Watchdog News You Can Sink Your Teeth
FloridaBulldog.org | Fort Lauderdale, FL | 501(c)(3) Nonprofit | Est. 2009
PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: April 9, 2026 | Source: FloridaBulldog.org
FLORIDA BULLDOG NEWS SUMMARY — APRIL 2026
Earmarks, Evictions & a $4.6B Windfall | Broward’s Fire Rescue Crossroads | Reef Versus Port | The Judge Who Won’t Stay Quiet
Florida Bulldog publishes investigative journalism that follows the money, examines the exercise of power, and surfaces stories that would otherwise stay buried. The four reports in this April 2026 news summary — every one published within the past 45 days on FloridaBulldog.org — demonstrate what that commitment looks like in practice. A Sweetwater developer who cleared 3,000 residents from their homes is now unveiling a $4.6 billion master-planned city on the same ground — while two Miami congressmen who secured his federal grants got $400,000 in PAC contributions in return. The Broward County Commission is formally moving to strip BSO of its fire rescue operations after years of financial disputes. A $1.35 billion Army Corps of Engineers project threatens to do to Fort Lauderdale’s reef what a nearly identical project did to Miami’s — and NOAA says the Corps hasn’t done its homework. And a Miami appeals judge is arguing that the First Amendment protects the pointed text messages that landed her before the Florida Supreme Court on ethics charges.
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Gimenez and Diaz-Balart: HUD Earmarks for Li’l Abner Developer, Big PAC Donations in Return
By Dan Christensen & Cassidy Winegarden | FloridaBulldog.org | March 22, 2026
The evictions of roughly 3,000 elderly and working-class residents of Sweetwater’s Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park drew cameras, tears, and headlines across South Florida throughout 2025. What those cameras did not catch was happening behind the scenes in Washington, D.C. — where Miami Republican Congressmen Carlos Gimenez and Mario Diaz-Balart were quietly using federal earmarks to secure $10 million in grants for the developer responsible for the evictions, while that same developer was routing $400,000 in political contributions to their joint fundraising committees. Florida Bulldog spent nearly a year scouring thousands of public records to document how those threads intersect.
The developer, CREI Holdings CEO Raul F. Rodriguez, contributed $150,000 to the Gimenez Victory Committee just six weeks after Gimenez submitted his earmark request letter — 12 times more than any other Gimenez donor gave. Rodriguez contributed $250,000 to the Mario Diaz-Balart Victory Fund just 11 days after HUD publicly announced it was poised to release $4 million for Rodriguez’s Li’l Abner III affordable housing project. Both congressmen signed certification letters declaring they had “no financial interest” in the project. Yet the House Ethics Manual states plainly that a political contribution tied to an official action may implicate the federal gift statute or the criminal provisions on illegal gratuities or bribery. Neither congressman, nor Rodriguez, responded to Florida Bulldog’s requests for comment.
The congressional silence during the actual evictions was equally notable. As weeping residents made nightly television and court hearings drew hundreds of displaced families, neither Gimenez nor Diaz-Balart offered a single public statement of sympathy. For Gimenez, whose congressional district includes the Li’l Abner site, that silence was not a political miscalculation — it was an acknowledgment that speaking up would have been “particularly awkward” for a congressman who had quietly sold out hundreds of his own constituents. This is the story that investigative journalism exists to tell.
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The Gimenez/Diaz-Balart investigation required nearly a year of records work — federal election filings, congressional certification letters, HUD grant documents, Miami-Dade county records, and U.S. Senate lobbying disclosures. It is document-intensive accountability reporting that commercial newsrooms no longer have the resources to sustain. Florida Bulldog does — because readers fund it directly. The story generated more than 9,500 views within its first two weeks, among the highest readership of any story Florida Bulldog published this year.
The full Li’l Abner story — from the evictions to the congressional earmarks to the $4.6 billion development now rising on that same land — is a connected narrative about who Florida’s growth serves and who it displaces. Florida Bulldog is the only newsroom that has tracked every chapter.
Flagler Center: The $4.6 Billion Vision Rising on Sweetwater’s Evicted Community
By Cassidy Winegarden | FloridaBulldog.org | April 5, 2026
In October 2025 a court order gave the last holdouts at Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park 24 hours to vacate. In April 2026 Florida Bulldog reporter Cassidy Winegarden documented what rises in their place: “Flagler Center,” a $4.6 billion master-planned development covering more than 100 acres. The project will include more than 6,000 housing units, hundreds of retail storefronts, a new school, a 250-room hotel, and a comprehensive medical campus anchored by a 400-bed hospital. Developer Rodriguez’s attorney told the Sweetwater City Commission the development will generate 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. What will not be generated is any comparable benefit for the working-class and elderly families who were cleared from this ground to make it possible.
The process by which Sweetwater approved the project raises questions Florida Bulldog does not shy away from asking. During the February 13 special meeting where commissioners signed a 30-year contract with CREI Holdings, Commission President Marcos Villanueva and Vice President Jose Marti both said on the record they had not had time to read the documents. “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 sole negotiator with CREI under what the commission president called a “professional courtesy” — urged approval despite the time pressure. A 30-year, 100-plus-acre development contract was executed by commissioners who admitted they hadn’t read it.
Flagler Center reflects a broader Florida pattern: the combination of available land, state-level development incentives, and political infrastructure that accommodates large-scale private investment has made Florida a destination for master-planned communities — ten of the 25 best-selling such communities in the country are in Florida, according to Zonda. The question Florida Bulldog keeps asking is whether Florida’s growth machine serves the people already living here, or systematically displaces them to make room for something more profitable.
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Cassidy Winegarden’s Flagler Center story is the latest installment in Florida Bulldog’s sustained Li’l Abner coverage — a journalistic thread that connects the displaced residents, the federal earmarks, the congressional contributions, and now the billion-dollar development vision that has erased the community they built. This continuity of coverage is something only a well-resourced nonprofit newsroom can deliver consistently.
Broward County Poised to Take Back Fire Rescue Services From BSO
By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | April 7, 2026
The Broward County Commission placed a motion on its April 14 agenda that could fundamentally reshape public safety in South Florida: directing the county administrator to outline the process for bringing the Broward County Department of Fire Rescue — contracted to BSO since 2003 — back under direct county control. The same agenda item asks staff to evaluate a consulting study on forming a separate law enforcement agency to replace BSO at Port Everglades and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. If all of these moves proceed, BSO would lose an estimated $290 million in annual contract revenues — a seismic financial blow to a sheriff already asking Tallahassee to override the county’s budget decisions.
Commissioner Lamar Fisher, the agenda item’s sponsor, framed the case plainly. The commission has repeatedly allocated additional funds for specific BSO needs — staffing, pay raises, capital projects — only to find the sheriff spends the money as he sees fit. “He can spend whatever dollars he gets however he wishes,” Fisher told Florida Bulldog. “And that’s frustrating.” Public safety spending has climbed from under 50 percent of the county budget in 2018 to 54 percent today, with no mechanism for the county to direct how those dollars are used. That structural reality — constitutional sheriff autonomy without financial accountability to the county — is what the commission is now directly challenging.
The fragmentation of BSO’s contract base is the context in which this challenge lands. Pembroke Park formed its own police department in 2022. Deerfield Beach voted in January to sever both police and fire rescue contracts. Pompano Beach is studying independence. Each departure was a story Florida Bulldog reported before anyone else — building the body of documentation that makes the April 14 agenda fully comprehensible. BSO’s public statement in response highlighted fire rescue achievements. But accolades do not answer the accountability question the commission is asking.
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Florida Bulldog editor Dan Christensen has covered the Broward Sheriff’s Office through multiple administrations with a depth and source base no other outlet has matched. The April 14 meeting is a direct consequence of that accumulated record — years of reporting on budget irregularities, personnel decisions, contract disputes, and the widening gulf between the sheriff’s office and the county that funds it. For Broward’s two million residents, what happens at that meeting will determine who shows up when they call 911. Florida Bulldog will report every development.
Port Everglades Dredging vs. Florida’s Last Thriving Coral Reef — Billions at Stake
By Kailey Aiken | FloridaBulldog.org | April 9, 2026
Scientists from NOAA and the Shedd Aquarium have documented approximately 10 million corals living within about a mile of the proposed Port Everglades dredging site — including more than 40,000 colonies of endangered staghorn coral, some potentially centuries old. This reef, just beneath the surface off Fort Lauderdale, is one of the last genuinely healthy coral ecosystems in the continental United States. The $1.35 billion Port Everglades Navigation Improvements Project, led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, would deepen and widen the port’s shipping channels by blasting 400 underwater acres of seafloor with explosives, potentially for more than 200 days a year over five years. Florida Bulldog reporter Kailey Aiken has reported on what the science shows, what the historical record warns, and why the project has not yet been approved.
The historical warning comes from 30 miles south. A similar Army Corps project at PortMiami between 2013 and 2015 was projected to cause 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. Corps-hired consultants had initially reported just six dead corals. The Port Everglades reef is denser than the PortMiami reef was. “These are animals that are attached to the bottom, and they can’t move,” Shedd Aquarium biologist Ross Cunning told Florida Bulldog. “So when they’re buried by sediment, they die.” NOAA’s own Southeast regional administrator wrote to the Corps characterizing its environmental analyses as “unintelligible,” lacking “fundamentally important information,” and containing “significant factual and analytical flaws.” That is the federal government’s own scientists telling the Corps its work is not good enough.
Port officials argue that without the expansion, South Florida loses competitive ground to other deepened East Coast ports, and note that Port Everglades supplies nearly all of the region’s petroleum. Florida Bulldog’s reporting acknowledges those stakes. But the reef’s economic value is consistently underestimated: it reduces storm surge wave energy by up to 95 percent along Florida’s coastline, supports recreational diving, sportfishing, and marine tourism, and hosts staghorn coral that exists in viable populations in almost no other location in the continental United States.
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As of publication today, April 9, the project remains in regulatory review with no final approval granted. Conservation groups including Earthjustice and Miami Waterkeeper remain actively engaged. The science is on the record. The historical warning is documented. What remains is a decision — one that will either protect what scientists call a national natural treasure or sacrifice it to accommodate larger ships. Florida Bulldog will follow every development in the review process through to its conclusion.
ABOUT FLORIDA BULLDOG
Florida Bulldog is Florida’s independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative newsroom, founded in Fort Lauderdale in 2009 by award-winning journalist Dan Christensen. A federally tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization and member of the Investigative News Network, Florida Bulldog covers government, politics, law enforcement, the courts, education, business, the environment, health, and public safety statewide. No advertisers. No corporate owners. No political agenda.
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