specific statutes narrowly applied. An example of exempted public documents from a public hospital would be, as an example, patient records. An exemption on which we can all agree.

In my last piece, I discussed the machinery to request, receive, and where necessary demand compliance with Florida’s public records laws; The Layperson’s Mandatory Mandamus Playbook. I laid out the exact machinery Florida courts are required to use when a public agency decides Chapter 119 is optional. I detailed what a facially sufficient mandamus petition looks like, and I highlighted what Rule 1.630 requires a judge to do next.

Not “may.” Not “if convenient.” Must.

That article was the blueprint. This one is the receipt.

Since then, a single public-records war against Broward Health has split into two very different courtrooms. One is still bogged down in a proxy fee war and Broward Health’s bizarre attempt to permanently ban me from making public records requests. The other went from a brand-new filing to a signed Alternative Writ in precisely seven days.

Same records. Same tax-funded agency. Same Florida law. Radically different courtrooms.

Here’s how the table flip played out.

The Old Case: Procedural Fog and Legal Desperation

The original public-records lawsuit against Broward Health was filed in December 2025 (CACE25-019383, Judge Daniel Casey, if you want to look it up on Broward Clerk of Courts website).

By May, Judge Casey quietly parked that case on an 18-month general civil track. The Alternative Writ—the vital order that forces an agency to answer for its non-compliance—was deferred in February and never touched again by Judge Casey contrary to what the rules demand.

On May 18, BPIRG voluntarily dismissed the main action without prejudice. That was the table flip. But the table didn’t land empty.

Broward Health had already taken the nuclear option: filing a third-party complaint against me personally, asking a circuit judge to issue a permanent injunction prohibiting me from ever making future public-records requests. Think about that for a second. A tax-funded public hospital district asked a court of law to strip a citizen of their constitutional right to inspect public records. My motion to dismiss that absurdity is fully briefed and pending before Judge Casey still.

Interestingly, Broward Health’s actions are exactly what CEO Shane Strum told me personally – that “they [Broward Health] would spend [tax-payer’s money] whatever it would take and force me to spend my own money fighting them and if they had to provide any records – they would make the records public thus undermining all my efforts.” A silly threat since making the records public is exactly my point.

Then, Broward Health asked Judge Casey to order BPIRG to pay its legal fees under Section 119.12(3)—Florida’s “improper purpose” provision. In plain English: the hospital district that only coughed up incomplete key public records after getting sued now claims the citizens who sued them should pay their lawyers. I predict that this insincere effort, with an absence of both legal and evidentiary support will fail. However, it may provide me an opportunity to put on evidence defending my position with witnesses that are likely to include many past Board members and past CEO’s who may be delighted to speak under oath. But as I have said, they have not offered any evidence – only baseless allegations.

The New Case: Enter Rule 1.630

On July 10, BPIRG filed a new verified petition (CACE26-011208) assigned to the Honorable Michele Towbin Singer.

This new petition targets eight specific, unfulfilled requests:

• Executive payroll data (Particularly Shane Strum’s allegedly $4.6 million dollar 2025 paid taxable income)

• Gala expenditure records

• September 2024 emergency board meeting records

• Executive employment contracts

• Organizational charts

• Closed-session transcripts

• FAU academic-practice-plan records

• Pension & Investment Committee minutes

Some of these requests had been rotting for over a year. Some got partial responses; others were met with total radio silence. In zero instances did Broward Health complete the production or provide the written, itemized statutory justifications required by law.

We asked Judge Singer to do what the law commands: review the pleading, determine if it states a prima facie case, and issue the writ.

On July 15, Judge Singer directed counsel to re-upload the proposed order, confirming she would review the complaint, research the issues, and draft the order herself.

On July 17, 2026, Judge Singer signed it. Her is the Show Cause Order:

07/17/2026 Order Directing Broward Health to Show Cause Why the Writ of Mandamus Should Not Be Grantednting 7

188KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Seven Days vs. Eighteen Months

Judge Singer found that BPIRG had established a prima facie case on all eight counts. She issued the Alternative Writ.

The order punches straight through the usual delay tactics:

• Shortened Timelines: Under Section 119.11(1), Broward Health has just 10 days after service to show cause; BPIRG gets 5 days to reply.

• Expedited Discovery: It grants immediate depositions of Broward Health’s records custodian, a representative of the General Counsel’s Office, and its Chief Information Officer (or designee).

• Priority Hearing: It commands the parties to coordinate an immediate hearing as mandated by law.

This is what mandamus is designed to do. This is what happens when a Judge follows the law and the rules.

To be clear: this isn’t a final judgment stating Broward Health violated the law—yet. An Alternative Writ is the threshold order that forces the agency out of the shadows and onto the record. Broward Health gets full due process. They can attempt to cite lawful exemptions, dispute the facts, or present evidence.

What they cannot do is send a lawyer to stand at a podium and make unsworn arguments. As I’ve noted before, lawyer talk isn’t evidence, and the Court of Appeals has repeatedly reversed circuit courts for pretending otherwise.

Most importantly, Broward Health can no longer let the calendar do their dirty work.

The 11-Minute Panic

Here is how the timeline played out once the order hit the docket:

• July 17: The Summons was efiled

• July 20, 4:40 p.m.: The Summons was issued by the Clerk.

• July 20, 4:51 p.m. (11 minutes later): Before they were even served, Broward Health panicked. They rushed out a motion asking Judge Singer to vacate her show-cause order, stay all discovery and hearings, and transfer the case right back to Judge Casey in Division 03 for consolidation. They even threw in a threat to seek Section 57.105 sanctions.

It is an extraordinarily messy motion—even by their standards. I’ll break down this hilarious piece of legal theater in my next article in a day or two. You won’t want to miss it.

• July 21, 9:30 a.m.: Broward Health was formally served at its corporate headquarters. Process was served on Elizabeth Ferguson, who represented herself as General Counsel for the district. The return of service was filed immediately.

(Want to audit the docket yourself? Go to the Broward County Clerk of Courts Case Search and enter case CACE26-011208).

The 10-day clock to show cause why a peremptory writ should not issue is officially running. By my math, their deadline expires at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, July 31.

The Lesson in the Docket

Broward Health can continue to litigate the old case. They can chase legal fees, defend their retaliatory lawsuit against me, and try to convince the world that suing a requester is a normal response to a Chapter 119 request.

None of that answers the eight outstanding requests in the new case. And a motion to dodge Judge Singer’s courtroom won’t pause the law.

That is the stark contrast between procedure as a fog and procedure as accountability. In the Casey’s courtroom, the writ languished, turning a swift public-records check into an 18-month marathon. In Judge Singer’s courtroom, the court read the petition, followed Rule 1.630, and issued the order in seven days.

Judicial elections matter. Real enforcement matters.

The table flip didn’t end the fight—it separated the genuine public-records compliance from Broward Health’s delay machine.

Now, Broward Health has three choices under Chapter 119:

1. Produce the records.

2. Cite valid, statutory exemptions.

3. Explain themselves under oath in court.

Tick tock, Shane.

Stay tuned.

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Subscribe now

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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For confidential encrypted tips: Signal: DanLewisReport.91

In my last piece, ‘BPirg Just Flipped the Table,’ I promised a closer look at the legal machinery that keeps public institutions honest.

Or, more accurately, the machinery that forces them to stop pretending they cannot hear you.

For months, I have been documenting the Broward Health public-records circus: the disappearing acts, the bureaucratic hide-and-seek, the sudden institutional hearing loss that descends the moment anyone says the words ‘public records,’ ‘audit,’ or ‘taxpayer money.’

This piece is the practical companion to that fight.

Call it The Layperson’s Mandatory Mandamus Playbook.

It is a field guide for ordinary Floridians -- and frankly, for anyone watching a public agency run from accountability -- who want to know exactly what to do when a public agency refuses to produce records, stalls without justification, hides behind vague exemptions, invents fees, refuses to cite statutory authority, or treats Chapter 119 like a polite suggestion instead of a constitutional command.

More importantly, it explains what a Florida circuit judge is supposed to do when a proper public-records mandamus petition lands on the bench.

Because here is the part almost nobody tells you:

The agency does not get to make up the rules.
And neither does the court.

A quick disclaimer before we begin: I am not a lawyer. This is civic-education information based on my personal decades of experience working with public records, public agencies, and the machinery of government accountability. You should consult a qualified Florida attorney before filing anything in court. But here is the practical truth: if you do consult an attorney, hand them this article. A good one will know exactly what to do with it.

Pro tip: plan your public-records request before you send it. Most failed public-records fights do not collapse because the law is weak. They collapse because the paper trail was ruined before a lawyer ever saw it.

You do not need magic words.

You do not need a special government form.

You need a clear request, a clean record, and enough procedural knowledge to stop a public agency from turning your constitutional rights into a waiting game.

Part I: Know Your Rights Before You Hit “Send” - 5 Rules

Florida has one of the strongest open-government frameworks in the country.

The right to inspect and copy public records is not buried in some obscure administrative rule. It is written directly into Article I, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution and implemented through Chapter 119, Florida Statutes -- commonly known as the Public Records Act.

It applies broadly: state agencies, counties, municipalities, special districts, public hospital districts, constitutional officers, and private entities acting on behalf of government.

Before you send a single request, memorize these five rules.

Rule 1: You Do Not Have to Explain Yourself

You do not have to tell the agency why you want the records.

You usually do not have to identify yourself.

If you attend a public Sunshine meeting and ask for available meeting documents, you can remain completely anonymous. If you submit a written request, the agency needs some way to contact you -- but even then, if anonymity matters, an attorney can submit the request on your behalf without revealing your identity.

You do not have to justify your request.

You do not have to prove your motives are pure.

You do not have to convince some custodian that your inquiry is sufficiently important.

The records belong to the public.

You are the public.

That is the whole point.

Rule 2: There Is No “30-Day Rule”

One of the oldest tricks in the government-avoidance manual is the invented deadline.

Agencies routinely behave as if they have 30 days, 45 days, or some vague internal “processing period” before they must act.

That is not how Chapter 119 works.

Florida law does not give any agency a fixed block of time to sit on your request. The agency must respond and produce records within a reasonable time. The only lawful delay is the time actually required to locate the records, review them, and redact legally exempt information.

That is it.

Delay for delay’s sake is not compliance. It is an unlawful refusal dressed in bureaucratic clothing.

There is one deadline you do need to remember: there is generally a two-year statute of limitations for initiating public-records litigation, measured from the date of the request, the last communication, or the statutory notice described below.

Sit around for two years while the agency runs out the clock, and you may destroy your own ability to sue.

That is not an accident.

Delay is a strategy.

Do not help them.

Rule 3: Electronic Records Should Stay Electronic

Most records today are electronic.

If the record exists electronically, ask for it electronically.

If it is a spreadsheet, ask for the spreadsheet. If it is structured data, ask for CSV, XLSX, or delimited text. If it is a document, ask for a searchable PDF.

Do not let an agency degrade useful electronic records into flat, useless scanned images unless there is a legitimate statutory reason. Public records should not be converted into digital concrete just to make public oversight harder.

I recently extracted data from more than 3.3 million Broward County scanned images at minimal cost. Modern tools can overcome bad-format games. But you should not have to fight the format war in the first place.

If the agency has the data electronically, demand it electronically.

Rule 4: If They Redact or Withhold, They Must Say Why -- Specifically

If an agency withholds a document or blacks out part of a record, it cannot just say, “It’s confidential.”

Under Section 119.07(1)(e), Florida Statutes, the custodian must cite the specific statutory exemption authorizing every withholding.

Under Section 119.07(1)(f), if you ask, the custodian must state in writing -- and with particularity -- the reasons for the conclusion that the record is exempt or confidential.

This matters.

“Legal review” is not an exemption.

“Sensitive” is not an exemption.

“Internal” is not an exemption.

“Privacy concerns” is not an exemption.

“Because we do not want you to see it” is not an exemption, no matter how polished the government language sounds.

If they redact, make them cite the law.

Every time.

Rule 5: Watch the Fees

Florida law allows agencies to charge certain copying costs. In limited circumstances, an agency may also impose a “special service charge” under Section 119.07(4)(d), Florida Statutes.

But that charge must be reasonable. It must be tied to extensive use of information technology resources, clerical labor, or supervisory assistance.

Do not give the agency a blank check.

Always require a written estimate before authorizing any charge above a stated amount. If the estimate looks inflated, object in writing. Make the agency defend its numbers.

If a court later finds the agency’s fee estimate was unreasonable, the agency may be ordered to produce the records and pay your attorney’s fees and costs.

A public-records request is a constitutional right.

It is not supposed to become a toll road.

Part II: The Copy-and-Paste Public Records Request

Keep your request polite, specific, and boring.

Boring is good.

Boring becomes evidence.

Here is a practical template you can adapt. Delete what does not apply. Fill in the brackets. Send it to the agency’s designated public-records custodian.

That is all you need.

Do not editorialize. Do not accuse. Do not write a manifesto.

The request is not where you win the fight. The request is where you build the record.

Part III: Build the Paper Trail Like a Litigator

The moment you send the request, stop thinking like an annoyed citizen.

Start thinking like a trial exhibit clerk.

Public agencies count on requesters being disorganized. They count on missing emails, vague follow-ups, undocumented phone calls, and citizens who cannot prove what happened when.

Do not give them that advantage.

Create a dedicated folder. Save everything. Name your files chronologically.

At minimum, preserve the following.

1. The Original Request. Save the exact email showing the date, time, recipient, and content. This establishes when the agency received notice -- and when its legal duty began.

2. Every Agency Response. Save every acknowledgment, delay notice, fee estimate, partial production, exemption claim, and “we are still working on it” email. Government stories often change dramatically once they reach a judge. Your paper trail preserves the actual story.

3. Every Follow-Up You Send. Your follow-ups demonstrate patience, clarity, and cooperation. They also prevent the agency from later claiming it was confused, waiting for clarification, or unsure what you wanted.

4. The Five-Business-Day Notice. This is critical. If you want to preserve a claim for attorney’s fees under Section 119.12(1)(b), Florida Statutes, you must send the required written notice before filing suit. Skip this step, and you may destroy your fee claim -- even if the agency was completely wrong. Do not skip it.

5. Phone Call Logs. Avoid phone calls when possible. Written communication is cleaner. But if you do speak by phone, immediately memorialize it with a follow-up email: “Per our phone call today, I understand that the agency is taking the position that...” That one sentence converts a fleeting conversation into a timestamped record.

Part IV: When They Hide, Send the Five-Business-Day Notice

If the agency ignores you, delays without explanation, produces only fragments, demands improper fees, refuses to cite statutory exemptions, or keeps pushing you into procedural fog -- it is time to send the formal notice required by Section 119.12(1)(b).

This notice does two things.

First, it gives the agency one final opportunity to comply.

Second, it preserves your ability to seek attorney’s fees if litigation becomes necessary.

The five-business-day clock starts when the agency receives the notice. Weekends and legal holidays do not count.

Once the notice is served, Section 119.11(4) also prohibits the custodian from destroying or altering the requested records until the dispute is resolved.

Here is a template.

Again: polite, specific, boring.

You are not trying to win an argument by email.

You are building the record for what comes next.

Part V: The Judicial Roadmap (And Why Courts Cannot Just Wing It)

If the agency still refuses to comply, the enforcement tool is a civil action in circuit court. The most common vehicle is a Petition for Writ of Mandamus.

Mandamus is not ordinary litigation. It is an extraordinary writ. That matters because the procedure is different, faster, and far more structured than a standard civil case.

Here is the part too many people miss:

A judge does not get to freestyle the process.

Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.630 lays out the sequence. If a mandamus petition is facially sufficient, the court must follow that sequence.

Not “may.”

Not “if convenient.”

Must.

And this is where many public-records cases go off the rails.

A court may be tempted to hold an informal status hearing, let the agency’s lawyer make unsworn representations about how hard everyone is working, and then deny relief based on a loose courtroom conversation.

That is not the mandamus process.

That is how constitutional rights disappear into procedure-shaped fog.

The Rule 1.630 Sequence

The proper mandamus sequence is straightforward:

1. The petition is filed.

2. The court reviews facial sufficiency.

3. If the petition is facially sufficient, the court issues an alternative writ.

4. The agency must respond formally, on the record.

5. Factual disputes require evidence -- not speeches.

1. Procedure Comes First -- Merits Come Second

In mandamus, the court’s first job is purely procedural.

The judge is not supposed to decide whether the requester is likable, whether the agency sounds trustworthy, whether the case is politically inconvenient, or whether everyone would prefer the problem to quietly disappear.

The first question is simple: Does the petition allege the necessary elements for mandamus relief? That is a facial sufficiency review. The court looks at the petition itself -- nothing more.

2. The Three Elements of Facial Sufficiency

A facially sufficient mandamus petition alleges three things.

1. First: A Clear Legal Right. In a public-records case, the clear legal right comes from the Florida Constitution and Chapter 119. The public has a legal right to inspect and copy non-exempt public records.

2. Second: An Indisputable Legal Duty. The agency has a legal duty to produce public records unless a specific statutory exemption applies. That duty is not optional. It is not a customer-service preference. It is not subject to the mood of the custodian. It is the law.

3. Third: No Adequate Remedy at Law. If the agency is refusing or unreasonably delaying production, ordinary waiting is not a remedy. The point of Chapter 119 is access. A right delayed until it becomes useless is not much of a right at all.

If those three elements appear on the face of the petition, the court’s discretion narrows sharply. Florida cases including Smith v. State and Chandler v. City of Greenacres recognize the mandatory nature of the next procedural step once the pleading is sufficient.

3. The Alternative Writ Is Not Optional

Rule 1.630(d) provides that, when the petition is facially sufficient, the court must issue an alternative writ in mandamus.

The alternative writ is not a final victory. It is not the court ordering immediate production without further process.

It is the judicial command that forces the agency to formally respond.

In plain English, the alternative writ tells the government:

Produce the records -- or come into court and legally justify why you don’t have to.

That is the whole point.

It moves the case from government silence to government accountability.

4. The Burden Shifts to the Agency

Once the alternative writ issues, the agency cannot rely on vague assurances, hallway conversations, or courtroom storytelling.

Under Rule 1.630(e), the respondent must file a formal response under the rules of civil procedure. That response must put facts and defenses into the record.

As described in Moeller v. Southeast Florida Behavioral Health Network, the burden shifts to the government -- it must bring forward hard facts justifying why it failed to perform its mandatory legal duty.

No more fog.

No more “we’re looking into it.”

No more “the staff is working very hard.”

Produce the records or justify the refusal.

5. Speeches Are Not Evidence

This is where the system most often breaks down.

Agency lawyers are good at this. They stand at the podium and say things like:

“We are working on it.”

“This request is overly burdensome.”

“The requester is harassing our staff.”

“There are significant privacy concerns.”

“We believe we have fully complied.”

Those statements may sound official. They may even sound persuasive.

But unsworn argument by counsel is not evidence.

A judge cannot resolve disputed facts based on a lawyer’s speech from counsel table.

The Fourth District Court of Appeal has already reversed a Broward County circuit court order for precisely this procedural failure in Williams v. State. If factual disputes exist, the court must use an evidentiary process -- sworn testimony, admissible evidence, a reviewable record.

Public-records rights do not vanish because a government lawyer tells a better story.

6. Motive Is Not a Defense

When agencies run out of legal arguments, they almost always reach for the same tired accusation: harassment.

They claim the requester has an improper motive, a political agenda, a personal grudge, or some other supposedly disqualifying reason for wanting the records.

That argument makes for good theater.

It is usually legally irrelevant to production.

Florida’s public-records law does not condition access on having an approved personality, a government-certified purpose, or a motive pleasing to the agency. The public’s right to inspect public records is not a popularity contest.

As the court stated plainly in Curry v. State, a requester’s underlying motivation has no bearing on the right to inspect records under the Public Records Act.

There is a narrow “improper purpose” concept in Section 119.12(3), but that is a fee-shifting issue resolved after the case ends -- not a license for hiding records at the front end.

The agency does not get to say: We dislike your motive, therefore we will not obey Chapter 119.

That is not how open government works.

The Payoff: Fees, Accountability, and Real Leverage

If an agency unlawfully refuses a public-records request, and the requester has satisfied the statutory notice requirement, Section 119.12 can require the court to award reasonable attorney’s fees and litigation costs.

That is not a minor detail.

It is the enforcement engine.

Without mandatory fee-shifting, wealthy public institutions can delay ordinary citizens into submission. They can make access so expensive and so exhausting that most people simply give up. That is the point.

With fees, the law creates genuine leverage. It tells public agencies that unlawful secrecy can become expensive.

And yes -- when the agency loses, taxpayers end up paying for the agency’s cover-up.

That is exactly why public officials should comply with the law the first time.

The answer to public-records litigation is not better excuses.

The answer is production.

Final Thought

Florida’s public-records law is not complicated because the public’s right is unclear.

It is complicated because institutions benefit from making the process feel mysterious, slow, and exhausting.

They count on you not knowing the sequence.

They count on you losing the email.

They count on you accepting delay as normal.

They count on a court treating a mandatory writ process like an informal status conference.

Do not make it easy.

Write a clear request.

Preserve the record.

Send the five-business-day notice when necessary.

Understand the Rule 1.630 sequence.

And when the bureaucracy tries to run out the clock, remember the core command at the heart of Florida’s public-records law:

These are public records.

The public has a constitutional right to see them.

And the government does not get to hide the clock.

This article is general civic-education information, not legal advice for any specific dispute. Statutory references are to Chapter 119, Florida Statutes, and Article I, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution, current as of June 2026. Consult a qualified Florida attorney before initiating any formal legal action.

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Subscribe now

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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For confidential encrypted tips: Signal: DanLewisReport.91

As a companion piece to this ongoing work, I will soon publish The Layperson’s Mandatory Mandamus Playbook. That field guide will explain what a Florida judge is required to do when a clear public-records petition lands on the bench. It will lay out the rules, the cases, and the roadmap I have learned as a non-lawyer trying to make taxpayer-funded institutions obey the law.

The purpose is simple: give citizens trapped in similar institutional delay machines the rulebook they need to hold the system accountable. It may also prove useful to ethical, impartial Florida circuit judges who someday find a public-records case on their docket and want to call it straight.

But that playbook has already been tested in the real world. The results need to be told first.

Here is the short version: in my view, Judge Daniel A. Casey effectively disregarded the public-records rulebook, granted Broward Health a 70-day delay on a request that was not properly noticed, and then pushed BPIRG’s public-records case onto an 18-month general civil track — the opposite of what Florida transparency law is designed to require.

If a judge can turn an “immediate” public-records dispute into an 18-month crawl, does the public actually have a right to know anything at all?

At least on this docket, the answer became painfully clear: not in any meaningful time frame.

So, the Broward Public Interest Research Group used an explicit procedural rule and voluntarily dismissed its own case without prejudice. With that one filing, the 18-month slow-walk disappeared. The 70-day extension lost its practical effect. The artificial hearing schedule vanished. The litigation excuse Broward Health had been hiding behind was stripped away.

This is the breakdown: why the dismissal was necessary, why it is a serious problem for Broward Health’s administration, and what the episode says about institutional power under the robe. If Broward Health continues to disregard its obligations under Florida law, I will refile it, and maybe, just maybe – the court will get it right.

The Institutional Trap

To understand the decision, look at where the case stood last week.

BPIRG filed the case on December 18, 2025. On its face, the issue was straightforward. A writ of mandamus asks a court to order a government agency to perform a mandatory legal duty. In this case, the duty was not complicated: produce public records, assert lawful exemptions with specificity, or explain the failure on the record.

That is the basic job of the court in a public-records enforcement case. The judge looks at the papers, determines whether the agency has complied with Chapter 119 based on the evidence presented, and promptly orders production or requires the agency to justify its refusal. The process is supposed to move quickly because delay itself defeats the public’s right of access.

That did not happen in Judge Casey’s courtroom.

Instead, Broward Health received a 70-day delay after an unannounced request from its lawyers. By March 27, 2026, the case had been pushed onto an 18-month general civil track — the kind of track used for ordinary, complex lawsuits, not expedited public-records enforcement. That result directly conflicts with the spirit and structure of Florida’s transparency laws, which require immediate attention and priority treatment for these disputes.

The fast-track built for public access had been rerouted into an administrative parking lot.

Every day BPIRG remained stalled there, Broward Health got what delay always gives an agency in a public-records case: time. Time for the underlying decisions to harden. Time for the political heat to fade. Time for records to lose their public value. Time for yesterday’s secrecy to become today’s old news.

When a court stops enforcing the rules that make public-records meaningful, the citizen is left with one practical option: remove the case from the trap. That is what BPIRG did.

The Escape Hatch

The mechanism was simple: a voluntary dismissal without prejudice.

Under Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.420(a)(1), a plaintiff generally has a one-time right to dismiss its own case before the opposing party serves an answer or moves for summary judgment. No court order is required. The filing is effective immediately.

That two-page filing dismantled the 18-month crawl. It made the 70-day extension functionally meaningless. It wiped out the artificial schedule. Most important, because the dismissal was without prejudice, BPIRG did not give up its substantive public-records rights.

The right to submit new requests remains. The right to sue again remains. The right to seek enforcement before a new division on a clean docket remains. At least, that is how the system is supposed to work.

Table Flip

Let me be clear before Broward Health or its lawyers try to spin this as a retreat: this was not giving up. This was a table flip.

The case had stopped being about public records and had become a courtroom debate over whether the public records rules mean what they say. Every hearing, every filing, and every delay pulled the dispute farther away from the records and deeper into procedural fog. Meanwhile, the public still did not have the documents.

There was another problem. While the case remained pending, Broward Health appeared to use the litigation itself as a shield. I am told that later public records requests were met with the same dismissive institutional posture: the matter is in litigation; contact legal counsel; sue us if you want the records.

That is the agency-delay playbook. Cut compliance capacity. Escalate litigation spending. Route transparency through outside lawyers. Then use the existence of litigation as the excuse for more noncompliance.

The voluntary dismissal strips away that shield. The litigation excuse is gone. Statutory duty remains. The public records that were on December 18, 2025, are still public records today. Broward Health’s legal obligation did not disappear because BPIRG refused to keep playing on a tilted field.

The “v.” Matters

The professional background of a judge does not decide a case. But it can help you understand the institutional lens through which a case appears to be handled.

Before taking the bench, Judge Daniel A. Casey spent decades at K&L Gates, a global law firm with a major institutional defense practice. His background included commercial litigation, insurance coverage, and representation of large entities. That career path is not disqualifying. Many excellent judges come from the defense bar.

But the “v.” matters. When a small citizen group is trying to force a politically connected public institution to comply with a straightforward disclosure duty, and the court repeatedly extends the institution while delaying the citizen, the pattern deserves scrutiny.

Here, the defendant is not a corner store. The North Broward Hospital District is a billion-dollar special taxing district. Its CEO, Shane Strum, previously served as Chief of Staff to Governor Ron DeSantis. The institution reduced transparency compliance capacity while increasing litigation spending to fight transparency. That context matters.

When a public-records case is delayed for months, moved to an 18-month track, and treated as ordinary civil litigation rather than expedited transparency enforcement, the public is justified in asking whether the institutional defendant received the benefit of every procedural doubt.

On this docket, the conduct lined up in the wrong direction.

What Happens Next

The public-records requests remain alive in every practical sense. The law applies now exactly as it applied before. If Broward Health claims exemptions, it must identify them in writing, with specificity, and cite the legal basis. If it refuses to comply, BPIRG can refile.

A dismissal without prejudice preserves the right to return to court. The next petition should procedurally land on a clean docket with a random division assignment before a different judge.

I will also continue covering Judge Casey’s courtroom because he remains assigned to the separate case in which Lynn Barrett, Broward Health’s former General Counsel, sued me over published speech on public issues. That case remains part of the same broader transparency story.

The Mandatory Mandamus Playbook will follow shortly. It will give readers the rules, tools, and procedural maps needed to understand how these cases are supposed to move. The answer to an unyielding docket is an informed public with better tools.

The enforcement of transparency does not depend on one courtroom. It is anchored in Florida law. That is where BPIRG has placed the fight.

Sunshine eventually eats secrecy. We are done waiting for a sunny day.
Wake up.

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Subscribe now

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

Share

Leave a comment

For confidential encrypted tips: Signal: DanLewisReport.91

References

· Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.420(a)(1): the plaintiff’s one-time right to voluntarily dismiss its own case before the opposing party serves an answer or moves for summary judgment. No court order is required; the dismissal is effective upon filing.
· Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.630: the procedural rule governing extraordinary writ actions, including actions used to compel government compliance with mandatory legal duties.
· Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.200(a)(13): the case-management provision exempting certain public-records and extraordinary-writ proceedings from standard civil case tracks.
· Florida Statute § 119.11(1): the provision requiring public-records actions to receive an immediate hearing and priority over ordinary civil matters.
· Florida Statute § 119.12: the fee-shifting provision applicable when an agency unlawfully refuses to permit inspection or copying of public records.
· Litigation records: BPIRG v. North Broward Hospital District, Case No. CACE 25-019383, Seventeenth Judicial Circuit, Broward County, voluntarily dismissed May 18, 2026, Docket 053; and Lynn Barrett v. Dan Lewis, Case No. CACE 20-014487, Seventeenth Judicial Circuit, Broward County.
· Judicial profile and biographical records: Florida Bar member profile for Daniel A. Casey; Trellis.Law judicial profile; Seventeenth Judicial Circuit records; Broward County Bar Association, Barrister, January 2019.
· K&L Gates / political event disclosure: RedBroward, “Broward Judicial Candidate’s Law Firm Hosted Trump Inauguration Party With Michael Cohen,” May 29, 2018.
· Institutional records: North Broward Hospital District / Broward Health leadership listings, budget and staffing materials, litigation-spending materials, and public appointment records for CEO Shane Strum.

In April 2021, Broward Health replaced a compliance-oriented CEO with Shane Strum, the then sitting Chief of Staff to Governor Ron DeSantis. The local press treated it as a sudden, high-profile career pivot. It was not.

Strum did not parachute into Broward County’s healthcare system out of nowhere. He is the culmination of a 25-year playbook built on grassroots political maneuvering, proximity to deeply compromised institutional actors, and the ruthless consolidation of executive power. To understand why Broward Health’s litigation budget expanded by 750 percent, you have to understand the man running the machine.

This is the structural history of Shane Strum. The record eliminates ambiguity. Folk wisdom like ”you can’t change the zebra’s stripes”, and “be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt” come to mind.

The Grassroots and the “Culture of Corruption”

Before he was the highest non-elected official in Florida, Strum was a local operative working the levers of power in heavily Democratic Broward County. He cut his teeth joining the Broward Young Republicans in 1997. By 2004, after grinding through the local executive committee, he seized the chairmanship of the Broward Republican Party. Alongside his wife, Alexis Yarbrough (a former Department of Transportation General Counsel), Strum mastered the back-room mechanics of South Florida politics.

That mastery seemingly bought him proximity to power and proximity to alleged corruption.

By the late 2000s, Strum had attached himself to George LeMieux, the deeply entrenched GOP operative who would become Governor Charlie Crist’s Chief of Staff. As Strum ascended into Crist’s inner circle, he and LeMieux became central figures in an era defined by what LeMieux himself reportedly later decried as a South Florida “Culture of Corruption”.

At the center of that culture was Scott Rothstein, the disgraced Fort Lauderdale attorney who orchestrated a massive $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme. The historical record is outwardly explicit. Strum and LeMieux did not just share a zip code with Rothstein; they shared VIP tables and charter jets. In 2008, Strum was photographed boarding Rothstein’s private plane alongside the Republican Party of Florida’s general counsel. In biographical vignettes published later, witnesses noted how Rothstein would hold court at political events, reputedly specifically singling out Strum from the crowd of staffers.

When the Ponzi scheme inevitably collapsed, Crist, LeMieux, and Strum all downplayed their relationships with the disgraced attorney. The fallout was contained. Strum survived. He learned the cardinal rule of political survival: control the narrative, and when you can’t, control the institution.

The Tallahassee Power Struggles

Strum’s tenure across multiple republican gubernatorial administrations is defined by an observed consistent pattern: the putatively aggressive consolidation of internal power and the suppression of external oversight.

As Charlie Crist’s Chief of Staff, reputedly Strum was the highest-paid worker in the executive office—earning more than the Governor himself. His management style was heavy-handed. In January 2010, the state’s emergency chief, Ruben Almaguer, purportedly was actively pressured to resign and fighting back in direct emails to Strum in a highly publicized internal conflict.

But it was under Governor Ron DeSantis that Strum’s operational playbook was perfected.

Strum was initially hired to the DeSantis transition team by Susie Wiles, the veteran GOP operative credited with saving DeSantis’s floundering 2018 campaign and now Trump’s Chief of Staff. Strum’s gratitude was remarkably short-lived. What followed was a brutal, orchestrated counter-mobilization. Aligning himself closely with DeSantis, Strum reportedly visibly engineered a relentless power struggle that ostensibly resulted in Wiles being completely exiled from the Governor’s inner circle and, temporarily, from the Trump campaign.

The message was clear: in Strum’s operational hierarchy, evidently loyalty to the executive branch supersedes institutional stability or historical alliances.

That loyalty apparently extended to managing—or misplacing—institutional scandals. In 2019, when Florida’s top financial regulator Ronald Rubin was reportedly placed under investigation for harassment and toxic workplace allegations, the state’s Inspector General delivered the preliminary findings directly to Strum via email. The findings appeared to sit dormant. According to news reports, DeSantis later claimed he “didn’t know for weeks” that his office possessed the preliminary investigation.

Information control is the ultimate institutional weapon. When a Chief of Staff controls what the Governor sees, he controls what the government does.

The Healthcare Takeover

Which brings us to the hospitals.

South Florida’s public hospital districts are massive economic engines funded by your tax dollars. They require operational expertise. Instead, they have increasingly become landing pads for political operatives.

Before taking over Broward Health, Strum served as a Commissioner and Board Chairman for the South Broward Hospital District (Memorial Healthcare System). During that time, he frequently praised Memorial’s long-time CEO, Frank Sacco. Sacco was an operator who built Memorial with a strong, long-term healthcare vision. But that soon changed when Strum arrived as Memorial’s interim CEO while serving as Broward Health’s CEO - but I get ahead of myself.

In early 2021, while still serving as DeSantis’s Chief of Staff, Strum to all outward appearances engineered his appointment as the President and CEO of Broward Health. He arrived with a handcrafted, three-year contract worth reportedly $1.3 million annually which may have exploded to $4.6 million dollar taxable income paid in 2024.

After a hastily called emergency meeting of the Broward Health Commission, the Board authorized Strum to become Memorial’s interim CEO under a written contract acceptable to the Broward Health’s General Counsel. But, according to multiple public records requests - there is no written contract. Strange.

Now, when Strum later returned to Memorial in an executive capacity (under an unknown contract) serving as Interim CEO—the contrast was stark. The institutional culture fractured. A public petition titled “Shane Strum Must Go — Morale at Memorial Is Shattered” purpotedly began circulating. One 23-year veteran of the hospital wrote:

Despite shattering morale at Memorial, Strum had his eyes on a larger prize.

The reform board that had guided Broward Health through 18 months of unprecedented transparency—lowering taxes, establishing public records compliance budgets, and passing Resolution FY20-14— establishing explicit governance transparency was systematically replaced by executive appointees. Under Strum’s leadership, the $325,000 public records/Board and transparency/compliance budget was gutted. At the same time, the litigation budget exploded to $6.7 million. And slowly, but ever gradually, the General Counsel’s office outwardly morphed into a proxy of the CEO and not the independent, gaiting influence of an independent Board or Commissioners. It seemed like the Counsel’s office chose the minimally legal permissive approach to the CEO as governance and resolutions were modified or ignored to oblivion. It is unclear whether The Board was aware of this trend as there are no records suggesting they were informed. It just happened, consistent with the Zebra’s stripes.

The transparency muscle was visibly deliberately allowed to atrophy.

Strum and his allies are now apparently pushing legislative loopholes to merge Broward’s public hospital systems without requiring a public referendum. In my opinion, it is the ultimate expression of the “Culture of Corruption” he grew up in ostensibly bypass the voters, consolidate the money, and litigate anyone who asks for the receipts.

I should note clearly, I have and do support some legislation which would allow both Broward’s public hospitals to coordinate, consolidate and work together - not to eliminate fair competition, but in service of the voters and taxpayers of Broward who created and funded our public hospitals. I’ll write about this more in the future.

Zebra’s Stripes

Shane Strum is not an anomaly. He is what he is, the standard product of an incentive structure that rewards opacity. From Rothstein’s charter jets to the Tallahassee power struggles to the executive suites of Broward Health, seemingly the playbook has never changed.

The resistance to transparency is not about logistics. It is about control. As long as political operatives are allowed to run public healthcare institutions like private fiefdoms, your tax dollars will continue to fund their legal defense against your right to know and participate.

The problem is not the public records law. The problem is who runs the institution, and who they answer to. If we can’t solve these challenges in our local institutions, how can we presume to address the same problems in our state and national institutions.

Time to wake up!

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

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Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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References

Category: Nova Southeastern University alumni — Wikipedia (Documents Scott Rothstein and Shane Strum as notable alumni).
LeMieux Decries S. Fla. ‘Culture of Corruption’ — The Ledger, Nov 26, 2009 (Details the Crist administration downplaying ties to Scott Rothstein).
Florida Lawyer Scandal — Justice Network / Sunshine State News (Features the 2008 photograph of Strum boarding Rothstein’s charter jet).
Vignettes From The Life Of Scott Rothstein — McCormick Place Blog (Details Rothstein singling out Strum at political events alongside George LeMieux).
Scott’s Stumbles Highlight Holes in Staffing — Tampa Bay Times, Jan 9, 2011 (Documents Strum as the highest-paid staffer under Charlie Crist).
State’s emergency chief pressured to resign — Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Jan 4, 2010 (Documents Almaguer’s internal fight with Strum).
‘Poisoned’: Power struggle distances DeSantis from party — Politico, Aug 13, 2019 (Details Strum’s engineering of the Susie Wiles ouster).
DeSantis staff mislaid initial findings of Rubin investigation — Politico, Jun 6, 2019 (Documents Inspector General Perry delivering scandal findings directly to Strum, which were subsequently delayed).
Shane Strum Must Go — Morale at Memorial Is Shattered — Change.org (Public petition contrasting Strum’s leadership failures with the legacy of Frank Sacco).
DeSantis ally Strum reels in sweet deal to run Broward Health — Florida Bulldog, Mar 2021 (Details the $1.3 million handcrafted contract).
Failed hospital ‘merger’ deserves referendum, not legislative loophole — Florida Politics (Coverage of the attempt to bypass voters to merge hospital districts).
COUNTY GOP LEADER TO QUIT AFTER DECADE IN ORGANIZATION — Sun Sentinel, Nov 16, 2004 (Documents Strum’s early takeover of the Broward Republican Executive Committee).

The timing is telling. Berry’s praise appeared the same day BPIRG filed an appellate petition against Broward Health. Berry is not a detached observer; he is Strum’s direct public employer who votes on the CEO’s annual contract and the very initiatives he praises. When an employer writes a public love letter to his employee during active litigation, we are looking at a PR operation, not transparency.

A Captured Board Threatening an 85-Year Legacy

Broward Health is a taxpayer-supported public hospital district where homeowners and businesses are involuntary investors. In its 85-year history, it has survived scandals and mediocrity, but never has it faced more perilous times than now—when the board entrusted to protect it has chosen a path of passivity and complicity.

The institutional incentive structure now pulls entirely toward self-protection and opacity. Any commissioner who raises hard questions faces a politically explainable threat of removal by CEO Strum. Instead of demanding accountability for emptying emergency rooms and plummeting surgical volumes, the board chooses the comfort of a padded spreadsheet.

The Budget Designed to Normalize Losses

Imagine a restaurant that loses money every year, so the owner calculates the annual loss and sends the bill to a landlord who cannot say no. That is essentially how Broward Health budgets: it projects the gap between collections and spending, then sets the property tax levy to cover that gap to the dollar.

For 2026, that number is $249,393,000. This structure doesn’t incentivize efficiency; it treats taxpayer support as an annual reset button for management’s inability to fix the business model.

The $4.6 Million Performance Paradox

Executive bonuses at Broward Health are tied to “hitting budget,” which sounds reasonable until you understand management helps build the budget it is graded against. When you build a budget with millions in cushion, “beating” it is a formality, not an achievement.

In March 2026, the Physician Group alone lost $4.7 million—on pace for more than $56 million in annual losses. Calling this a “win” because the loss was smaller than planned is budget management, not performance management.

The Numbers Do Not Add Up

Across key measures of patient activity, Broward Health is shrinking, yet management reports the strongest financial performance in years.

Systemwide Patient Activity (March 2026 vs. March 2025):

The Coral Springs Anomaly

Broward Health Coral Springs (BHCS) is the case that should stop every commissioner cold. In March 2026, ER visits there collapsed by 29%. Admissions fell 11%, and total surgeries fell 8%. Yet, management reported a $21.4 million favorable year-to-date budget variance for that same facility.

The “Charity” That Requires a Cleaner Explanation

Broward Health claims $516.6 million in annual “Community Benefit”. This sounds like a gift to the community, but the reality is a math trick.

• • The Medicaid Gap: They count Medicaid shortfalls as charity but often receive supplemental federal reimbursements (DSH/DPP) designed specifically to offset those costs.

• • The Bad Debt Inflation: They include $111.6 million in bad debt (unpaid bills). Worse, this is calculated on the chargemaster rate—the fictional sticker price that nobody pays—rather than the actual economic cost of care.

The 61% Tax Increase

The board regularly points to a lower property tax rate as evidence of stewardship. This is incomplete. Because property values have skyrocketed, a lower rate on a much larger base still produces a larger bill.

THE TAX TRAP
Under Strum’s tenure, the District has levied over $670 million in taxes—a 61.3% increase from the start of his term. For 2026, the approved levy is $249.4 million, the highest in history.

Resistance Over Compliance

The legal budget reflects a troubling shift in institutional priorities. The current draft identifies a $19.6 million legal budget.

The spending data tells a clear story: under a compliance-oriented board in 2021, the Governance and Public Records budget was $325,000. Under current management, that line was gutted by 75%, while the litigation budget exploded by 750%. Broward Health has stopped spending on transparency and started spending on resistance. For example, according to the current public records litigation BPIRG filed against BH—incredibly, BH allegedly still refuses to comply with Florida’s Public Records laws.

“Better Together” or Public Mission?

Commissioner Berry frames the “Better Together” initiative as a response to “market competitors.” This framing is a telling mischaracterization. Broward Health and Memorial are not simply market actors; they are public hospital systems. Their purpose is not to “win” a private-sector contest, but to deliver healthcare under a public mission with public assets.

Closer coordination could make sense if it reduced duplication and improved service lines. But this is only true if the process is transparent and designed around patients rather than executive consolidation and compensation. Instead, we see a shattered culture: in March 2026 alone, 66 Memorial employees were fired and 32 others demoted. At Broward Health, the C-Suite is all but empty.

Critics rightly argue that the recently failed proposed legislation known as HB 1253 would create a legislative loophole for a de facto merger without the public referendum required by Florida law. But it’s actually worse. It attempted to eliminate a transparent conversation about the future of healthcare in Broward by and among the very taxpayers and voters who created and funded the systems. Not surprisingly, the legislation was yet another conversation by and between disconnected political insiders who were deciding what we need and want with our healthcare without our input.

The Bottom Line

Stability is not a board accepting unexplained budget variances while patients flee the system. It is not a CEO with a political background collecting a $1.3 million contract—and millions more in taxable income—while frontline volumes collapse. And it is not a public hospital district collecting a quarter-billion dollars in property taxes while spending millions on lawyers to resist the very public that funds it.

None of this is hidden; it is in Broward Health’s own documents. The question is whether a taxpayer-owned institution will be held to the standard of transparency the public has every right to demand.

Ray Berry got it wrong, but at least he spoke up and tried to bring the conversation to the public debate.

Time to wake up!

(See exhibit A & B Below)

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Subscribe now

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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Exhibit A: Year-to-Date Volumes by Facility

Source: NBHD Operating Indicators, March FY26 (FY26 = Oct 2025–Mar 2026 vs. comparable FY25 period). Negative percentages shown in red.

Exhibit B: The Financial Paradox

The pattern: volumes are materially down at most facilities, yet financial results are up or stable across the board

References & Citations

· North Broward Hospital District Finance Committee Meeting Book (April 29, 2026 / Ref: 260429BH_Finance Meeting Book.pdf)
· Community Benefit Service Budget, FY2026 (Page 8) — source for $516.6M total cost, $111.6M bad debt, and Medicaid offsets.
· Operating Indicators, March FY26 (Page 12) — source for systemwide and per-facility volume changes (ER visits,
outpatient visits, surgeries, admissions, hospitalizations).
· Income Statement Summaries, March FY26 (Pages 13, 14, 17) — source for March 2026 actuals vs. budget for BHMC, BH North, BH Coral Springs, and the Physician Group; source for the $21.4M YTD favorable variance.
· Statement of Cash Flows, March FY26 (Page 24) — source for $247.5M YTD Ad Valorem Tax Collections and $1.33B ending cash balance.
· Legal / Compliance Departments Budget (Page 25) — source for the $19.6M legal budget.
· BPIRG, LLC v. North Broward Hospital District, CACE 25-019383.
· Board Resolution FY20-14, North Broward Hospital District (January 2020).
· “Shane Strum Must Go — Morale at Memorial Is Shattered,” Change.org Petition.

Previously: Parts 1 through 4 documented eleven years of Broward Health’s institutional playbook from the inside — litigation records, billing invoices, board resolutions, budget lines, and the five-phase architecture of attrition I’ve been mapping since 2015. If you haven’t read those, start there. This piece covers the same ground from the outside. What reporters were writing, what editorial boards were demanding, and the specific moments — caught on the record, in public, by journalists doing their jobs — that should have ended this a decade ago.

What the Press Record Adds

Everything I documented in Parts 1 through 4 came from sources I controlled: records I requested, litigation filings I made, billing invoices I obtained, budgets I analyzed. That record is precise. It is also, by definition, filtered through my own case.

There is a parallel record — running alongside mine, covering the same years, the same actors, the same decisions — that I did not produce. Reporters at the Sun Sentinel, particularly David Fleshler and Mike Mayo, covered Broward Health’s 2015–2018 collapse with sustained attention. Their editors published editorials that named what was happening in language the institution’s lawyers couldn’t redact. The resulting body of press coverage is not my analysis. It is contemporaneous, external documentation of the same institutional behavior I’ve been arguing from inside a courtroom.

When the institutional record and the press record say the same thing, that is not coincidence. That is corroboration.

Here is what the press documented.

I. The Settlement the Board Tried to Move Past

The press had Broward Health’s number before I had filed my second records request.

In August 2015, the Sun Sentinel reported that Broward Health had paid $69.5 million to the federal government to resolve a False Claims Act case — an illegal kickback scheme that paid physicians above fair market value for patient referrals. This was, as I documented in Part 1, the federal reckoning that should have changed everything. Reporters were there when it didn’t.

What the press added that my records didn’t fully capture: the scale of what the institution was generating — and therefore protecting. Broward Health manages $1.6 billion in annual revenue. Of that, $140 million comes directly from Broward County property taxes. It is, by any measure, one of the most significant public financial instruments in South Florida. The federal fraud settlement was not an anomaly. It was a symptom of an institution that appears to have learned to treat its financial arrangements as a private matter, public funding notwithstanding.

The press noted that at the same moment Broward Health was signing a five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement — a binding federal consent decree requiring ethical compliance — it was simultaneously spending $44,000 to resist my records request about the very category of compensation arrangements the CIA was designed to govern. Neither the reporters nor I could make that up. The institution did it on its own.

II. The Private Investigator Who Wouldn’t Go Away

On January 23, 2016, CEO Dr. Nabil El Sanadi died by suicide in a condominium lobby bathroom. The board’s immediate institutional response appeared to be managing the narrative.

The board issued an official statement claiming that Wayne Black — the private investigator El Sanadi had hired months earlier to probe internal purchasing fraud — had been let go in October 2015. Terminated. No longer active. The subtext, or so the statement implied: whatever Black knew, it was old news and no longer the institution’s problem.

Wayne Black showed up at the next public board meeting with his contract.

He had the billing records. He had the communications. He had proof that he had never been fired and had continued working, continued communicating with El Sanadi, up until shortly before El Sanadi’s death. The unsigned statement the institution had issued was false. Not inaccurate. Not incomplete. False.

This is worth pausing on. Broward Health — under federal compliance monitoring, having just paid $69.5 million to settle a fraud case — issued a false statement about a private investigator who had been probing internal corruption, in the immediate aftermath of the death of the CEO who had hired him. Black had written to federal investigators warning that evidence was being withheld from the FBI’s corruption squad. His letter was on the record. The record was public. And the institution’s first public response was to claim he had been dismissed months before.

The Sun Sentinel was there. Wayne Black was there. The record is unambiguous.

III. “This Looks Like We’re Trying to Hide”

In the days after El Sanadi’s death, the board convened a special meeting. The subject: how to handle the escalating disclosures — the private investigator, the FBI inquiry, the federal monitor’s questions.

The board voted 5-2 to hold that discussion in a closed “shade meeting” — behind closed doors, out of public view.

Board Chairman David Di Pietro voted against. He said it on the record: “This looks like we’re trying to hide and close and not let the public hear what is going on here.” He was right. He was also outvoted.

The Sun Sentinel editorial board published a formal objection. They argued it was not merely bad optics to conduct a public discussion of alleged federal obstruction behind closed doors. They argued it was illegal.

The five board members who voted for the shade session did so while publicly committing to transparency. The Sun Sentinel captured the institutional contradiction in a line that has held up remarkably well: “Board members spoke of their commitment to transparency, of course. It’s a word you often hear before government shuts the door in your face.”

I have spent eleven years documenting the architecture behind that door. The press described the door.

IV. The “Christmas Party”

On March 21, 2016 — five weeks after Di Pietro’s public opposition to the shade vote — Governor Rick Scott suspended him. Scott also suspended Darryl Wright, the audit committee chairman who had been pushing to examine the legal spending. The official basis: suspicions referred by the governor’s chief inspector general.

A judge would later find the governor had failed to produce “a single fact” proving wrongdoing. Di Pietro was ordered reinstated. The Sun Sentinel editorial board described the suspensions as a “rush to judgment” built on a “flimsy case.” The board publicly questioned whether Scott was deliberately destabilizing the institution — “Is the board deliberately trying to destabilize this asset to lower its value for a possible sale?” — a question that remains, to my knowledge, unanswered.

What the press documented about the day of the suspensions is not in any litigation record I possess.

According to reporters, General Counsel Lynn Barrett was ostensibly overheard in the building following the announcement, saying: “This is like Christmas!” Her team, according to sources cited by the Sun Sentinel, was celebrating.

Barrett denied it to the press. “There was no party.”

A board member then told reporters that he had personally confronted Barrett about the celebration. His version: “She didn’t deny it. She was just letting off a little steam.”

Barrett denied it. A board member publicly contradicted her. One event. The institution’s official position was denial. The contemporaneous witness contradicted that denial publicly, on the record, and the Sun Sentinel printed both.

The two men who had been most vocal about the legal spending, most resistant to the shade sessions, and most aligned with federal oversight expectations — gone. Replaced by Scott appointees. Within weeks.

That is the sequence the press documented. I documented the billing records that followed. Read together, the picture is complete.

V. What “We All Know What the Right Thing Is to Do” Actually Meant

On December 1, 2016, the board fired Interim CEO Pauline Grant. The firing was not on the public meeting agenda. Board members had been individually briefed beforehand by outside attorneys. The vote happened. The press was present.

Former Commissioner Beverly Capasso made a statement during the meeting that the Sun Sentinel recorded and the editorial board subsequently flagged as significant. She apparently said: “We all know what the right thing is to do.”

The editorial board’s response was immediate: Really? What all did they know?

The problem was simple and devastating. If “we all know” — but there had been no public discussion, no public agenda item, no public briefing — then the knowledge had seemingly come from somewhere that was not public. The statement was, in effect, an accidental confession to exactly the kind of pre-vote private coordination the Sunshine Law was designed to prohibit.

Linda Robison purportedly added that they couldn’t have a CEO “under criminal investigation.” But no public announcement of any criminal investigation had been made. The press asked the obvious question: by whom?

The grand jury that indicted five officials in December 2017 — Rodriguez, Ure, Robison, Barrett, and Capasso — found probable cause that consequential governance decisions had been made through back channels, conduits, hotels, restaurants, and telephone calls, outside public view. The indictment identified the Grant firing as the central event. Capasso’s reported four words — “We all know what the right thing is to do” — were part of the public record on which the press connected those dots long before the grand jury did.

VI. Robert’s Rules and the Diploma Mill

While the Grant firing was still generating headlines, reporters began examining Beverly Capasso’s background more carefully.

David Fleshler reported that Capasso’s resume listed a master’s degree from Kennedy-Western University. Kennedy-Western had closed in 2009, after federal investigators exposed it as a diploma mill — an institution where students could purchase graduate degrees with little or no academic work. The institution had been shut down after federal investigators determined its credentials lacked academic legitimacy.

The board that had just fired Pauline Grant — a 30-year veteran of the health system and one of Broward County’s highest-ranking Black officials, on the basis of unproven kickback allegations — was simultaneously preparing to make Capasso — whose resume evidently listed a master’s degree from the now-shuttered Kennedy-Western — its interim CEO.

There was one additional detail.

When the board voted to appoint Capasso as interim CEO, Capasso voted for herself. A board member raised the question of conflict of interest. Lynn Barrett intervened and justified Capasso’s self-vote by citing Robert’s Rules of Order.

The Sun Sentinel editorial board responded directly: “It’s hard to imagine Barrett is right — that a commissioner of a taxpayer-supported hospital system can vote to give herself the top job. If it is legal, then it needs to be made illegal.”

The same general counsel who had spent $44,000 resisting my records request. The same general counsel who had allegedly withheld evidence from federal investigators. The same general counsel who had allegedly orchestrated the Grant firing without a public agenda item. Now deploying Robert’s Rules to ostensibly ratify a commissioner voting herself into the top job at a billion-dollar public hospital.

The press documented all of it in real time. In real time, it continued.

VII. What $15 Million in Legal Fees Bought

By 2017, reporters had done the math on Broward Health’s outside legal spending.

Over three years, the district had paid more than $15 million to three outside law firms — firms retained during Barrett’s tenure, billing up to $1,000 an hour — on top of Barrett’s in-house legal staff of six to seven attorneys. An additional $6.4 million went to Baker Donelson as the Independent Review Organization. J. Scott Newton, an attorney working for the IRO, formally accused Broward Health’s compliance department of a “predictable pattern of potentially illegal conduct to not only improperly influence, impede and/or obstruct our performance... but causing serious threats to our independence.”

The federal monitor was accusing the institution of obstructing the federal monitor.

Meanwhile, a local blogger reportedly attempting to review legal invoices was told he would need to pay $1,400 simply to access them. The same documents that should have been available on request were seemingly being price-gated against a private citizen in a transaction that cost the institution nothing to fulfill and the citizen $1,400 just to see.

The press reported the $1,400 fee. It did not generate a board response. It was not, apparently, inconsistent with how the institution understood its obligations.

In December 2017, the grand jury indicted. In December 2018, a judge dismissed the criminal charges, finding insufficient evidence of criminal intent. New Board Chairman Andrew Klein, in his assessment of what Barrett’s tenure had produced, used a word I had been using for years in my own litigation filings: “weaponization.” He allegedly said Barrett had weaponized outside law firms against what he characterized as bureaucratic enemies and rivals.

It took the press three years and a criminal indictment to get a sitting board chairman to use that word publicly.

VIII. What Changed — and What Didn’t

In late 2018, CEO Beverly Capasso resigned. The board formally fired Lynn Barrett. A parade of speakers at the public meeting — physicians, administrators, community members — accused her of squandering money and creating a toxic working environment. New CEO Gino Santorio arrived and announced that “transparency is the best medicine.” He cut the bloated legal contracts. He built the compliance architecture I documented in Part 3 — including Resolution FY20-14 and the $325,000 dedicated public records budget that would later be gutted to $80,000.

The press covered all of it. The arc from 2015 to 2018 is fully documented in the public record. It was not hidden. It was not gradual. The Sun Sentinel named names, printed quotes, asked questions on the record, and published editorials that said clearly and repeatedly: something is wrong here, and the person who could fix it — the governor who appointed the board — is not fixing it.

“We lay this mess at Gov. Scott’s feet. He pulls the strings at Broward Health and could clean house.”

He didn’t.

What changed in 2018 was not the governor’s intervention. It was the accumulation of pressure — press coverage, editorial demands, community opposition, federal oversight, criminal indictments, and sustained litigation — reaching a threshold ostensively that the institution’s defenders could no longer sustain.

What didn’t change was the underlying condition the press had been describing: a public institution whose board appointment process runs through the executive branch, whose leadership’s primary accountability appears to run to the appointing governor rather than the public it serves, and whose response to transparency demands appears to be calibrated by who is watching and how hard they are pushing.

Shane Strum walked through the door in April 2021. The compliance budget dropped to $80,000. The litigation budget grew to $6.7 million. The playbook appeared to resume — more polished, more legally sophisticated, but structurally identical to what the press had been documenting since 2015.

The reporters who covered this from 2015 to 2018 were not wrong. They were not ignored because the evidence was insufficient. The evidence was overwhelming. The institutional response was apparently to outlast the scrutiny, absorb accountability, and resume operations when the pressure dropped.

Now political appointee Shane Strum, CEO of Broward Health, Interim CEO of Memorial Health System controlling Board appointments, and a fat newspaper media budget.

It is still dropping. Until it doesn’t.

References
· Sun Sentinel (David Fleshler, Mike Mayo): Broward Health coverage 2015–2018
· Sun Sentinel Editorial Board: editorials on Di Pietro suspension, Grant firing, Capasso appointment, Barrett tenure
· Florida Bulldog: “Republican-led Broward Health paid $3 million in legal fees to firms tied to Gov. Rick Scott” (April 11, 2016)
· J. Scott Newton (IRO, Baker Donelson), formal correspondence to Broward Health compliance department
· Grand Jury Indictment Case No. 17010909MM10A (December 12, 2017)
· BPIRG, LLC v. North Broward Hospital District, CACE 25-019383 (Broward County Circuit Court)
· Board Resolution FY20-14, North Broward Hospital District (January 29, 2020)
· OIG Investigation CIG #201601280006

Dan Lewis is known as the “Grey Man” of Florida politics. For more than 30 years, he has worked where public power, institutional culture, and real-world results collide — as a former elected official, a political strategist behind more than 350 campaigns at every level of government, Chair of the Broward County Charter Review Commission, architect of the influential “Blue Card,” and the founder of technology companies built to solve problems that government either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Respected by many, mocked by a few, and feared by some, Lewis brings an uncommon inside-and-out view of government and public policy.

He has sat in every chair at the table. From 2019 to 2025, he was the governance consultant hired by Broward Health to assist with fixing its institutional “breakdowns.” He is also the citizen now filing writs of mandamus to enforce the public records law against the same institution. Whether bringing a site plan forward for public review, refusing as an elected treasurer to sign an unconstitutional pension check, or documenting what hospital boards and judges would rather keep quiet, Lewis focuses on one thing: facts, transparency, and consequences.

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue — grounded in documents, not press releases — consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles. If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone. If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Subscribe now

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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Previously: In Part 3, we saw the 18-month window when the obstruction actually stopped — a reform board, a compliance-oriented CEO, and a binding resolution (FY20-14) that formally declared all district records public. Then Shane Strum, DeSantis’s former Chief of Staff, was appointed CEO. The dedicated compliance budget dropped 75 percent. The litigation budget grew 750 percent. The institution didn’t stop spending on records. It reduced spending on compliance and started spending on resistance.

IX. The Eleven-Year Playbook

I’ve been building toward this section for three articles. Here is the full five-phase playbook — documented in my own case, cross-referenced against what I experienced in 2015 and what Pauline Grant’s legal team experienced in 2017. The phases are not innovations. They are the refined, polished version of an institutional approach that has been running since at least 2015. What is new in the current iteration is how completely each phase feeds the next — and how the fifth phase extends the obstruction into the litigation itself.

Phase 1 — The Clarification Loop

On March 17, 2025, BPIRG filed its public records request: W-2 payroll data for corporate officers, records for the gala event, employment contracts, board meeting documents. Routine in scope. Documents the Board had formally declared public records under FY20-14 five years earlier.

May 9, 2025 — 53 days later — the records custodian responded. Not with records. With a status update typed in green text: “This request is still in process.”

June 24, 2025: “These requests are currently being processed. We are conducting review and gathering estimates...” I replied that generic responses were “no longer acceptable.” More letters. No records.

By October 2025, Broward Health’s outside counsel William Scherer communicated privately that the records “should have already been produced.” His client produced nothing.

On September 24, 2025, I served the statutory notice under § 119.12 — the legal prerequisite to filing suit. Nothing. Two more months of silence.

On March 12, 2026, Broward Health filed its Response to Request for Admissions. One admission read: “NBHD did not seek judicial clarification before delaying production of records.” Broward Health’s response: Admitted.

Here is how the clarification loop works in my case. “Still in process” and “conducting review” are not refusals. They are deferrals. Each one is procedurally defensible. Each one buys another 30 to 60 days. By the time I serve statutory notice, the delay is already six months old. By the time I file suit, it is nine.

Compare across the decade:

· 2015: 60 days, $44,000 in legal fees, heavily redacted response — while four agencies answered in 48 hours

· 2017: 56 days to produce a letter from outside counsel saying the request was “unclear” — for records the General Counsel had herself compiled and used

· 2025: 9 months of status letters, then a lawsuit — for records Broward Health’s own outside counsel privately admitted should have already been produced

The only thing that changed across those three instances is the duration of the loop.

Phase 2 — Counter-Mobilization and a Compromised Forum

On December 18, 2025, BPIRG filed its verified petition for writ of mandamus and complaint for declaratory judgment and mandatory injunction. What followed was not compliance. It was a counter-campaign — and it was compounded by a judicial assignment that raised serious questions about the forum itself.

The case was assigned to Circuit Judge Daniel A. Casey. At the time, Judge Casey was already presiding over Barrett v. Lewis — a separate matter in which I had filed a pending appeal of his rulings to the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Lewis v. Barrett. The February 3, 2026 BPIRG hearing was the first appearance before Judge Casey involving both me and my counsel after that appeal had been filed.

What happened at the February 3 hearing, in BPIRG’s view, appeared to confirm BPIRG’s concerns that Judge Casey could not be fair and impartial in BPIRG’s public records case after I exercised my right to appellate review of his rulings in Lewis v Barrett. The hearing was set and noticed as an Emergency Case Management Conference. Judge Casey chose to hear Broward Health’s Motion for Extension of Time — a motion not set for hearing. He granted BH a 70-day extension. Then he turned to us and demanded we explain why default should have been granted: “How — illuminate me. I don’t get it. How can they be in default?” He directed no questions to BH’s counsel. He declared our Default Motion mooted by his grant of BH’s Extension Motion and denied Our Default Motion.

On February 6, 2026, BPIRG filed a Verified Motion to Disqualify Judge Casey — documented violations of Florida Judicial Code of Conduct Canons 2A, 3B(5), 3B(7), 3B(8), and 3E. On February 17, Judge Casey denied it in a single sentence: “legally insufficient.” On February 19, 2026, BPIRG petitioned the Fourth District Court of Appeal for a Writ of Prohibition and/or Mandamus.

The case continued before Judge Casey. On March 27, 2026 — four days after pleadings closed — rather than issuing a writ or show cause order, he placed the Chapter 119 action on the general civil track of eighteen months.

Florida Statute § 119.11(1) is unambiguous: Chapter 119 shall receive “immediate hearing” with “priority over other pending cases.” Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.200(a)(13) expressly exempts writ actions from the general civil track requirements. The statute commands priority. The rule exempts the case type. The court assigned it an 18-month docket. On March 31, 2026, BPIRG filed a Second Verified Motion to Disqualify.

Broward Health’s parallel countermobilization ran throughout: a state agency identity claim to extend response windows;; 45 docket entries generated to resist production. First document production came on April 4, 2026 — day 175 of active litigation. The writ of mandamus has not been issued.

Phase 3 — Converting Defense to Offense

On March 9, 2026 — the same day it filed its Answer — Broward Health filed a Third-Party Complaint against me personally. Not against BPIRG. Against me, individually, as a private citizen. The relief sought: a permanent injunction barring me from making any public records request in any capacity, forever. That is Broward Health’s official litigating position — filed in circuit court, on the record, signed by counsel — that a public agency may use the judicial process to permanently bar a citizen from exercising a constitutional right to request public records.

In my April 3, 2026 Motion to Dismiss, I put the argument on the record where it belongs: “A governmental entity that invokes the judicial process to suppress the exercise of this right states no cognizable claim; it seeks to use the courts as an instrument of the very obstruction that Ch. 119 was enacted to prevent.”

Phase 4 — Sealing the Evidence

On March 23, 2026, at approximately 10:46 AM, BPIRG filed a court document containing the Scherer text messages — the private admission from Broward Health’s own outside counsel on October 2, 2025:

Yes, they’re going to start producing and I had thought they would have already done so already. I’ve told them just do a rolling production, or familiar with doing that in big cases that require a lot of documents. I don’t know what the holdup is because I have been in trial. But I’ll get on it.”

At 10:52:18 AM — six minutes later — Broward Health filed a Motion to Seal.

A motion drafted, reviewed, and filed in six minutes does not appear to be considered a legal judgment. It has the hallmarks of a reflex response — the institutional equivalent of reaching across the table and grabbing a document back the moment someone else picks it up.

The motion had serious legal deficiencies. The authority invoked — § 90.408, an evidentiary admissibility rule — does not appear anywhere in Rule 2.420(c)’s enumerated categories of information eligible for sealing. It governs whether evidence is admissible at trial. It has nothing to do with public access to court records. The wrong statute, invoked to achieve the right suppression outcome.

The motion also couldn’t correctly identify its own target. Paragraph 1 cited the filing date as “March 19, 2026.” The WHEREFORE clause cited “March 16, 2026.” Neither date corresponds to any BPIRG filing. The motion filed to seal a specific court document didn’t know which document it was targeting.

The stated legal basis does not support the relief requested. The apparent goal — based on the timing and the deficiencies in the motion itself — was to remove from the public record the evidence that Broward Health’s own lawyer had privately conceded the records should have already been produced, before it could be cited in briefing or reported in the press.

Phase 5 — Discovery Stonewalling

Broward Health’s discovery responses, served March 12, 2026, completed the picture.

BH objected to every interrogatory BPIRG served. Zero substantive responses. Zero documents produced in response to BPIRG’s Requests for Production.

The justification: discovery would “undermine the purpose of mandamus to determine whether the respondent has a clear ministerial duty based solely on the existing record.”

The stonewalling creates a second layer of obstruction inside the litigation itself, requiring its own separate motion practice to dislodge. BPIRG filed its First Motion to Compel on March 25, 2026.

How the Phases Work Together

This is the architecture of attrition.

The clarification loop consumes months before you can file. Counter-mobilization — compounded here by a judicial forum that required two disqualification motions and a 4DCA writ petition — consumes months after you file. The third-party complaint converts you from plaintiff to defendant, forcing you to defend your right to ask while they continue to avoid answering. The sealing motion attempts to erase the most damaging evidence from the public record. Discovery stonewalling prevents the factual record from developing.

Each phase is independently effective. A requester who runs out of patience at Phase 1 never reaches Phase 2. A requester who can sustain the first two phases may not survive Phase 3’s personal cost. Phases 4 and 5 operate on a longer timeline — they shape the trajectory of the litigation rather than its initiation.

In sequence, the five phases are designed to exhaust any requester who cannot sustain a multi-year fight against an institution spending $6.7 million annually on legal resistance. This playbook is not designed for one encounter. It is designed for attrition. And it works — against everyone who doesn’t have the resources, the standing, and the determination to outlast it.

X. The Records That Finally Came — and What They Show

On April 4, 2026 — day 175 of active litigation, with no court order and no writ — Broward Health produced its first document tranche.

Here is what was worth 175 days of resistance.

Shane Strum’s compensation: The package totaled approximately $4.6 million, including a component of approximately $3.7 million that does not reconcile with the publicly disclosed employment agreement. No amendments. No appendices. No board authorization identified in the produced records for the gap.

Missing employment contracts: Absent for 33 of 35 executives — the employees with the most significant compensation and governance authority in the institution. These are the documents that would show what was promised, to whom, for what, and by whose authority. They are missing.

Gala records: The 10th Annual Broward Health Ball, May 2022, raised approximately $900,000. The produced records show no public accounting for how those funds were used, what vendors were engaged, or whether the procurement of event services followed the conflict-of-interest protocols that a $70 million fraud settlement should have made mandatory.

Resolution FY20-14 — adopted January 29, 2020 — was designed to make these questions answerable without a lawsuit. The board formally declared these records public. The compliance architecture the board built said they should be available on request.

It took 175 days of active litigation to get a first partial production. The writ has not been issued. The full production has not been made. The accountability mechanism designed to work in days has now consumed more than a year.

The question of why production required 175 days of active litigation appears to answer itself.

XI. What Would Actually Fix This

After eleven years and five case numbers, I have a clear view of what the structural gaps are. These are not drafting failures — the law is clear on its face. They are exploitable features that well-resourced public agencies have learned to use systematically.

The “reasonable time” gap is the entry point. Florida has no production deadline. “Prompt” and “reasonable” can accommodate nine months of holding-pattern responses before a court reaches the question. Every state that has solved this problem has solved it with hard deadlines.

The record supports five specific reforms:

Hard production deadlines with automatic fee-shifting. Ten business days for routine requests, thirty for complex ones, with mandatory interim substantive responses — backed by automatic fee-shifting for violations, not discretionary awards available only after years of litigation. By the time current-law fees are imposed, millions have been spent and months have become years.

Mandatory substantive interim responses. The clarification loop works because “still in process” is procedurally defensible. Require interim responses to identify what has been found, what is being withheld and why, and what the production completion date will be. That requirement eliminates the loop’s core mechanism.

Categorical prohibition on future-request injunctions. A clear statutory bar — no injunction may issue restraining future exercise of the constitutional right of access, resolved at motion to dismiss, not deferred to merits — ends Phase 3 of this playbook permanently.

Governance accountability at the board level. The OIG’s January 2021 finding was specific: compliance mechanisms applied to management but not to the board. A statutory requirement that board-level compliance be independently audited — the same structure the CIA imposed federally — closes that gap.

Judicial enforcement of § 119.11(1)’s priority mandate. The statute commands immediate hearing, priority over all other cases. A circuit court assigning a Chapter 119 writ action to an 18-month general civil track is not enforcing the statute. It is nullifying it. Accelerated appellate supervision of compliance with the priority mandate would align the enforcement mechanism with the Legislature’s intent.

None of these are novel. Several exist in other states’ frameworks. Florida has been litigating their absence at Broward Health alone for over a decade — in CACE 16-022981, CACE 16-022987, CACE 17-014710, CACE 17-022221, and now CACE 25-019383. The Legislature knows these gaps exist. The pattern across those cases is the evidence.

XII. The Arc

Here is the eleven-year record, compressed:

2015. I file a records request. Broward Health spends $44,000 and 60 days producing a heavily redacted response. Four other agencies produce the same records in 48 hours.

2017. A former Florida Bar president and a prominent litigator file records requests. Sixty-nine days to produce a letter saying the requests are “unclear” — for records the General Counsel had compiled herself. Lawsuit. Settlement: $975,000.

2019–2021. Reform board. Compliance-oriented CEO. FY20-14. $325,000 dedicated records compliance budget. The institution works.

2021. DeSantis’s Chief of Staff becomes CEO. Compliance budget: $80,000. Litigation budget: $6.7 million.

2025. I file a records request. Nine months of status letters. Lawsuit. Day 175 of active litigation. First partial production. No court order. No writ.

That is not enforcement. That is the appearance of enforcement, in service of delay.

The accountability gap — between what the law commands and what actually happened, measured in months and in your tax dollars — is the structural story. The playbook that fills that gap has been running for eleven years, against multiple requesters, across multiple administrations, in the same institution.

But here is what I want to leave you with. There was a moment — documented in board resolutions, compliance reports, and budget records — when it didn’t have to be this way. From mid-2019 through early 2021, the institution worked. The records prove it. And the same records prove what ended it: not a change in the law, not a change in the institution’s legal obligations, not a change in the community’s expectations. A political appointment.

The institution can be different. The 18-month window is the evidence. The problem is not Chapter 119. The problem is who runs the institution — and who they answer to.

That moment ended when Shane Strum walked through the door.

References

This Article:

· BPIRG, LLC v. North Broward Hospital District, CACE 25-019383 (Broward County Circuit Court)
· § 119.07(1)(a); § 119.11(1); § 119.12; § 119.12(3), Florida Statutes
· Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.200(a)(13)
· Florida Judicial Code of Conduct, Canons 2A, 3B(5), 3B(8), 3E
· Fourth District Court of Appeal, Lewis v. Barrett (4D2024-2362)
· Fourth District Court of Appeal, Writ of Prohibition (BPIRG v. Casey)
· O’Boyle v. Town of Gulf Stream, Fourth District Court of Appeal
· Board Resolution FY20-14, North Broward Hospital District (January 29, 2020)
· § 90.408, Florida Statutes; Florida Rule 2.420(c)
· CACE 16-022981; CACE 16-022987; CACE 17-014710; CACE 17-022221; CACE 25-019383 (Broward County Circuit Court)
· Grand Jury Indictment Case No. 17010909MM10A (December 12, 2017)
· OIG Investigation CIG #201601280006

Series references:

· Part 1: “How Public Records Law Gets Weaponized — Part 1 of 4” — Florida Chapter 119; Art. I, § 24, Florida Constitution; False Claims Act settlement (August 2015); Resolution #15-10-28-01 (October 28, 2015); Berger Singerman billing invoices, Matter ID: 21561-0001
· Part 2: “How Public Records Law Gets Weaponized — Part 2 of 4” — OIG CIG #201601280006; Grant/Pettis/Berger complaint (August 2, 2017); Florida Bulldog: “Republican-led Broward Health paid $3 million in legal fees to firms tied to Gov. Rick Scott” (April 11, 2016)
· Part 3: “How Public Records Law Gets Weaponized — Part 3 of 4” — OIG Final Report CIG #201601280006 (January 2021); FY21/FY23 budget records, North Broward Hospital District; Sun Sentinel: “Florida’s government transparency is collapsing under DeSantis”

Dan Lewis is known as the “Grey Man” of Florida politics. For more than 30 years, he has worked where public power, institutional culture, and real-world results collide — as a former elected official, a political strategist behind more than 350 campaigns at every level of government, Chair of the Broward County Charter Review Commission, architect of the influential “Blue Card,” and the founder of technology companies built to solve problems that government either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Well respected by many, mocked by a few, and feared by some, Lewis brings an uncommon inside-and-out view of government.

He has sat in every chair at the table. From 2019 to 2025, he was the governance consultant hired by Broward Health to assist with fixing its institutional “breakdowns.” He is also the citizen now filing writs of mandamus to enforce the public records law against the same institution. Whether bringing a site plan forward for public review, refusing as an elected treasurer to sign an unconstitutional pension check, or documenting what hospital boards and judges would rather keep quiet, Lewis focuses on one thing: facts, transparency, and consequences.

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue—grounded in documents, not press releases—consider subscribing or upgrading.

Subscribe now

No paywalls. No restricted articles.
If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone.
If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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Previously: In Part 2, we saw what happened when Florida’s former Bar president and one of the state’s most prominent litigators filed the same kind of records request, I had — and received the same kind of holding-pattern treatment. Sixty-nine days to produce a letter claiming the requests were “unclear” — for documents Broward Health’s own General Counsel had compiled and used. The litigation settled for $975,000 in public money. Then, in December 2017, the Broward County Grand Jury indicted Broward Health’s leadership for running governance decisions through secret channels. Acknowledged, settled, indicted — and still no durable structural change.

VII. The Exception: When the Institution Actually Changed

I want to be precise about something, because it matters to the argument I’m making.

For approximately 18 months — from roughly mid-2019 through early 2021 — Broward Health was a genuinely different institution. I was watching. I have the records. This is not my opinion. It is documented in board resolutions, compliance reports, OIG correspondence, and budget records.

I’m telling you this because I think the most important thing the eleven-year record shows is not the obstruction. It’s the exception. If the institution were structurally incapable of transparency — if the problem were simply that public records law doesn’t work — the exception wouldn’t exist. But it does exist. Which means the problem is not the law. The problem is who runs the institution, and who they answer to.

A reconstituted board — Commissioners Stacy Angier, Nancy Stamper, and Marie Waugh among them — began systematically reforming how the district operated. What drove it was a combination of factors that proved, in retrospect, difficult to sustain without all three simultaneously: a reform-minded board with genuine independence from executive branch influence, a CEO whose institutional orientation ran toward operational compliance rather than political protection, and sustained community pressure that had been building for years.

That CEO was Gino Santorio. He came up through healthcare operations, not government. His appointment followed a community-driven process — physicians testified on his behalf, the Broward Workshop endorsed him, district leadership backed his record. Under his acting tenure before formal appointment, Broward Health trimmed more than $30 million from the budget, reduced property taxes by approximately $20 million, and disbursed $116 million in capital improvement projects. Those are the metrics of an operator whose job is to run a hospital, not manage an executive branch relationship.

On January 29, 2020, the board adopted Resolution FY20-14. I have read this resolution many times. The language is explicit: all records retained or received by the District in connection with the transaction of official business are public records subject to disclosure. Not aspirational. Not advisory. A binding board resolution, backed by a dedicated budget line — “Governance/Public Records” — funded at $325,000 in FY21. The board had formally acknowledged, in writing, that records compliance required institutional resources and governance accountability.

In January 2021, the OIG released its final report on Investigation #201601280006 — the investigation I wrote about in Part 2. The structural finding was precise: governance controls had been applied to management but not to the Board itself. Contract review, procurement oversight, lobbying — all managed below board level. The Board had accountability mechanisms for everyone it supervised. It had none for itself. The reform board was engaging seriously with that finding.

Also in January 2021, the board conducted a formal CEO search: structured criteria, published Leadership Profile, documented candidate rankings, four candidates assessed. The candidate ranked second was a hospital executive with deep experience running healthcare systems. The candidate ranked first was Shane Strum — then serving as Chief of Staff to Governor Ron DeSantis.

The exception proves the rule. The institution can be different. It was different. The record proves it. What happened next proves something else.

VIII. The Pivot: Strum, DeSantis, and the Political Reversion

On April 14, 2021, Shane Strum was introduced as the new President and CEO of Broward Health. Gino Santorio departed. He has since gone on to serve as CEO of Mount Sinai Healthcare in Miami. He is, by any measure, running a better institution than the one he left.

The significance of Strum’s appointment is not personal. I am not interested in Shane Strum as an individual. I am interested in what his appointment represented structurally — because that is what produced everything that followed.

Strum arrived with an entirely different kind of capital than Santorio’s. As DeSantis’s Chief of Staff, he had been the governor’s principal operational deputy — the person who managed the machinery of state government on behalf of a governor who had made executive control a governing philosophy. His appointment was not the outcome of a community-driven process that weighted healthcare experience. It appears to have been the outcome of political alignment. The board that selected him — appointed in its entirety by that same governor — was by 2021 ostensibly a fully aligned instrument of the executive branch.

The reform board’s independence had been the engine of the transparency push. FY20-14 passed because a CEO whose interests aligned with operational compliance was supported by commissioners who were, briefly, answerable primarily to the public they served. Once the governance apparatus — board, CEO, general counsel — appeared to become fully aligned with the executive branch, the institutional incentive structure ostensibly shifted. The external accountability pressure that had driven the 2019–2020 reforms was, it appears, replaced by internal alignment with an administration whose public record on open government compliance speaks for itself.

A Statewide Collapse

Broward Health did not revert in isolation. A Sun Sentinel editorial documented the broader context: “Florida’s government transparency is collapsing under DeSantis... Delay, deny or ignore — that’s the new standard operating procedure for the Executive Office of the Governor.”

The editorial continued: “Public records laws in Florida aren’t suggestions; they’re enshrined in law, designed to ensure that the people know what their government is doing in their name. But DeSantis’ office has decided that compliance is optional.”

Under this administration, state-level records delays stretched from months to more than a year. Court challenges piled up. Local institutions — their boards appointed by the governor, their CEOs politically connected to the executive branch — absorbed the signal. Broward Health’s reversion appears to be a local expression of a statewide phenomenon: the apparent erosion of transparency by an executive apparatus that, based on the public record, treats public records compliance as optional.

You are funding this. Every taxpayer in Broward County is funding this.

The Budget Is the Proof

I don’t ask anyone to take my word for it. The budget record eliminates ambiguity.

Under Santorio and the reform board, the FY21 budget carried a dedicated “Governance/Public Records” line item: $325,000. A structural investment in records compliance. The board had put its money where its resolution was.

Under Strum, by FY23, that same line item stood at: $80,000. A 75 percent reduction.

The litigation budget tells the other side of the same story. FY20: $785,000. FY23: $6,700,000. A 750 percent increase.

The institution did not stop spending on records. It stopped spending on compliance and started spending on resistance. The $6.7 million litigation budget funds exactly the kind of countermobilization documented in my current case: 45 docket entries, a third-party complaint against an individual citizen, a six-minute sealing motion, blanket objections to every interrogatory served. These are not improvised responses to an unexpected lawsuit. They are the outputs of a well-resourced institutional defense operation that the budget expressly prioritizes.

And what was the institution working so hard to keep you from seeing? The gala records I requested in 2025 document the 10th Annual Broward Health Ball, held in May 2022, which raised approximately $900,000. A fundraising event generating close to a million dollars — at a public hospital, using the institution’s name and resources — with no public accounting for how those funds were used, what vendors were engaged, or whether the procurement process was clean. That is what FY20-14 was designed to make answerable without a lawsuit.

By 2025, asking required 175 days of active litigation and still yielded only a first partial production.

References

· Board Resolution FY20-14, North Broward Hospital District (January 29, 2020)

· OIG Final Report, Investigation CIG #201601280006 (January 2021)

· BPIRG, LLC v. North Broward Hospital District, CACE 25-019383 (Broward County Circuit Court)

· FY21 and FY23 budget records, North Broward Hospital District

· Sun Sentinel: “Florida’s government transparency is collapsing under DeSantis”

· Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.200(a)(13); § 119.11(1), Florida Statutes

Dan Lewis is known as the “Grey Man” of Florida politics. For more than 30 years, he has worked where public power, institutional culture, and real-world results collide — as a former elected official, a political strategist behind more than 350 campaigns at every level of government, Chair of the Broward County Charter Review Commission, architect of the influential “Blue Card,” and the founder of technology companies built to solve problems that government either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Well respected by many, mocked by a few, and feared by some, Lewis brings an uncommon inside-and-out view of government.

He has sat in every chair at the table. From 2019 to 2025, he was the governance consultant hired by Broward Health to assist with fixing its institutional “breakdowns.” He is also the citizen now filing writs of mandamus to enforce the public records law against the same institution. Whether bringing a site plan forward for public review, refusing as an elected treasurer to sign an unconstitutional pension check, or documenting what hospital boards and judges would rather keep quiet, Lewis focuses on one thing: facts, transparency, and consequences.

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue—grounded in documents, not press releases—consider subscribing or upgrading.

Subscribe now

No paywalls. No restricted articles.
If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone.
If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

Leave a comment

Previously: In Part 1, I laid out the structural thesis: Broward Health putatively treats public records requests not as obligations to be fulfilled but as threats to be managed. The sharpest indicia was the 48-hour contrast — four other public agencies produced CEO El Sanadi’s outside compensation contracts by email, unredacted, within two days, while Broward Health spent $44,000 and 60 days delivering a heavily redacted non-answer. That institutional choice played out against a backdrop the institution preferred to ignore: a $70 million federal fraud settlement and a five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement imposed just months before.

IV. The OIG’s Own Records Demand

By 2016, the federal monitor installed under the CIA had identified additional concerns. The OIG launched a formal investigation under Case Number CIG #201601280006.

On March 15, 2016, the Berger Singerman law firm served Broward Health with a sweeping records demand. This time, Berger Singerman was not working for Broward Health. They were working for the OIG.

The same firm that had billed $44,000 helping Broward Health resist my records request was now demanding those same categories of records on behalf of the federal government. The scope was comprehensive: employment files, termination agreements, settlement agreements, personnel investigation reports, and — most significantly — “any and all records, policies, procedures, opinions, guidance, evaluation, analysis, interpretations, legal advice, communications and training materials regarding the use of ‘shade’ meetings by the Broward Health Board of Commissioners... for the period of 2012 to present.”

The federal government wanted to know what the board had been doing behind closed doors for four years. This was not an abstract exercise. Shade sessions — closed board meetings held pursuant to attorney-client privilege — had ostensibly become a governance mechanism through which consequential decisions were being made outside public view. The OIG was specifically examining whether those closed sessions were being used to manage federal compliance obligations out of public sight. Out of the public’s sight. Out of your sight.

The dynamics inside Broward Health on this question were telling. When federal investigators issued a subpoena, the question before the board was whether to address it in shade. Board Chair Di Pietro opposed this explicitly and on the record: “he totally and unequivocally disagrees that this meeting could legally be held in the Shade... he also stated that no one has provided him legal advice nor did he think as a public policy it was a good decision to go into the Shade.”

He was outvoted.

Meanwhile, General Counsel Lynn Barrett had built what amounted to a parallel legal governance structure. A Florida Bulldog investigation documented it: “Republican-led Broward Health paid $3 million in legal fees to firms tied to Gov. Rick Scott” — contracts signed by El Sanadi with firms billing up to $695 per hour, layered on top of Barrett’s staff of six to seven in-house attorneys. Even Chair Di Pietro was alarmed. He called it “runaway lawyering with no governance from the board.”

Less than a month after making that statement on the record, Governor Scott suspended Di Pietro for alleged malfeasance.

Read that sequence again. The board chair says the legal spending is out of control and the lawyers are running without board oversight. Less than a month later, the governor removes him — for alleged malfeasance. Whether the timing was coincidental is a question the record raises but does not definitively answer. The result reflects that internal resistance to opacity was penalized and institutionally protected.

What the OIG was demanding in 2016 — the same categories of records citizens had been denied for years — is the federal government’s documentation that the public was being kept in the dark about exactly what federal oversight required it to know.

V. When Florida’s Best Lawyers Hit the Same Wall

I want to be clear about something before I describe what happened in 2017. The playbook I documented in Part 1 — the clarification loop, the outside attorneys, the redacted non-response — was not invented to deal with me. I was apparently the first test case. By 2017, it had been refined into a repeatable institutional process. I know this because it was deployed, in nearly identical form, against some of Florida’s most prominent attorneys.

On May 12, 2017, Pauline Grant — then-CEO of Broward Health North, wrongfully terminated — filed public records requests through her counsel: Eugene K. Pettis, a former president of the Florida Bar, and Mitchell W. Berger, one of the state’s most prominent litigators. One request went to Maryanne Wing, the district’s records custodian. A second went directly to General Counsel Lynn Barrett.

The court record tells us what Barrett allegedly knew when she received that second request. As the court found: she “understood the set of records sought... In fact, such records should have been compiled and reviewed by Barrett and/or the Waller Firm in connection with the investigation of Grant.” These were not mysterious documents. According to the court record, they were documents Barrett herself had compiled and used in connection with Grant’s termination — and the court’s finding was that she understood precisely what was being requested.

Neither request was acknowledged as required by § 119.07(1)(c).

Pettis followed up on May 19. May 26. June 2. June 7. On May 22, outside counsel Kevin Hyde sent a single sentence: “We are reviewing the public records request you sent and will respond to it.”

Then Broward Health brought in yet another outside attorney — Alberto Fernandez — to manage the problem. On July 7, 56 days after the initial request, Fernandez responded. His position: “It is unclear and/or ambiguous to undersigned counsel what exactly is being requested.”

The court’s subsequent finding was blunt: “This response makes clear that, as of July 7, 2017, Broward Health had failed to begin searching for any of the records responsive to the May 12 Barrett PRR, June 2 PRR or June 15 PRR.”

Not begun. Fifty-six days in. Zero search activity.

On July 14 — now 63 days out — Pettis received a letter saying only that as records were compiled, Fernandez had “directed that they be forwarded to his office for review.” On costs: “I will be in position shortly to give you additional information.”

Sixty-nine days. No records. A former Florida Bar president and one of the state’s most prominent litigators receiving the same holding-pattern machinery I had received as a private citizen two years earlier. The actors changed. The institution’s response did not.

On August 2, 2017, Grant, Pettis, and Berger filed suit — alleging that “Broward Health’s conduct... demonstrates a pattern of noncompliance with the Public Records Act” and “a strong likelihood that Broward Health will continue to delay or otherwise frustrate production of the records.”

They were right on both counts.

In 2018, the same legal team filed another round of requests. Same pattern. Clarification demanded, records withheld, lawsuit filed. In July 2019, the board settled the consolidated litigation for $975,000 — public money, paid out of the public hospital’s budget, to end public records cases, Sunshine Law cases, and whistleblower claims that all arose from the same institutional failure to operate in the open.

The actors on Broward Health’s side changed with every cycle: different general counsel, different outside attorneys, different board compositions. The institutional response did not. That is what a systemic problem looks like.

Now BH is suing me individually

Broward Health is currently suing me. Not BPIRG. Me, individually, as a private citizen. The relief they are seeking is a permanent injunction barring me from making any public records request in any capacity. In my April 3, 2026 Motion to Dismiss, I put it directly on the record: “A governmental entity that invokes the judicial process to suppress the exercise of this right states no cognizable claim; it seeks to use the courts as an instrument of the very obstruction that Ch. 119 was enacted to prevent.”

VI. The Indictments

On December 12, 2017, the Broward County Grand Jury handed down sweeping indictments against Broward Health’s leadership.

Board Chairman Rocky Rodriguez, Commissioner Christopher Ure, former Commissioner Linda Robison, General Counsel Lynn Barrett, and Interim CEO/President Beverly Capasso were charged with allegedly violating Florida’s Sunshine Act and conspiracy to allegedly violate Florida’s Sunshine Act. The allegation: they had met outside public view — through conduits and intermediaries, at hotels and restaurants and by telephone — to handle a “reportable event” connected to Pauline Grant’s termination. Consequential governance decisions, allegedly made in secret, in alleged violation of the open meetings law that every one of them had sworn to uphold.

Let me be direct about what the indictments represented. The Grand Jury found probable cause that Broward Health’s leadership had allegedly treated the public’s right to observe its own government as an inconvenience to be managed around. They were alleged to have coordinated through back channels and used conduits. They were indicted for it — and the indictments, as public grand jury findings, are part of the documented record.

And it was still not enough to produce durable structural change.

That year, I had also obtained Broward Health’s accounts payable data through a public records request. My analysis of that data showed Barrett’s office appearing to spend at a rate of approximately $500,000 per month on outside counsel — a burn rate ostensibly exceeding $6 million per year — on top of her in-house legal staff. Healthcare funding, apparently directed toward institutional legal defense. Including, it appeared, lawyers defending the people who had just been indicted for allegedly violating the law they were supposed to uphold.

The pattern by the end of 2017: documented compliance failure under the CIA. A $70 million fraud settlement. Indictments of the board chair, two commissioners, the general counsel, and the acting CEO. A $975,000 settlement of public records and Sunshine Law violations. Years of sustained public records litigation. And still — the playbook continued.

Acknowledged. Settled. Indicted. Still no structural change.

In Part 3, something different happened.

References

· OIG Investigation CIG #201601280006
· CACE 16-022981; CACE 16-022987 (Broward County Circuit Court)
· CACE 17-014710; CACE 17-022221 (Broward County Circuit Court)
· Grant/Pettis/Berger complaint, August 2, 2017
· § 119.07(1)(c), Florida Statutes
· § 119.12(3), Florida Statutes
· O’Boyle v. Town of Gulf Stream, Fourth District Court of Appeal
· Grand Jury Indictment Case No. 17010909MM10A (December 12, 2017)
· Florida Bulldog: “Republican-led Broward Health paid $3 million in legal fees to firms tied to Gov. Rick Scott” (April 11, 2016)

Dan Lewis is known as the “Grey Man” of Florida politics. For more than 30 years, he has worked where public power, institutional culture, and real-world results collide — as a former elected official, a political strategist behind more than 350 campaigns at every level of government, Chair of the Broward County Charter Review Commission, architect of the influential “Blue Card,” and the founder of technology companies built to solve problems that government either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Well respected by many, mocked by a few, and feared by some, Lewis brings an uncommon inside-and-out view of government.

He has sat in every chair at the table. From 2019 to 2025, he was the governance consultant hired by Broward Health to assist with fixing its institutional “breakdowns.” He is also the citizen now filing writs of mandamus to enforce the public records law against the same institution. Whether bringing a site plan forward for public review, refusing as an elected treasurer to sign an unconstitutional pension check, or documenting what hospital boards and judges would rather keep quiet, Lewis focuses on one thing: facts, transparency, and consequences.

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty. Subscribe at DanLewisReport.Substack.com.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue—grounded in documents, not press releases—consider subscribing or upgrading.

Subscribe now

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If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone.
If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

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Previously: In “Why I Do This,” I wrote about the personal arc — what brought me into this work, the philosophy behind it, and the conviction that local civic engagement is how democracy actually functions. That article was about the *what* and the *why*. This series is about the *how*.

About This Series

For years I have trained public organization governance boards on what I call the prime directive. The board’s job is the What — mission, policy, standards, direction. Professional management reports to the board on the How — operations, execution, and compliance with the board’s mandate. Good governance depends on that division being clean: the board sets the destination; management is accountable for how it gets there. The public, in turn, is entitled to see both — preferably before the decision is made and the money is spent.

What happens when management — and the board above it — decides that accountability to the public is not part of the mandate?

These four articles answer that question with eleven years of documented evidence from one institution. They are about the How: specifically, how a well-resourced public agency can treat transparency not as an obligation but as a threat to be managed, how it can render a board’s own transparency resolutions functionally meaningless without ever repealing them, and how the five-phase playbook I’ve documented in my own litigation represents the mature, polished version of an approach that has been running since 2015.

If you’ve already read “Why I Do This,” you know what drove me here and why I believe local civic engagement is how democracy actually works. These articles are the structural diagnosis underneath that story. Part 1 starts where it always starts — with the law on paper, and the gap between that and the law in practice.

I. The Gap Between the Law on Paper and the Law in Practice

Florida Chapter 119 — the Public Records Act — is built on a constitutional premise. Government records belong to the public. Article I, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution makes access to those records a fundamental right. Section 119.07(1)(a) requires that custodians permit inspection “at any reasonable time, under reasonable conditions.” Nothing in the statute authorizes nine months of silence. Nothing authorizes holding-pattern letters designed to run out the clock. The law is not ambiguous on this.

The enforcement mechanism the Legislature provided is mandamus: a circuit court order compelling a public official to perform a clear ministerial duty. Section 119.11(1) commands that Chapter 119 actions receive an “immediate hearing” with “priority over other cases on the court’s docket.” The losing agency pays attorney’s fees and costs.

That’s the law on paper.

Here is the law in practice — my practice, as of the date I’m writing this. A public agency receives a records request. It generates holding-pattern responses for nine months. Produces nothing. Watches the requester file suit. Counters with 45 docket entries and a third-party complaint against the individual citizen — not the organization, the individual. Files a motion to seal the most damaging evidence six minutes after it enters the public record. Refuses to produce a single substantive discovery response. And then, on day 175 of active litigation, releases a first partial document tranche agedly responsive to the subject public records request(s). No court order. No writ issued. Compliance with leverage, not with law.

That is what happened in BPIRG, LLC v. North Broward Hospital District (CACE 25-019383). My case. Still pending.

What makes it a structural diagnosis rather than a personal grievance is that it has happened before — not once, not twice, but systematically, to different requesters, across different administrations, over more than a decade. I have the records to prove it, because I’ve been requesting them since 2015.

The thesis is this: Broward Health — legally the North Broward Hospital District, a tax-funded public agency — putatively treats public records requests not as obligations to be fulfilled but as threats to be managed. That institutional choice has been consistent across administrations, across general counsel, across outside law firms. What varies is the sophistication of the resistance.

II. The Forty-Eight-Hour Proof

Let me give you the structural thesis in its most concentrated form before I walk through eleven years of my observations and evidence.

In early 2015, I filed my first public records request at Broward Health. I was asking for CEO Nabil El Sanadi’s outside compensation contracts — his “Medical Director” agreements with the Broward Sheriff’s Office and three municipalities. The reason was straightforward: El Sanadi was earning more than $675,000 as Broward Health’s “full-time” CEO while simultaneously drawing an estimated $300,000 or more from part-time political appointments. The potential conflicts of interest under the federal Anti-Kickback Statute were not subtle. The board wasn’t asking about them. I was.

Broward Health’s response was to hire Berger Singerman. The billing invoices — which I subsequently obtained through a separate public records request — tell the story in billable hours. In February 2015 alone, Berger Singerman billed 25.8 hours on my request. A partner conferencing with El Sanadi about “119 issues.” An associate spending 10.3 hours in a single day “researching related to public records requests made by Dan Lewis.” Seven-plus hours to “prepare response to public records request.” February invoice alone: $10,859.40 after a courtesy discount. The billing continued through March, April, May, June, and July. Total cost to taxpayers: approximately $44,000.

The response, 60 days later, was heavily redacted.

Then I did what I always do when one agency resists. I asked the agencies that actually held copies of the same records. The Broward Sheriff’s Office. Fort Lauderdale. Sunrise. Tamarac.

Every one of them produced the contracts electronically, unredacted, within 48 hours.

Forty-four thousand dollars and 60 days at Broward Health. An email attachment and 48 hours everywhere else. The same documents. The contrast is not explained by complexity. The contracts were sitting in municipal filing systems, one email away from anyone who asked. The only plausible explanation is institutional choice: Broward Health decided to treat my records request as a threat requiring $44,000 in legal management. Four other public agencies treated the same request as a legal obligation and answered it by email.

(For the personal context on this request — why I filed it and what preceded it — see “Why I Do This.”)

That contrast is not a footnote. It is the entire argument. Every phase of the eleven-year playbook I’m about to document is a more sophisticated version of the same ostensible institutional decision: to treat transparency as a risk to be managed rather than a right to be honored. Understanding why that decision keeps getting made — and keeps getting funded by your tax dollars — requires starting with the federal reckoning that should have changed everything.

It didn’t.

III. The Federal Reckoning That Should Have Changed Everything

The accountability crisis at Broward Health did not begin with my records request. It began with a federal fraud settlement.

In August 2015 — the same year I was fighting for documents that four other agencies produced in 48 hours — Broward Health paid approximately $70 million to the federal government to resolve a False Claims Act case. The allegation: the District had paid physicians above fair market value in compensation arrangements that constituted improper kickbacks for referrals. A scheme that ran through physician contracts and vendor relationships at the highest levels of the institution. One of the largest settlements in the District’s history.

As part of the settlement, the federal government imposed a five-year Corporate Integrity Agreement — a CIA. A consent decree requiring Broward Health to establish a formal compliance program, retain an independent review organization, and submit to ongoing federal monitoring of its financial arrangements. Enforceable by exclusion from Medicare and Medicaid. This was not a suggestion. It was a binding legal obligation with a consequence that would have ended the institution.

Section III.A.3 of the CIA imposed a specific, recurring governance mandate: the Board was required to adopt an annual resolution — signed by each commissioner individually — affirming commitment to compliance and ethical standards. The compliance officer briefed the board on this requirement in March 2015. On October 28, 2015, the board adopted Resolution #15-10-28-01, its initial CIA implementation resolution.

Here is the irony, and it is structural. While Broward Health was spending $44,000 to resist my records request about El Sanadi’s outside compensation contracts, the federal government had just imposed a five-year consent decree on the institution for exactly that kind of improper compensation arrangement. The records I was requesting disclosed the very category of financial relationship that had cost the institution $70 million. And the institutional response — spend public money to suppress rather than disclose — was not the response of an organization that had internalized the lesson. It appears to have been the response of an organization that had learned to manage federal oversight without changing its fundamental operating posture.

Compliance on paper. Resistance in practice — or so the record suggests.

The CIA didn’t solve the transparency problem. It documented the depth of it.

In Part 2: What happened when Florida’s most prominent lawyers filed the same kind of records request I did — and hit exactly the same wall. And then the grand jury got involved.

References

· Florida Chapter 119, Public Records Act; Art. I, § 24, Florida Constitution

· § 119.07(1)(a); § 119.11(1), Florida Statutes

· BPIRG, LLC v. North Broward Hospital District, CACE 25-019383 (Broward County Circuit Court)

· Board Resolution FY20-14, North Broward Hospital District (January 29, 2020)

· False Claims Act settlement, United States v. North Broward Hospital District (approximately $70 million, August 2015)

· Resolution #15-10-28-01, North Broward Hospital District (October 28, 2015)

· Berger Singerman billing invoices, Matter ID: 21561-0001 (obtained via public records request)

Dan Lewis is known as the “Grey Man” of Florida politics. For more than 30 years, he has worked where public power, institutional culture, and real-world results collide — as a former elected official, a political strategist behind more than 350 campaigns at every level of government, Chair of the Broward County Charter Review Commission, architect of the influential “Blue Card,” and the founder of technology companies built to solve problems that government either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Respected by many, mocked by a few, and feared by some, Lewis brings an uncommon inside-and-out view of government and public policy.

He has sat in every chair at the table. From 2019 to 2025, he was the governance consultant hired by Broward Health to assist with fixing its institutional “breakdowns.” He is also the citizen now filing writs of mandamus to enforce the public records law against the same institution. Whether bringing a site plan forward for public review, refusing as an elected treasurer to sign an unconstitutional pension check, or documenting what hospital boards and judges would rather keep quiet, Lewis focuses on one thing: facts, transparency, and consequences.

The Dan Lewis Report is his no-spin briefing on the institutions Broward residents fund but rarely see clearly — the hospital districts and the courts. This is the indiscretion of honesty.

No paywalls. No restricted articles.
If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone.
If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

It’s a fair question. The litigation against Broward Health is now past its fourth month. The docket has 45 entries. I’ve been personally sued by the institution — a third-party complaint seeking to permanently bar me from ever filing a public records request again. My legal costs are real. My time is consumed. And the documents I’ve been asking for since March 2025 — payroll data, employment contracts, event records — are the kinds of things that should have arrived in an email attachment.

So why do it?

Because this isn’t about Broward Health. Broward Health is the example. The principle is bigger, and it is simple: you cannot participate in your own democracy if you don’t have information about what your government is doing. And you will never have that information unless you demand it.

This article is about that principle — what I believe, why I believe it, and what I’ve learned from fourteen years of putting it into practice.

The Ladder You Have to Climb from the Bottom

Everyone I talk to is frustrated by national politics. The dysfunction in Washington. The polarization. The sense that nothing works and nobody is listening. I understand the frustration. I share it.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe after more than a decade of civic engagement: you can’t fix national politics without fixing your state. You can’t fix your state without fixing your county. You can’t fix your county without fixing your community.

Your community is not an abstraction. It is a specific collection of public entities — a hospital district, a school board, a water management district, a housing authority, a city commission — each one spending your tax money, making decisions that affect your daily life, and operating under laws that say you have the right to know what they’re doing.

Every one of these entities shares a single structural requirement: transparency. If they are transparent, you can participate. If they are not, you can’t. It’s that simple. The conversation is rigged before it starts when the people making decisions control the information about those decisions.

And here’s the thing most people don’t realize: transparency is not a condition. It’s a practice. It’s not something that exists because a law says it should. It’s something that exists only when citizens exercise their right to demand it — and keep demanding it, and keep showing up, and keep filing requests, and keep attending meetings, and keep documenting what they find.

The moment you stop, the institution reverts. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve watched it happen in real time, at Broward Health, over more than a decade. And the record proves it in both directions — what happens when citizens engage, and what happens when they don’t.

How It Started: A Daughter’s Life and a Decision

I didn’t start this as an activist or a journalist or a litigant. I started as a father.

In 2011, my daughter nearly died from a rare medical syndrome. The emergency and ICU services at Broward Health — the public hospital system my tax dollars helped fund — failed her through systemic incompetence. She survived. But the experience changed something fundamental in how I understood my relationship to the public institutions around me.

I had a choice. I could litigate the medical failures. Or I could do something harder: commit my abilities and resources to making the system better so it wouldn’t fail someone else’s daughter.

I chose the harder path. Beginning in 2012, I attended virtually every open committee and Board meeting at Broward Health. Not occasionally. Not when something controversial was on the agenda. Every meeting. For three years. I met with current and former Board members, senior staff, physicians, and elected officials. I brought thirty years of experience in systems architecture and organizational strategy. I came with an evolving agenda focused on one goal: making this district one of the finest public hospital systems in the country.

That was the first exercise of transparency — simply showing up and watching. And it taught me the first lesson: what you learn by being in the room is different from what they tell you from outside it.

The $44,000 Lesson

My education in how transparency gets resisted began in earnest in 2015.

Dr. Nabil El Sanadi had just been installed as Broward Health’s CEO — a position he secured through political connections to the Board Chair and Governor Rick Scott. When I requested a meeting to continue the initiatives I’d been working on, his office first demanded to know my agenda in advance, then unilaterally cancelled the meeting without explanation, then had the corporate attorney send me a letter that amounted to a warning not to ask questions.

So I stopped asking for meetings. I started asking for records.

I filed a public records request — my first at Broward Health — seeking, among other things, El Sanadi’s outside compensation contracts with the Broward Sheriff’s Office and three cities. These were directly relevant: he was earning over $300,000 in part-time political appointments while serving as Broward Health’s “full-time” CEO at $675,000. The potential conflicts under federal anti-kickback law were obvious.

Broward Health’s response: hire a law firm. Berger Singerman billed 25.8 hours in February 2015 alone — including a partner conferencing with the CEO about “119 issues” and an associate spending 10.3 hours in a single day researching my records request. The February invoice: $10,859. The billing continued for months. Total cost to the taxpayers for responding to my request: approximately $44,000.

The response, when it finally arrived roughly 60 days later, was heavily redacted.

Then I did something that changed my understanding of what was really happening. I asked the other agencies — BSO, Fort Lauderdale, Sunrise, Tamarac — for the same contracts.

Every one of them produced the records electronically, unredacted, within 48 hours.

Forty-four thousand dollars and 60 days at Broward Health. An email attachment and 48 hours everywhere else. The same documents. The difference was not complexity. The difference was institutional choice.

That was when I understood: the resistance to transparency is not about logistics. It’s about control. And it will continue as long as nobody challenges it.

The Blog: Documenting Everything in Real Time

Starting in 2015, I began publishing what I was finding. First at BrwdHealthBlog.com, then at DanLewisReport.com. The articles were detailed, sourced, and public. “Just Say No — How Not to Cancel a Meeting” was a four-part series documenting the El Sanadi encounter. “The Best Broward Health CEO Contract Politics Can Buy” examined how political contributions secured the CEO appointment. When I obtained billing invoices showing what Broward Health spent to resist my records request, I published those too.

The blog was an exercise of transparency in itself. Everything I learned, I documented publicly. Not behind a subscription wall. Not in private letters. In public, where anyone could read it, verify it, and act on it.

This is a form of civic engagement that anyone can practice. You don’t need a law degree. You don’t need to file a lawsuit. You need a public records request, a computer, and the willingness to publish what you find. The public record is the raw material. Your willingness to make it visible is the act.

Recording the Meetings They Didn’t Want Recorded

In 2018, Broward Health did not livestream its board meetings. There was no online archive. If you wanted to know what happened at a meeting, you either attended in person or you didn’t know.

So I recorded them. Both cameras and audio. I posted the footage to YouTube. All-day committee sessions and full Board meetings — unedited, publicly accessible, free.

I became the institution’s transparency infrastructure because the institution wouldn’t build its own.

There were remarkable moments in those recordings — moments that would never have been documented otherwise. Commissioners making promises. Staff giving presentations that contradicted their own written reports. Community leaders standing at the podium and speaking truths the Board didn’t want to hear on any permanent record.

In September 2018, Vicente Thrower from Pompano Beach stood at that podium and said: “We are having some serious things that this board committed to us of transparency and trust... we have to stick to that commitment.”

Commissioner Ray Berry began drafting a formal transparency resolution. The board discussed livestreaming for the first time. By October 2018, I was able to write an article headlined “Broward Health to Finally See Sunny Days” — because the board, under public pressure, had agreed to begin livestreaming and archiving meetings.

That didn’t happen because the board woke up one morning and decided to be transparent. It happened because citizens showed up, recorded what was happening, published it, and made it impossible to pretend the public wasn’t watching.

Following the Money: Accounts Payable Analysis

In 2018, I obtained Broward Health’s accounts payable data through a public records request. Then I did what any competent analyst would do: I built a spreadsheet.

What I found was that General Counsel Lynn Barrett’s office was spending approximately $500,000 per month on outside legal counsel — a burn rate exceeding $6 million per year — on top of her staff of six to seven in-house attorneys. This was public money. Healthcare dollars. Money that could have funded patient care in the communities that needed it most.

I published the analysis. I identified the vendors. I cross-referenced the spending against Board presentations where Barrett had reported on legal costs — and found the numbers didn’t track. I sent the analysis directly to Broward Health’s CFO, copying the CEO and a commissioner, and asked pointed questions: Who is “Law Office Of”? Under what ethical basis is BH paying for an indicted former commissioner’s defense? Is this hush money?

This is what exercising transparency looks like in practice. You obtain the data. You analyze it. You publish it. You ask the questions that the data raises. And you do it all in writing, on the record, where the institution cannot later claim it didn’t know.

A Florida Bulldog investigation subsequently confirmed the broader picture: “Republican-led Broward Health paid $3 million in legal fees to firms tied to Gov. Rick Scott.” Even the Board Chair at the time acknowledged the problem on the record: “The legal bills are completely out of control. This is runaway lawyering with no governance from the board.”

He was suspended by the Governor less than a month later.

The Proof: When Engagement Works

Here is where the philosophy stops being abstract and becomes empirical.

From roughly mid-2019 through early 2021, everything I’m describing worked. Citizens had engaged. The pressure was sustained. The institution responded.

A reconstituted Board passed real governance reforms. On January 29, 2020, the Board adopted Resolution FY20-14 — a binding policy explicitly affirming that all district records are public records subject to disclosure. The legal budget carried a dedicated line item for public records compliance, funded at $325,000. The OIG findings were being taken seriously. A CEO search was conducted transparently, with published criteria, structured interviews, and documented candidate rankings.

CEO Gino Santorio — a career healthcare professional, not a political operative — trimmed $30 million from the budget, reduced taxes by $20 million, and disbursed $116 million in capital improvements. The institution was functioning. It was serving the public. It was transparent.

This happened not because the law changed. Not because the Board suddenly discovered a conscience. It happened because citizens engaged and refused to stop engaging. The meetings were being recorded. The records were being requested. The spending was being tracked. The blog posts were being published. The community leaders were standing at the podium. The pressure was constant, visible, and documented.

The institution worked because the public demanded that it work.

The Proof: When Engagement Stops

Then the engagement stopped mattering — not because citizens gave up, but because the political structure changed.

In April 2021, the Board replaced Santorio with Shane Strum — Governor DeSantis’s former Chief of Staff. The Board that hired him was composed entirely of gubernatorial appointees. The external accountability infrastructure — the community pressure, the reform-minded commissioners, the operational CEO who understood compliance as a management obligation — was replaced by internal alignment with an executive branch that does not prioritize transparency.

Within two years:

• The public records compliance budget was cut from $325,000 to $80,000 — a 75 percent reduction.

• The litigation budget grew from $785,000 to $6,700,000 — an increase of more than 750 percent.

• The institution stopped spending on compliance and started spending on resistance.

When I filed public records requests in March 2025, the response was nine months of silence followed by a lawsuit — mine against them. When I obtained the first records in April 2026, they revealed a CEO compensation package of $4.6 million with a $3.7 million gap that nobody on the Board could explain. Employment contracts were missing for 33 executives. A fundraising event that generated millions had no public accounting.

The information existed. It was always there. The institution simply chose not to share it — because nobody was making them.

This is what happens when transparency is not exercised. The muscle atrophies. The culture reverts. The institution serves itself instead of the public it was created to serve.

What I Believe — and Why It Matters for You

I am not doing this because I enjoy litigation. I am not doing this because I have a grudge against Broward Health. I am doing this because I believe — with evidence accumulated over fourteen years — that local civic engagement is the only thing that actually works.

The people who run your local public agencies are not, in most cases, villains. They are people operating within institutional incentive structures that pull toward self-protection, opacity, and the path of least resistance. Left unchallenged, those incentives win. The budget gets complex. The contracts get negotiated in shade. The board meetings become performative. The public records get delayed, then redacted, then resisted, then litigated.

But when citizens show up — when they attend the meetings, file the requests, analyze the data, publish the findings, and refuse to accept silence — the institutions respond. I’ve seen it. I’ve documented it. The record proves it.

This is not about being an expert. I started with no legal training, no journalism background, no political connections. I started with a public records request and a willingness to read what came back. Everything I learned, I learned by doing — and everything I learned is available to anyone willing to do the same.

Here’s what you actually need:

• Your state’s public records law. In Florida, it’s Chapter 119. Every state has one. Learn the basics: what’s a public record, who has to produce it, how fast, and what happens when they don’t.

• An email address. Most public records requests can be filed by email. You don’t need a lawyer. You don’t need letterhead. You need a clear, specific request sent to the records custodian.

• A willingness to read. The records are not exciting. They are budgets, contracts, meeting minutes, accounts payable reports. But they are where the truth lives. If you can read a spreadsheet, you can follow the money. If you can read a contract, you can find the conflicts.

• A place to publish. A blog. A Substack. A community Facebook page. A letter to the editor. The format doesn’t matter. What matters is that what you find becomes visible to your community.

• Persistence. They will delay. They will ask for clarification. They will estimate fees designed to discourage you. They will produce records in formats designed to be difficult to analyze. They will hire lawyers. They may sue you. None of this means you’re wrong. All of it means you’re asking the right questions.

The Bottom of the Ladder

I started at the bottom of the ladder. A father whose daughter almost died in a public hospital. A taxpayer who decided to attend board meetings. A citizen who filed a public records request and discovered that the institution preferred to spend $44,000 resisting it rather than answer it.

Fourteen years later, I have a blog archive spanning a decade. A Substack with a growing readership. A pending lawsuit that has already produced the first public disclosure of executive compensation data in years. A published record showing that when citizens engage, institutions work — and when they don’t, institutions default to serving themselves.

The ladder goes all the way up. County to state. State to national. But you have to start at the bottom. You have to start where you live. And you have to start with the one thing that makes everything else possible: information.

Your government has it. The law says you’re entitled to it. But you will never receive it unless you ask.

And when you ask, you must be prepared for the possibility that they will say no. That they will delay. That they will resist. That they will spend your tax dollars fighting your right to see how they spend your tax dollars.

That’s when you find out what transparency actually requires. Not a law on the books. Not a resolution on a wall. A citizen who refuses to stop asking.

That’s why I do this.

Dan Lewis is the Managing Director of Broward Public Interest Research Group, LLC (BPIRG), and the author and content creator behind DanLewisReport.com and DanLewisReport.Substack.com. He is a former board advisor to Broward Health and Memorial Health Systems and previously served as Broward Health’s Executive Advisor for Special Projects.

The Dan Lewis Report is reader-supported. If you want this kind of reporting to continue—grounded in documents, not press releases—consider subscribing or upgrading.

No paywalls. No restricted articles.
If it’s worth reading, it should be available to everyone.
If it’s worth continuing, it needs support.

Subscribe now

Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

A W-2 is not an obscure document. It is the federal tax form your employer sends you every January. It shows what you were paid. It shows what taxes were withheld. Every employer in America — including every government agency — is required to produce one for every employee. It is, by definition, a record that already exists.

I asked for that record in March 2025. Fourteen months later, I still don’t have it.

What I have instead are two different summary tables — produced thirteen days apart — that show wildly different numbers for the same CEO, covering the same year.

What I Asked For

A W-2 form has more than twenty boxes. It shows your total wages, federal and state taxes withheld, Social Security and Medicare contributions, deferred compensation plan distributions, retirement plan participation, and executive benefits like company cars and life insurance.

Producing “W-2 payroll data” means producing the W-2 — or at minimum, a complete certified extract of every box, for every covered officer. Broward Health produced neither. What they produced — twice — was a stripped-down summary table of their own construction. The first had four columns. The second had one. Neither was an actual W-2. Neither mentioned the word “deferred compensation” once.

That is not compliance. That is an agency deciding ostensively unilaterally what version of the truth you are entitled to see.

Shane Strum — The Two Productions

Below are the two official court filings, presented as they would appear on the underlying W-2, using only the data Broward Health chose to include in each production.

Then.

The Pattern Across the Top Nine

Strum is not the only one. The table below shows every executive whose first-production wages exceeded $500,000 — nine officers in total. The pattern is unmistakable.

Control Group — No Meaningful Change.

Are Both Numbers True? Yes. That’s the trick.

Broward Health is a governmental agency. Under federal tax law, governmental employers can maintain supplemental executive retirement plans — called SERPs — under IRC §457(f). These plans allow government entities to set aside additional compensation for senior executives beyond their salary and bonus. The money sits in a restricted account. When vesting conditions are met — typically after several years — the full amount is released and becomes taxable income in that year, flowing entirely into Box 1.

The most likely explanation for the gap: the first production included Strum’s full Box 1 — salary, incentive bonus, and a 457(f) SERP distribution. The second production stripped out the deferred compensation and called the remainder “Correct Totals.”

It is correct. It is also incomplete. Calling a partial disclosure “correct” while silently omitting $2.8 million is not an accident. It is a choice. I believe that Broward Health’s law firm was obligated to release the first production. It purportedly shows Mr. Strom’s 2024 total taxable income from Broward Health accurately in response to my W2 Public records request.

The Tell: The Medicare Anomaly

There is one more number in the first production that Broward Health apparently did not notice it was disclosing. Box 6 — Medicare tax withheld — was $52,539. Medicare is withheld at 1.45% (plus an additional 0.9% above $200,000). Working backward from $52,539 implies Medicare wages of approximately $3,623,000 — not $4,645,992.

What Florida Law Actually Permits

What the Public Is Owed

Broward Health is the North Broward Hospital District — a special taxing district created by the Florida Legislature, governed by a Board of Commissioners appointed by the Governor, funded by your tax dollars. Shane Strum is a public employee.

Under Florida’s Public Records Act and the Sunshine Amendment, the compensation paid to public employees from public funds is a public record. All of it. Not the parts the agency finds convenient. Not a one-column summary produced fifteen months after the original request. Not a “correct totals” document that quietly redefines what “total” means.

What Florida law entitles the public to is the actual W-2. Every box. Every number. With only the Social Security number redacted, as the law permits. I have not received that. This case is still in court.

The public pays Shane Strum’s salary. The public pays his bonus. If the public is also funding multimillion-dollar deferred compensation arrangements for five senior executives — arrangements that release in a single year and disappear behind a one-column “corrected” filing — the public has a right to know.

Gotcha, Shane!

Daniel Lewis is Managing Director of Broward Public Interest Research Group, LLC (BPIRG) and publishes at DanLewisReport.com and DanLewisReport.substack.com. BPIRG v. North Broward Hospital District, Case No. CACE 25-019383, is currently pending in Broward County Circuit Court.

This article reflects the author’s analysis of publicly filed court documents and records produced in litigation. All factual characterizations are based on documents in the court record.

Share this report: If you value independent oversight of your tax dollars, consider sharing this article with your network. The truth is only as strong as the people willing to look for it.

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Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

🤡 “Holy Floating Decimal Point, Batman!”

Z-A-P! According to this latest boardroom dispatch, that eye-watering $4.6 million payout was a mistake—it was a “Whoopsie-Daisy!” A digital hiccup! A whimsical typo in the grand ledger of life!

“Holy Million-Dollar Typo, Batman!” Robin exclaims, nearly tripping over his own yellow cape. “The Commissioner says the salary was just a little mistake! A digital sneeze that accidentally added a few extra zeros!”

“Calm yourself, Boy Wonder,” Batman says, peering through his Bat-Magnifying-Glass at the 2024 payroll report filed with the Court. “It’s a truly miraculous event. Think of the odds! Out of all the listed senior employees—from the heroic nurse to the tireless COO—the computer managed to get every single deduction and decimal point correct... except for one. It seems the ‘Extra Zero’ key only gets sticky when it’s the Ringmaster’s turn at the ATM!”

“You mean the computer has a sense of humor, Batman?”

“Either that, Robin, or we’ve discovered a new form of Broward Health Whimsical Bookkeeping that defies the known laws of physics!”

🎺 Send in the Clowns! (Wait, They’re Already Chilling in the Boardroom!)

S-W-A-P! The “Mistake” defense is the ultimate slapstick routine! It suggests our Seven Commissioners—the self-appointed Guardians of the Public Trust—weren’t actually overseeing a massive payout; they were just victims of an over-caffeinated keyboard!

It’s not a policy; it’s a Comedy of Errors! While the Unofficial spokesman Commissioner plays the “Clumsy Sidekick” card—shuffling his feet and looking for a trap door—Shane Strum is still standing center stage. His top hat is perfectly tilted, his cape is fluttering in the air-conditioned breeze, and he’s clutching a bag of taxpayer gold that is 100% intentional. In the Great Broward Yield Machine, there are no “accidents”—just “happy little windfalls” for the man in the $4.6 million cape!

• The Surgical Decline? “Holy Vanishing Patients!”

• The Property Tax Levy? “Holy Empty Pockets!”

• The $4.6 Million? “Holy Jackpot, Batman!”

❓ Will the Dynamic Duo of Common Sense Ever Save the Day?

Can the Board find the “Undo” button before the vault is empty?

Will the Commissioner’s “Clerical Error” result in a BAM! POW! REFUND! or just another round of applause?

Is the “Great Salary Caper” a tragedy, a comedy, or just the world’s most expensive magic trick?

THRILL as the math defies the laws of gravity!

GASP as the “Mistake” buys its own private island!

SHUDDER as the taxpayers realize they’re the ones juggling the bowling pins!

Tune in next time! Same Bat-Time! Same Bat-Substack!

The Grand Finale Question:

What’s your favorite act in this three-ring circus? Is it the $4.6 million “oopsie,” or the way the Board pulls a disappearing act the second someone whispers the word “AUDIT”?

Drop a comment below and join the Bat-Resistance!

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P.S. I believe the original report is accurate, not a mistake and if anything, only the tip of the “earned benefits” iceberg to which Broward Health and the Board are steering. (Deferred earnings, pension payments, retirement programs e.g. 457F and others not yet reported as income on the W2)

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I hope you enjoyed the quick article.
Dan

You are about to witness an act that defies gravity, logic, and the basic obligations of public stewardship. For the low, low price of $4.6 million — paid upfront, naturally — Shane Strum, our CEO-Hawker in the top hat, is here to perform his most audacious feat yet: making your operational failures look like strategic masterpieces.

No experience with running a hospital required. No patients necessary. Just bring the taxpayer checkbook.

🎩 The Great Vanishing Act: Shane Strum and the Shrinking Patient List

“Presto! Change-o!”

With a puff of budgetary smoke and a flourish of his $4.6 million cape, Shane Strum makes entire wings of surgical patients disappear — below his own projections.

Outpatient surgeries: down 13.1%. Inpatient surgeries: down 10.2%. Total hospitalizations: 6.0% below his own budgeted target.

These aren’t shortfalls, folks. These are illusions. Strum budgets high to signal “growth” to the public — then, with a masterful sleight of hand, pivots the Board’s attention away from the empty beds and toward the flashing “Financial Stability” sign overhead.

The trick depends on one thing: that nobody in the audience asks the obvious question.

Where did the patients go, Shane?

💰 The Revenue Illusion — and the Taxpayer Volunteer

Here’s the climax of the show: Shane Strum’s Amazing Yield Machine.

How does Strum keep generating revenue without generating new patients? Simple — he doesn’t need new patients. He needs richer ones.

By raising prices (“stronger rate”) and concentrating on the sickest cases (“acuity”), he squeezes more cash out of the same pool — or a shrinking one. Volume falls. Revenue holds. Shane takes a bow.

But this trick has a hidden mechanism — and it requires a volunteer from the audience.

Would the Broward County Taxpayer please step forward?

Through the expanded property tax levy, you’ve been conscripted as the invisible safety net beneath the stage. Your money funds the liquidity metrics — days cash on hand — that let Shane Strum miss his surgical targets by double digits without consequence. He fails upward. You pay forward. He takes another bow. You get the bill.

For this, Shane Strum receives $4.6 million. You receive a property tax notice. The math is, somehow, not discussed at Board meetings.

🥤 The Board: Seven Commissioners, Zero Questions

And leading the applause? The Broward Health Board of Commissioners.

Seven commissioners. Zero skeptics. One collective glazed expression.

They haven’t been governing Broward Health — they’ve been attending it. There’s a difference, and Shane Strum is counting on them never figuring out which one they’re doing.

These seven distinguished public servants have been sold a hypnotic cocktail of “Strategic Dominance” and “Complex Turnaround,” and they are absolutely hammered on it. Every time Strum misses a surgical target by double digits, they don’t reach for accountability. They reach for another long sip and wait for the Yield Machine to deliver their “favorable payor mix” buzz.

Missing your volume plan? Delicious. Dependence on property taxes? Refreshing. Squeezing more margin out of sicker patients while volumes fall? Ah. That’s the good stuff.

They’ve consumed so much of this narrative that they’ve lost the ability — or the will — to read the actual charts. Which is convenient, because the charts have questions. Hard ones. The kind that require a Board to act like a Board instead of a fan club.

Here is what seven commissioners earning public trust have apparently decided: that $4.6 million is a perfectly reasonable price to pay a man whose primary measurable achievement is making decline look like strategy.

Standing ovation, everyone. Please hold your applause until Shane has finished not hitting his targets.

What do you think of the performance? Do you see the man behind the curtain — or are you still watching the show? Drop a comment below.

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What is Broward Health hiding?

Now we have the answer.

On April 2, 2026—under pressure of litigation—Broward Health finally produced records.

Not voluntarily.
Not completely.
But enough.

Here is the number:

Shane Strum, President & CEO: $4,645,992 in 2024.

That is not a typo. Unknown what the 2025 number is

That is a public hospital CEO, paid with your property taxes, taking home $4.6 million in a single year. That does not include benefits like a car allowance, pension match payments and the ultrasecret pension 457F - that is according to sources entirely paid by Broward Health (with our taxes). Strum and his cabal’s salary is just the tip of the iceberg!

The Number They Fought For

This was never about process.
It was never about timelines.
It was never about clarification.

It was about this number.

Because once you see it, everything else lines up:

• Outside counsel brought in to fight a records case

• A 70-day delay in a statutorily urgent proceeding

• A sworn “utter falsehood” declaration

• Blanket discovery objections

• A Third-Party Complaint filed against me personally

• A pre-drafted motion to seal filed in six minutes

That is not how institutions respond to weak cases.

That is how they respond to records they cannot afford to have read.

The Real Payroll

The production includes W2 compensation for roughly 35 executives. It does not include pension and other lucrative benefits.

More than $10.2 million not including lucrative pension and other benefits. Six people. One year. One public hospital district.

Paid by taxpayers.

The $3.7 Million Gap

Strum’s base salary under his 2021 employment agreement: $920,000.

His 2024 compensation: $4.6 million.

That leaves a gap of roughly $3.7 million.

No document produced explains it.

Not the employment agreement.
Not the incentive plan.
Not an amendment.
Not an appendix.

At a private company, that’s aggressive compensation.

At a public taxing district, it’s a question that demands an answer.

How You Approve $4.6 Million Without a Fight

You don’t do it in the open.

You use “private briefings” and the consent agenda.

On October 23, 2024, Broward Health’s Board approved five items in a single vote:

• CEO compensation pushed to the 95th percentile of market

• Incentive ceilings increased

• Authority for the CEO to structure executive bonuses

• “Exceptional” performance ratings for senior leadership

No discussion.
No debate.
No individual votes.
No recorded scrutiny.

Seven weeks later, Board Chair Mario Pernicano signed the amendments implementing those changes.

Same outcome.
Same day.
No visible deliberation.

You do not place multi-million-dollar executive compensation on a consent agenda unless the outcome has already been decided.

That is not deliberation.
That is pre-decision followed by public ratification.

The Authority Gap

There is a second problem.

The consent agenda authorized compensation ranges.
It did not authorize anyone to execute contract amendments.

There is no recorded Board vote, resolution, or delegation of authority connecting those approvals to the signed contracts in the Board Minutes.

The Board set the ceiling.
The Chair signed the contracts.

The link between the two is missing from the public record.

At a private company, that is a governance lapse.
At a public hospital district, it raises a more serious question:

Who authorized the execution of those contracts—and where is that authorization documented?

The Production That Proves the Pattern

The records Broward Health produced reveal some of the numbers.

They also reveal how tightly the information is controlled.

Out of roughly 35 executives:

• 2 employment agreements produced

• 33 not produced

The production is 43 pages.

• Bates numbering begins at page 5

• No explanation

• No privilege log

Strum’s agreement references appendices:

• Job description: not included

• Severance terms: not included

Redactions appear throughout:

• No statutory justification provided

And one more detail:

The General Counsel’s contract was produced.
Her compensation was not.

That is not a clerical error.

That is selective disclosure.

What They Produced—Then Omitted

On April 3, they filed Initial Disclosures in court at 10:43 am.

The same day, April 3, Broward Health produced these incomplete records at 3:12 pm.

Those disclosures:

• Do not list the contracts

• Do not list the W2 data

• Do not acknowledge the production

They produced the disclosures at 10 in morning, and documents hours later.

That is not an oversight.

It is a documented pattern—now sitting in consecutive docket entries.

What Is Still Locked

Two core requests remain unproduced:

• The Gala Records
  A fundraising event claiming $6+ million in revenue.
  No attendee list.
  No reconciliation.
  No explanation.

• The September 19 Emergency Board Meeting
  Records requested.
  Records withheld.

This is not partial compliance.

This is controlled release.

Read the Reaction

Go back to the behavior.

Why retain high-end outside counsel for a records case?
Why consume 70 days after more than a year of delays?
Why swear “utter falsehood”?
Why seal evidence in six minutes?
Why file against the requester personally?
Why object to everything?

Now you have the answer.

Because the records justify the response.

Where This Goes Next

The case is advancing on multiple fronts:

• Motion to Compel — to force full production,

• Motion to Dismiss — challenging the Third-Party Complaint,

• Sealing Challenge — to keep the record public,

• Disqualification proceedings — ongoing at the trial level,

And now there is something new:

The compensation data is on the record.

The Questions That Follow

Not whether Broward Health will fight.

They already have.

The questions now are:

• Who approved this level of compensation?

• Where was it actually decided?

• What is in the missing pages?

• Where are the remaining contracts?

• Where is the General Counsel’s compensation data?

• What happened at the September 19 meeting?

• Where did the $6 million go?

What Transparency Looks Like When Forced

Broward Health did not disclose this information voluntarily.

It was produced under pressure—
in fragments,
with gaps,
and without explanation.

That is not compliance.

That is containment.

Final

Frivolous cases do not generate this level of resistance.

They do not produce numbers like this.
They do not trigger this kind of legal spend.

Dangerous cases do.

Broward Health fought the records.
The records explained the fight.

Now the fight is about what’s still missing.

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Because the next set of records is already being fought over. And based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to matter.

For those of you watching this institution for years, the pattern is familiar. The actors change. The titles change. The slogans get refreshed. The script does not. When a serious watchdog gets close to the paper trail, Broward Health does what it too often does: pull the curtains, lawyer up, and send the bill to the taxpayers.

That is the real story in BPIRG v. North Broward Hospital District. This is not a nuisance lawsuit. This is not a political grudge match. This is a public interest organization demanding that a billion-dollar taxing district, funded by your property taxes, governed by a publicly appointed board, bound by Florida’s Sunshine and Public Records laws, produce the documents it is legally required to produce. The Legislature did not make Chapter 119 optional. Broward Health is treating it that way.

And the harder they fight, the more obvious the question becomes: what exactly are they hiding?

The “State Agency” Costume

The opening move was a masterclass in institutional gaslighting. When BPIRG served Broward Health with a Verified Petition for Writ of Mandamus — a court order demanding a public body perform its mandatory legal duty — attorney Irwin Gilbert suddenly discovered the district was a “state agency” entitled to a 40-day response window instead of the standard 20.

It was a cynical name-tag swap. They are local when they want your ad valorem property taxes. They are “the state” when you ask to see the receipts.

Broward Health’s own public identity is that of a special taxing district, governed by a locally appointed board, financed by Broward County taxpayers. It becomes a “state agency” only when the label buys another 20 days of darkness. Every hour that delay buys is billed to you. Gilbert’s firm is paid with your property tax dollars. So is every motion he files.

The “Utter Falsehood” Exhibit

When BPIRG moved to disqualify Circuit Judge Daniel A. Casey, citing a 70-day extension that gutted Chapter 119’s explicit urgency requirement, Gilbert filed a sworn declaration calling BPIRG counsel’s account an “utter falsehood.”

He filed that declaration before he knew she had the verbatim transcript.

Judge Casey’s oral ruling trailed off mid-sentence, “I’m going to find that —” — before the operative order was entered. No express finding. No ruling on the merits. A 35-minute Zoom call and a 70-day gift to the district. Words matter in court. Sworn words matter more. Gilbert’s characterization of “utter falsehood” is now itself the exhibit.

At Broward Health, apparently the truth is whatever you can certify to a court before someone checks the tapes.

The Answer as a Weapon

When Broward Health finally filed its Answer, consuming every one of those 70 court-gifted days, it read less like a legal defense and more like a targeting document.

First came a “Preliminary Statement”, pages of narrative framing that belong in a press release, not a pleading. Florida’s Rules of Civil Procedure do not recognize a “Preliminary Statement.” It exists merely to seed a story into the record before the merits are joined.

Then came the Affirmative Defenses, including one asserting that I, Dan Lewis personally, am a necessary and indispensable party to a case I brought as Managing Director of BPIRG. That does not read like ordinary pleading hygiene. It reads like target selection.

And then, buried at the back of the Answer, without a separate motion, without appropriate notice, Broward Health asked for an injunction shielding itself from all future public records requests.

This is the antithesis of transparency: asking a court to protect a billion-dollar public taxing district from the public they tax. That is not a legal defense. That is a mission statement.

The Declaration They Want to Bury

On March 19, 2026, BPIRG filed my Amended Unsworn Declaration under Florida Statute § 92.525. Attached to it was an exhibit Broward Health never expected to see in a court file: the text messages.

Between October 2, 2025, and February 11, 2026, I exchanged text messages with William R. Scherer, the Scherer of Conrad & Scherer who serves as Broward Health’s lead outside counsel. Those messages were preserved via SyncTech backup, redacted to remove any genuinely privileged or confidential content, and filed as an exhibit to my declaration. They are now part of the public court record.

What the texts show is not flattering to Broward Health or its lawyers.

On October 2, 2025 — more than two months before the lawsuit was filed — Scherer acknowledged in writing that Broward Health’s records production was overdue. “Yes they’re going to start producing and I had thought they would have done so already.” That is the defendant’s own lead counsel admitting that production should have already happened. BPIRG filed this lawsuit on December 18, 2025. That is 77 additional days of silence after Broward Health’s own lawyer said the records should have already been produced.

The texts also reveal that Scherer was not merely defending this case. He was simultaneously negotiating on behalf of CEO Shane Strum to resolve it — while authorizing aggressive pleadings against me personally. On December 12, Scherer confirmed that “Shane Strum is behind” the litigation strategy. The next day, he assigned his son (W.R. Scherer III) and another attorney to “close the deal.” One day after that, BPIRG filed its petition. The negotiation and the aggression were running on parallel tracks, directed by the same lawyer, authorized by the same CEO.

Strum was not negotiating through the Board. Scherer told me plainly: Strum, not the Board, was driving the settlement attempt. At a public hospital district subject to Florida’s Sunshine Law, that is a governance failure — not a litigation tactic.

And then there is the admission Scherer probably wishes he had never made. BH is Conrad & Scherer’s “most important client.” When your law firm’s most important revenue source is the entity you are defending, the incentive structure writes itself: litigate hard, bill long, and keep the client happy regardless of the merits.

These are the text messages Broward Health wants sealed. Ask yourself why.

Six Minutes

On March 23, 2026, BPIRG filed two documents: its Reply to Broward Health’s defective Answer and a Motion to Strike the Third-Party Complaint BH had filed against me. The Reply is 37 pages. The text thread exhibit — the same one from my Amended Declaration — is embedded at pages 18 through 37.

BPIRG’s last filing hit the docket at 10:46:36 AM.

At 10:52:18 AM — six minutes later — Broward Health filed a motion to seal my declaration.

Six minutes.

It is procedurally impossible to receive two multi-page filings, read them, identify that the text thread is embedded in the Reply, make a strategic decision to seek sealing, draft a motion, obtain signatures, and file it with the court in six minutes. The motion was pre-drafted. Broward Health’s lawyers knew the text messages were coming and had the sealing motion ready before BPIRG’s filings even hit the docket.

That is not a legal response. That is a cover-up with a court filing number.

And there is one more detail. The motion was signed by Irwin Gilbert, not William Scherer. Scherer is listed as co-counsel — but his signature line is blank. The reason is obvious: Scherer’s own text messages are the subject of the motion. He cannot certify the factual and legal basis for sealing his own communications without creating a conflict of interest. So, Gilbert signed. But make no mistake about who directed it. Scherer runs Broward Health’s litigation. Gilbert signs what Scherer instructs.

The Amendment That Made It Worse

The original Motion to Seal contained nine defects. Wrong party designation (”Plaintiff’s” — Broward Health is the defendant). Wrong date (March 16, 2026 — no such filing exists). Wrong target document (the superseded Declaration, not the Amended one). A sole legal authority — Florida Statute § 90.408 — that is an evidentiary admissibility rule, not a sealing statute. No Florida court has ever used § 90.408 to seal a court record. Not once. A complete LexisNexis annotation current through 2025 shows zero cases. And the Certificate of Service references “CM/ECF” — the federal court’s electronic filing system. This is a Florida state court. Five separate Broward Health filings have made the same error.

Broward Health chose to amend. The result was worse.

The Amended Motion, filed March 24, corrected one defect (partially — the date in one paragraph), introduced three new errors, and left the other seven untouched. The amended title contains the typo “Coummunications.” The body now contradicts itself: paragraph 1 says the declaration was filed March 19; the prayer for relief says March 16. The motion cannot agree with itself on the filing date of the document it wants sealed.

Three new conclusory paragraphs were added — asserting that sealing is appropriate under Rule 2.420, that it will not hinder public access, and that it is filed in good faith — without a single citation, a single case, or a single analysis to support any of those conclusions.

Net: Broward Health went from nine defects to twelve. The amendment made the motion worse, not better.

BPIRG Strikes Back

On March 28, 2026, BPIRG filed its Response opposing the Amended Motion to Seal. BPIRG’s counsel, Colleen O’Loughlin, filed a six-section opposition that dismantles the motion on four independent grounds. Download full filing (PDF)

The text thread contains no unredacted privileged content — it was already redacted before filing. Section 90.408 does not apply to the Text Thread — it is an admissibility rule, not a sealing authority. The motion fails Rule 2.420 in three independent ways. And the Florida Constitution’s Sunshine Amendment, backed by the Florida Supreme Court’s strong presumption of openness, prohibits sealing where the movant has demonstrated no recognized ground for closure.

BPIRG also demanded sanctions against Broward Health and its counsel under Rule 2.420(i) for seeking confidential status for non-confidential information.

I am separately preparing my own pro se response as the declarant and Third-Party Defendant. It deploys five independent grounds for denial across twenty numbered paragraphs, including a detailed defect catalogue showing how the amendment made the motion worse, a deep dive on why § 90.408 has never been used as a sealing authority, and a preservation of my independent right to seek sanctions.

BPIRG’s response is on record. Mine is almost ready to file.

The Discovery Wall

When BPIRG served discovery — three sets of requests aimed at the core facts — Broward Health’s response was architecture: blanket objections, no substantive engagement, not a single record produced.

Not yes. Not no. Process.

That is how institutions hide in plain sight. Not with one dramatic refusal, but with layers of procedural wallpaper stacked floor to ceiling until the public gets tired, the clock runs out, or the legal bills do their work.

And those bills are not abstract. The lawyers blocking production, filing every objection, and producing nothing are on your payroll. You are funding the attorneys who are fighting against your right to know.

In Broward Health’s own Request for Admissions, their counsel certified to the court that Judge Casey had “expressly ruled” Broward Health is a state agency. The transcript says no such ruling was made. That certification is now on record. So is the transcript.

BPIRG has now filed a Motion to Compel all three sets of discovery responses. The motion is on the docket. Broward Health’s wall is about to meet a court order.

What Are They Hiding?

Here is what BPIRG actually asked for. Three requests. Three locked doors.

The Executive Cabal. CEO Shane Strum’s multi-million-dollar employment contract — negotiated behind closed doors with your tax dollars — and his W-2, redacted for personal identifiers, so the public can see what the real compensation number is. The same for his top executives. The inner circle running a billion-dollar taxing district with none of the transparency that title requires.

The GME Black Box. The contract secretly negotiated between Broward Health and Florida Atlantic University — a deal FAU now claims entitles it to approximately $15 million in public funds — on the basis of an agreement the public has never seen, that Broward Health will not produce.

The Gala Ghost Millions. The attendees list from a fundraising event that purportedly generated over $6 million in revenue. Six million dollars that does not appear in the publicly available budgets. Not reconciled. Not explained. Just gone.

That is what is being blocked. Not abstract “records.” Not bureaucratic paperwork. Executive compensation. A $15 million secret contract. Six million dollars in unaccounted fundraising revenue.

Now consider the proportionality. BPIRG asked for documents. Broward Health’s response was to retain outside counsel, call our attorney a liar under oath, consume 70 court-gifted days, file a legally defective Answer riddled with improper pleading devices, object to every discovery request, file a Third-Party Complaint against me personally, and when the text messages showing their own lawyer admitting production was overdue hit the public record, file an emergency motion to seal — pre-drafted and filed in six minutes — then amend it the next day and make it worse. All while billing every hour of it to the taxpayers they are stonewalling.

Frivolous cases don’t generate this kind of response. Dangerous ones do.

And when those records finally come out — because they will — the questions will not be small. Who made the decision to fight this hard? Who authorized the strategy? Who signed off on the bills? Who told the lawyers to certify things to the court that weren’t true? And who told whom to violate Florida’s public records laws in the first place?

Somebody takes the fall. It is never the institution.

BPIRG Is Not Waiting

BPIRG has petitioned the Fourth District Court of Appeal to remove Circuit Judge Daniel A. Casey from this case. The petition is not a delay tactic. It is a direct challenge to documented bias — a judge who handed a 70-day extension in a case the Legislature mandated be heard with urgency, who declined to reach the merits at the initial hearing, and whose conduct on this record creates exactly the kind of reasonable fear that disqualification exists to address. If Casey stays on the case, I hope my concerns about his perceived bias are wrong, but they aren’t baseless.

BPIRG’s Motion to Compel is on the docket. The motion to seal my declaration has been opposed on the record by BPIRG, and my own pro se opposition is ready to file. Broward Health’s Answer has been challenged. The Third-Party Complaint against me has been challenged. Discovery is being forced. And the court has entered a case management order setting a mandatory conference. This case is not stalling. It is accelerating.

Delay. Misrepresent. Stonewall. Intimidate. Seal the evidence. Block the next request before the current one is resolved.

That is not a glitch in the system. That is the system.

At Broward Health, culture eats strategy for lunch and sends the bill to the taxpayers. But now the text messages are in the court file. Now the defects are catalogued. Now the demand for sanctions is on record. And now the demand for sanctions is before the court, with a second opposition ready to follow.

The cover-up is on the public record. It is just a matter of time before the public reads it.

Sunshine eventually eats secrecy. We’re done waiting for a sunny day.

Stay tuned to The Dan Lewis Report. If you value independent oversight of your tax dollars, share this report.