Allyson Love

"It has minimum service impacts and we can accomplish the objectives of the city," city budget Director Allyson Love said.
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Love said her staff began molding the budget in June, before the new tax formulas were set by the state.When the hard numbers came in, the budget was smaller than it had to be.

"We were dealing with what we could confirm and know," said Love.

City Auditor Allyson Love has acquired new status as a result of the City's Budget Boondoggle. Her office is the center of a power struggle between the City Commission and the City Manager's office.
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In the meantime, because of the light that her office can focus on cloudy fiscal scenarios, Auditor Allyson Love's stock can only go up.
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One of City Auditor Allyson Love's troops, auditor Renee Foley, uncovered a contractor's repeated overbilling of the city, apparently in cahoots with city employees.
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In response to the disappointing discoveries made by Auditor Allyson Love's office, the City intends to recover the sorely needed $85,800 overbilled by RDC and exercise substantially stronger controls for effective oversight of future City projects. The Fort Lauderdale Engineering staff has also committed to establishing a written business ethics policy by March 22nd. To preclude a recurrence of this embarrassing (and expensive) scenario, all City contracts would be subject to the terms of this newly created policy. Difficult lessons learned by our municipality in reaction to these audits serve as poor excuses for silver linings. However, if Allyson Love bags a few more juicy ones, not only will she help the City shed its "fiscally casual" reputation that threatens our bond ratings, she'll have the makings of a $20 million four-part pay-per-view mini-series!
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Fort Lauderdale fiscal sleuth Renee Foley of Director Allyson Love's Internal Auditing team (operating under the auspices of the City Manager) uncovered additional cracks through which the City's money seems to fall through on an alarmingly regular basis.
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Personnel problems owing to the budget dilemma aside, if Allyson Love's audit adventures continue to encourage the City to straighten up and fly right, when the City does get back on its feet, it will have an excellent chance of remaining there!

Allyson Love's Internal Audit is in the Acting City Manager Alan A. Silva's offices.

On July 18th, Budget Department Director Alyson Love presented City Manager George Gretsas' new municipal budget designed to run from October 1, 2006 to September 30, 2007.

City Auditor Allyson Love has been an extremely active part of the City's budgetary housecleaning effort. Her audits of the Parks Department and some questionable practices ascribed to a contractor doing business with the City have affirmed the City Commission's commitment to tightening fiscal controls.

Allyson Love Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Betty Burrell, Director of Finance and Averill Dorsett, Director of the Department of Human Resources.
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Love was the Assistant Internal Auditor for the City from 1989 to 1990 when she was promoted to Internal Auditor.She was familiar with the City's budget crisis and knew its inner workings.In 2004, a promotion brought her to what was then the Finance and Budget Office.

When City Manager George Gretsas restructured the departments within the city, he split two departments out of one, the Department of Finance and the Office of Management and Budget, which Love directs.

She knows her job doesn't make her popular but her chief concern is that everyone be part of the process of keeping the City of Fort Lauderdale solvent and the reserve funds stable in case of emergencies."We knew what the problem was and that we had to analyze the operation to decide what controls to put in place," Love said.

The largest cost for a city is labor so Love began there.She created the Thaw Committee, which meets weekly to track operational costs.
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Director of Finance Betty Burrell takes the revenue and expenditure numbers and the amounts saved by Love to document the City of Fort Lauderdale's financials, economic conditions and major initiatives for its Comprehensive Annual Financial Report.

With the help of Allyson Love, director of the Office of Management and Budget, the city has reduced its insurance deficit and instituted checks and balances on its spending.
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Love, who had been the City's Internal Audit director, knew how to manage the money.