FLORIDA BULLDOG –Watchdog News You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

FloridaBulldog.org | Fort Lauderdale, FL | Nonprofit | Est. 2009

PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: April 9, 2026 | Source: FloridaBulldog.org

The Billion-Dollar Bet on Sweetwater’s Displaced Residents | Broward’s Public Safety Empire Begins to Crack | A Doomed Reef and the Port That May Destroy It | A Judge Dares to Say What Florida Judges Are Supposed to Keep Quiet

Good journalism does not just describe what happened. At its best, it reveals what was hidden, names what is nameless, and forces into public view the decisions that powerful people would prefer to make in the dark. The four stories Florida Bulldog is highlighting in this April 2026 news summary — all published in the past 30 days on FloridaBulldog.org — do exactly that. A $4.6 billion master-planned development is being built on the ruins of a working-class mobile home community whose residents were evicted with 24 hours’ notice, while the city commission that approved a sweeping 30-year development contract admitted its members hadn’t had time to read it. The Broward County Commission is moving to dismantle large chunks of the sheriff’s empire by reclaiming fire rescue services outsourced since 2003. Billions of dollars and the last thriving coral reef on the U.S. mainland are on a collision course off the Fort Lauderdale coast. And a Miami appeals court judge is using the First Amendment as a shield against ethics charges that stem from text messages she sent while passionately defending a death penalty case she prosecuted two decades ago. These stories are happening right now. Florida Bulldog is on them.

Florida Bulldog is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit newsroom founded in Fort Lauderdale in 2009 by award-winning investigative journalist Dan Christensen. We accept no advertising, answer to no corporate interest, and carry no political allegiance. Everything we publish is freely available at FloridaBulldog.org. The reporters and editors who produce these stories are funded entirely by readers and donors who believe that accountable, independent journalism is not optional — it is the oxygen of a functioning democracy.

Support Florida Bulldog: FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

Flagler Center: $4.6 Billion Master-Planned Community Rising on Sweetwater’s Displaced Residents

By Cassidy Winegarden | FloridaBulldog.org | April 5, 2026

The earth has barely settled over the footprints of the Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park. Last October, court officers showed up with a 24-hour eviction order and cleared out the last holdouts among the roughly 3,000 working-class and elderly residents who had made the Sweetwater park their home — some for decades, many having sunk their life savings into mobile homes that could not be moved. Now, Florida Bulldog reporter Cassidy Winegarden has documented what is rising in their place: “Flagler Center,” a $4.6 billion master-planned development covering more than 100 acres that its developer, CREI Holdings CEO Raul F. Rodriguez, describes as the future of urban living in South Florida. The contrast between the people who were removed and the vision being built for those who will replace them is the story of modern Miami-Dade County in concentrated form.

The scale of what Rodriguez has won approval to build is extraordinary. Flagler Center’s approved master plan includes more than 6,000 housing units — with at least 1,000 designated as affordable, workforce, and senior housing — alongside hundreds of retail storefronts, private offices, a new school, a 250-room hotel, a self-storage facility, and a “comprehensive medical campus” featuring a hospital with more than 400 beds, a medical outpatient facility, and an assisted living facility on a 12.6-acre parcel already being offered for sale. The developer’s attorney told the Sweetwater City Commission that Flagler Center is “destined to become the new standard for live, work, play, and thrive” in Sweetwater — projecting more than $25 million in new annual tax revenue, 62 times what the property currently produces, along with 29,000 construction jobs and 5,000 permanent positions.

But Florida Bulldog’s reporting captures a moment of civic governance that raises serious questions about whether Sweetwater’s elected officials gave this approval the scrutiny it deserved. During the February 13 special meeting where commissioners approved Sweetwater’s 30-year contract with CREI Holdings, both Commission President Marcos Villanueva and Vice President Jose Marti acknowledged on the record that they had not had time to fully read the documents they were approving. “I know you’ve been working on this for years but it’s a lot for us to digest,” Marti said. Mayor Jose “Pepe” Diaz — who will serve as the city’s “negotiator” with CREI under a “professional courtesy” arrangement — acknowledged the time pressure but urged approval. A 30-year contract governing 100-plus acres was approved by commissioners who said they hadn’t fully read it.

★ KEEP THE WATCHDOG BITING — DONATE TO FLORIDA BULLDOG TODAY ▶ Make a Tax-Deductible Donation at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

This story cannot be read in isolation from what Florida Bulldog reported in March about the $10 million in federal earmarks that Congressmen Carlos Gimenez and Mario Diaz-Balart secured for CREI’s Li’l Abner III project — and the $400,000 in PAC contributions Rodriguez made to their political committees in proximity to those earmark requests. The residents who were evicted did not have congressional allies writing certification letters on their behalf. They had lawyers who filed a lawsuit that failed. They had television cameras that captured their tears. They had 24 hours to leave. Florida Bulldog’s reporting puts those two realities side by side, because that juxtaposition is the truth of what happened in Sweetwater.

Florida’s appetite for master-planned communities continues to accelerate — ten of the 25 best-selling master-planned communities in the country are in Florida, according to data from the marketing firm Zonda. Whether that trajectory serves the working-class and elderly Floridians who have historically made communities like Li’l Abner their home, or whether it systematically displaces them in favor of higher-value uses, is a question Florida Bulldog will continue to pursue through the full development arc of the Flagler Center project.

Cassidy Winegarden’s reporting on Flagler Center is the latest chapter in Florida Bulldog’s sustained coverage of the Li’l Abner story — from the evictions to the congressional earmarks to the grand unveiling of what rises in the displaced residents’ place. It is a story that requires a newsroom with institutional memory, source access, and the patience to follow a single thread across months and years of development. That is what nonprofit investigative journalism provides.

Broward Commission Moves to Dismantle BSO’s Fire Rescue Operations

By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | April 7, 2026

For years, Florida Bulldog has been documenting the gathering storm between the Broward County Commission and Sheriff Gregory Tony — the financial disputes, the personnel purges, the budget irregularities, the contracts coming undone. On April 7, Florida Bulldog editor Dan Christensen reported that the storm has arrived. On the agenda for the commission’s April 14 meeting: a motion to begin the process of bringing the Broward County Department of Fire Rescue — contracted out to BSO since 2003 — back under direct county control. The same agenda item asks county staff to consider the findings of a still-secret consulting study about forming a new law enforcement agency to replace BSO at Port Everglades and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. What the commission is discussing is not a budget dispute. It is the beginning of a fundamental restructuring of how public safety is delivered in Broward County.

The numbers tell part of the story. BSO’s own budget projects approximately $220 million in annual revenues for its fire rescue and emergency services. Taking back fire rescue would strip that revenue and more than 890 personnel from the sheriff’s operational control in a single move. Losing the Port Everglades and airport law enforcement contracts would cost an additional $70 million. For a sheriff who just traveled to Tallahassee asking DeSantis to force the county to give BSO $73 million more in funding — and whose own budget documents contain the irregularities Florida Bulldog documented in February — the prospect of losing contracts worth nearly $300 million represents an existential challenge.

Commissioner Lamar Fisher, the author of the April 14 agenda item, explained the frustration in terms every Broward taxpayer can understand. The county has repeatedly directed additional money toward specific BSO needs — pay raises, staffing, capital projects — only to discover that the sheriff can spend the money however he chooses. “He can spend whatever dollars he gets however he wishes,” Fisher told Florida Bulldog. “And that’s frustrating at times.” When public safety spending has grown from under 50 percent of the county budget in 2018 to 54 percent today, and the county cannot direct how that money is spent, the case for structural change becomes compelling.

★ KEEP THE WATCHDOG BITING — DONATE TO FLORIDA BULLDOG TODAY ▶ Make a Tax-Deductible Donation at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

Florida Bulldog’s reporting on this story reflects years of investment in sources, document analysis, and institutional knowledge that no other South Florida outlet has matched. The BSO story did not begin in April 2026. It began when Florida Bulldog first documented Tony’s concealed 1993 murder arrest, when it first exposed his undisclosed prior employment, when it first reported on the training center cost overruns, the ethics proceedings, the personnel purges, and the budget irregularities that have defined his tenure. The April 14 commission meeting is a direct consequence of that accumulated record.

The fragmentation of BSO’s contract base is accelerating from multiple directions simultaneously. Pembroke Park launched its own police department in 2022. Deerfield Beach voted in January to end its BSO contracts. Pompano Beach is studying its options. Now the county itself is considering whether to take back fire rescue and potentially replace BSO at the region’s two major transportation hubs. Florida Bulldog is the newsroom that mapped that erosion in real time, contract by contract, controversy by controversy, until the map became the story it is today.

For the more than two million Broward County residents who depend on BSO for fire rescue, emergency services, and law enforcement, the April 14 meeting is a decision about who will respond when they call 911, whose logo will be on the fire trucks in their neighborhoods, and whether the institution responsible for their safety is one that Broward County can actually hold accountable. Florida Bulldog will be covering every development through the weeks and months of proceedings that follow.

Port Everglades Dredging Project Threatens Florida’s Last Healthy Coral Stronghold

By Kailey Aiken | FloridaBulldog.org | April 9, 2026

You cannot see it from shore. You cannot see it from the highway that runs alongside Port Everglades, or from the cruise ship decks that glide past it on the way to sea. But beneath the surface of the water just off Fort Lauderdale, in and around the shipping channel that handles billions of dollars in cargo and fuel every year, there is something that scientists describe as one of the last genuine strongholds of coral health in the continental United States. Researchers from NOAA and the Shedd Aquarium have counted approximately 10 million corals living within about a mile of the proposed dredging site — including more than 40,000 colonies of endangered staghorn coral, some potentially centuries old. And a $1.35 billion federal project led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is positioned to destroy a significant portion of it. Florida Bulldog reporter Kailey Aiken has reported on what is at stake, what the science shows, and why the decision has not yet been made.

The Port Everglades Navigation Improvements Project exists because the port’s shipping channels are not deep enough or wide enough to accommodate the generation of massive Neo-Panamax container ships and supertankers that now dominate global trade. Port officials argue that without the expansion, Florida will lose competitive ground to other East Coast ports. These are real concerns with real economic consequences, and Florida Bulldog’s reporting takes them seriously. But the environmental case against the project is also real, and its scientific basis is considerably stronger than the Army Corps’s own analysts appear to have acknowledged. NOAA’s Southeast regional administrator wrote to the Corps that the agency’s environmental analyses are “unintelligible,” lacking “fundamentally important information,” and containing “significant factual and analytical flaws.” That is the federal government’s own environmental experts telling the Army Corps that it doesn’t know what it’s doing.

The consequences of getting this wrong are not theoretical. They are documented 30 miles south, where a nearly identical Army Corps dredging project at PortMiami between 2013 and 2015 produced what scientists now describe as an ecological catastrophe. The Corps predicted minimal coral damage. A 2019 scientific study found more than 560,000 corals killed, with harmful impacts extending up to six miles beyond the dredging site. Consultants initially reported just six corals killed. “These are animals that are attached to the bottom, and they can’t move,” Shedd Aquarium research biologist Ross Cunning told Florida Bulldog. “So when they’re buried by sediment, they die.” The reef around Port Everglades supports a higher coral density than the PortMiami site did. If history repeats itself, the scale of destruction could be correspondingly larger.

★ KEEP THE WATCHDOG BITING — DONATE TO FLORIDA BULLDOG TODAY ▶ Make a Tax-Deductible Donation at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

The economic argument for protecting the reef is not sentimental — it is practical. Coral reefs provide coastal protection by reducing storm surge wave energy by up to 95 percent. In a state facing rising sea levels and increasingly destructive hurricane seasons, that protection is worth more in avoided infrastructure damage than the incremental shipping efficiency gained from a deeper channel. The staghorn coral that populates this reef — once widespread throughout Florida’s coastal waters before disease and bleaching decimated the species — represents one of the very last viable populations remaining anywhere in the continental United States.

As of today’s publication date — April 9, 2026, the same day this story ran on FloridaBulldog.org — the Port Everglades Navigation Improvements Project remains in regulatory limbo. Conservation groups including Earthjustice and Miami Waterkeeper are actively engaged in the review process, and no final federal approval has been granted. That means the outcome is not yet determined. The science is in. The historical precedent is documented. The Army Corps’s own analyses have been called inadequate by federal scientists whose job is to evaluate them. What remains is a decision — one that will either protect the last healthy coral stronghold on the U.S. mainland, or sacrifice it to accommodate larger ships.

Kailey Aiken’s reporting brings a new voice to Florida Bulldog’s science and environment coverage — careful, rigorous, source-driven reporting that contextualizes technical regulatory proceedings within the broader story of what Florida’s natural heritage actually means, what threatens it, and what it would cost to lose it. This is the kind of reporting that South Florida needs and that the region’s diminished commercial press corps can no longer consistently provide.

Miami Appeals Judge Miller Claims First Amendment Shields Her Ethics Fight

By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | April 1, 2026

There is a straightforward version of the Bronwyn Miller story, and there is a complicated one. The straightforward version: a Miami appeals court judge sent blunt, pointed, sometimes caustic text messages to the Miami-Dade State Attorney about a high-profile resentencing case, crossed lines that the Judicial Qualifications Commission says no judge should cross, and is now facing ethics charges before the Florida Supreme Court. The complicated version — the one that Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has been tracking and now reports on in this latest chapter — is that Miller’s defense has transformed those ethics charges into a First Amendment case, a structural critique of Florida’s politicized judicial discipline system, and a potential rocket ship to federal court if the Florida Supreme Court rules against her. This is not just a story about one judge’s texts. It is a story about who controls Florida’s judiciary and on what terms.

The facts are well documented. Corey Smith, a convicted mass murderer whose death sentences were vacated in 2017, was undergoing a court-ordered resentencing. Miller — who as an assistant state attorney had prosecuted Smith two decades earlier — began texting her former boss, State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, with tactical advice, strategic criticism, and assessments of the lawyers and judge handling the resentencing that were, to put it charitably, direct. She called a motion “extremely weak.” She suggested a judge “needs to be disqualified.” When a new prosecutor assigned to the case had written a novel with a sadomasochistic motif, Miller asked why a “misogynistic pervert anti-death penalty campaigner” had been assigned to a death penalty case. After Rundle defended the prosecutor, Miller replied: “Ted Bundy was too.” The prosecutor was fired two weeks later. The texts became public. The JQC charged Miller with violating multiple canons of judicial conduct.

Miller’s defense, detailed in a 69-page motion by attorney Warren Lindsey and reported by Florida Bulldog, rests on two interlocking arguments: first, that there was no nexus between her private communications and her role on the Third DCA; and second, that applying judicial conduct canons to punish a judge for private communications about a matter of significant public concern cannot survive First Amendment scrutiny. “Are judges not called to task to make difficult decisions which require strongly held convictions and opinions on the administration of justice?” the motion asks — a question directed at a Florida Supreme Court that will find no comfortable answer in any direction.

★ KEEP THE WATCHDOG BITING — DONATE TO FLORIDA BULLDOG TODAY ▶ Make a Tax-Deductible Donation at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog

Florida Bulldog’s Noreen Marcus identifies the strategic subtext of the First Amendment argument with characteristic clarity: it is an escape route. If the Florida Supreme Court — six of whose seven justices are DeSantis appointees — rules against Miller on the merits, the constitutional framing gives her a predicate for a federal civil rights lawsuit challenging the state court’s removal of a judge on First Amendment grounds. That would be unprecedented in Florida judicial history, and it would involve a federal court with lifetime-appointed judges reviewing the disciplinary decision of a state court packed by a single governor. The legal and institutional implications of that scenario extend well beyond Bronwyn Miller’s individual fate.

Marcus’s reporting sits at the intersection of two separate stories Florida Bulldog has been telling for years: the transformation of Florida’s judiciary under DeSantis, and the question of whether Florida’s judicial discipline system treats all judges equally. The JQC moves aggressively against judges perceived as politically problematic while providing more accommodating treatment to those who align with the dominant ideology. Miller’s fight is happening in that context, and that context is essential to understanding what her case actually means.

Miller faces a retention election in November 2026. The outcome of her ethics proceedings before the Florida Supreme Court will directly shape whether she appears on that ballot as a sitting judge or as a former judge fighting to reclaim her seat. For the litigants, lawyers, and communities served by the Third District Court of Appeal — which handles criminal and civil appeals from Miami-Dade and Monroe counties — the question of who sits on that court is not abstract. It is the question of whether the court that reviews their cases is selected on merit and by law, or shaped by political calculations that have nothing to do with either. Florida Bulldog will be there for every development.

ABOUT FLORIDA BULLDOG

Florida Bulldog is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative newsroom serving South Florida and all of Florida since 2009. Founded by award-winning journalist Dan Christensen — a former investigative reporter at The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review — Florida Bulldog is staffed by veteran journalists whose work has produced criminal indictments, government reforms, and landmark court decisions. A federally tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization and member of the Investigative News Network. No advertisers. No corporate owners. No political agenda. Just the facts — and the determination to find them.

Read all of our work: www.FloridaBulldog.org Make a tax-deductible donation: FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog