Palm Beach County sheriff lavishes retiring execs with $400K bonuses

When Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputies retire, they usually can count on leaving with generous lifetime pensions, along with payouts for unused vacation and sick leave.

But the agency’s top executives leave with something else, too: massive retirement perks worth more than five times a deputy’s annual starting salary.

Sheriff Ric Bradshaw has doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra retirement payments to his top brass as they departed in recent years, an extraordinary benefit with no apparent parallels in other county government agencies, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found.

Bradshaw implemented the retirement benefits as early as 2014, records show, and in the following seven years he paid out bonuses of more than $400,000 each to at least three departing officials, including one payout of more than $700,000.

In 2021, he revised the bonus program to give executives hundreds of hours of extra paid time off instead of money — time off that could be cashed out for hundreds of thousands of dollars when they depart the agency.

This year, his former chief deputy, Frank DeMario, took advantage of that program for a huge payday. In addition to cashing out his regular sick leave and vacation time, he walked out the door with an extra $412,000 for unused extra time off.

The executive benefit continues despite a state law that generally prohibits government agencies in Florida from giving bonuses to exclusive groups of employees.

Public agencies in Florida that want to implement bonus programs must “base the award of a bonus on work performance” and “consider all employees for the bonus,” according to Florida law. Bradshaw’s program does neither.

https://news.yahoo.com/news/investigation-palm-beach-county-sheriff-150841232.html

Why would the Sheriff be paying additional bonuses to senior officials due to retire?