The Slow No
The Greater Fort Lauderdale CVB had 34 days to answer a simple question about public money. They sent a bill instead.
On March 10, 2026, I filed a Chapter 119 request with the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau asking a straightforward question: how does the bureau decide which events get public tourism dollars, and how does it document those decisions?
How each heritage-referenced event sponsorship or expenditure under the Business Development & Community Engagement program (or any similar program) was evaluated and approved for FY 2024–2026, including the criteria applied and the official or office that authorized the expenditure.
The specific dollar amount disbursed for each ethnicity-referenced event, the funding source, and the contractual or budgetary authority under which the expenditure was made.
Any promotional materials, press releases, or social media content produced or distributed by the GFLCVB using Broward County funds that promote events organized around a specific ethnic or cultural heritage for the same period.
Any performance metrics, reporting requirements, or deliverables in the contract between Broward County and the GFLCVB that reference diversity, equity, inclusion, cultural heritage, or ethnicity-specific programming.
Simple. Lawful. Routine — or it should be.
Thirty-four days later — no acknowledgment, no response in between — I got an answer.
Not records. An answer.
The bureau informed me that producing responsive documents would cost $1,326.08. They called it an itemized estimate. No itemization was provided. Just a total. One number.
My dad would call that a slow no.
I’d put it differently (fuck right off Chaz), but this is a family publication.
Some people will say a fee estimate isn’t a no. It’s a conditional yes.
A fee you can’t verify and can’t afford isn’t a yes. It’s a yes with a lock on the door.
Data Is Data. No Data Is Data. All Are Points.
Here’s what most people do when they get that letter: they walk away.
Not a coincidence. A four-figure fee demand with no supporting math is a near-perfect deterrent. It works on almost every requester, almost every time, without leaving fingerprints. The agency never said no. They just said $1,326.
A slow no is still an answer.
If the bureau produces records showing how these decisions were made — what criteria were applied, who approved what, under what authority — that’s one kind of useful. It tells you whether the process was followed.
If the bureau produces nothing, or claims no records exist, that’s a different kind of useful. It means decisions were made without documentation.
If the bureau responds to a lawful public records request with a $1,326 fee and no itemization?
Also useful.
Every response is a data point. Every non-response is a data point. The fee is a data point. The math they haven’t shown me is a data point.
I collect them all.
What a $1,326 Fee Actually Tells You
Florida law — specifically § 119.07(4)(d) — requires that any special service charge “shall be reasonable and shall be based on the cost incurred… or the labor cost of the personnel providing the service that is actually incurred by the agency or attributable to the agency.”
Actually incurred. Not estimated. Not approximated. Not rounded to the nearest thirteen hundred dollars.
Also, the eight pennies really caught my attention. Attention, they say, is in the details.
If the bureau needed $1,326 worth of staff time to respond, that means someone sat down and calculated hours by function, hourly rates by salary grade, and IT costs if applicable. That worksheet either exists or it doesn’t.
If it exists, show it to me.
If it doesn’t, the fee wasn’t calculated. It was set. Those are different things.
One more implication. A $1,326 fee implies a voluminous records set. Voluminous records means the bureau maintains extensive documentation of how ethnicity-referenced events were evaluated, approved, and funded with public tourism dollars. That is precisely the kind of decision-making that Florida’s new anti-DEI statute — SB 1134, effective January 1, 2027 — will prohibit government agencies from conducting.
So the fee is either legitimate math or it’s a deterrent.
Either way, I’m interested in what’s behind it.
Most People Don’t Know They Can Push Back
A $1,326 fee letter is designed to end the conversation. For most requesters — people without legal training, without a playbook, without thirty years of doing this — it does exactly that. They don’t know that Florida law requires fees to be based on actual, documented costs. They don’t know that a lump sum with no supporting math is not a compliant response.
They just know it costs $1,326 and they don’t have it.
The fee isn’t just money. It’s a knowledge barrier. It works because most people don’t know what I know.
The FOI Request Engineering Playbook exists because that asymmetry shouldn’t be permanent.
Tallahassee Handed Me This Lever
I didn’t write Florida’s public records law. I didn’t write SB 1134. I didn’t write § 119.07(4)(d).
The Legislature did.
They wrote a transparency statute with teeth. They wrote a fee provision that requires agencies to justify every dollar with actual cost documentation. They handed citizens a legal instrument specifically designed to pry open government decision-making.
And now I’m using it.
If that produces uncomfortable outcomes for agencies that have been making decisions without documentation, charging fees without math, running processes that exist in practice but not on paper — that’s not my doing.
That’s the law doing what the law was designed to do.
The Kicker
If they have the math, they’ll show it.
If they don’t, they just told you how decisions get made with your money.
Either way, this isn’t about $1,326.
It’s about whether “itemization” means anything at all in Broward County.
I’ll post their answer when it comes.
Chaz Stevens is a Broward County resident and founder of REVOLT Insights.
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