ORLANDO, Fla. — Roses are red, violets are blue, our property taxes are high, because of you.

Chief Financial Officer and self-styled defender of taxpayers Blaise Ingoglia offered that piece of doggerel Wednesday to blast Orlando for what he called wasteful spending of public dollars: $6,000 annually for the city’s poet laureate.

“In the city of Orlando there is a poet laureate program that uses your tax dollars to pay poets to write poems,” he said at a Jacksonville appearance, flanked by a grinning Gov. Ron DeSantis. “So in an effort to save taxpayer money we wrote a couple of them for free.”

Ingoglia has visited numerous city and county governments in recent weeks, accompanied by state auditors bent on ferreting out exorbitant government spending. It’s all part of DeSantis’ Florida DOGE effort — so named after billionaire Elon Musk’s government spending crackdown in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.

During these visits, Ingoglia has held up placards with massive dollar figures in red, characterizing the amounts as to how much residents were overtaxed in places including Alachua, Broward, Hillsborough, Jacksonville and Orange. Local officials have objected to his calculations, saying they aren’t based on reality.

But until recently the CFO provided scant examples of programs he considers to be overspending.

The poet laureate critique was meant to change that, but the amount Ingoglia flagged represents 0.0008% of Orlando’s $742.6 million general fund budget, part of an annual $1.8 billion spending blueprint. That amounts to pennies as a portion of the average property tax bill. In addition to a $6,000 stipend, the poet also gets reimbursed for approved expenses related to the role.

Longtime Orlando resident Shawn Welcome, a University of Central Florida graduate, has drawn wide acclaim as the city’s second poet laureate, receiving $4,000 annually. His four years in the post are nearing an end, with Mayor Buddy Dyer announcing his higher-paid successor Monday.

Welcome could not be reached Thursday by email or phone for comment.

According to the city’s website, as Orlando’s official storyteller the poet laureate presents original poems at city events and youth activities to inspire emerging generations of literary artists and poets. The appointee serves a one-year-term with annual renewals for a total of four years. Orlando native Susan Lilley became the inaugural poet laureate in 2018 at $3,000 per year.

In paying its poet, Orlando appears to be unusual.

Other Florida cities have poet laureates, including Gulfport, St. Augustine and St. Petersburg, but none of those are paid by the local governments. Florida has its own bard-in-chief, an honorary role within the Department of State. Peter Meinke has held the unpaid post since his appointment by then-Gov. Rick Scott in 2015.

In Jacksonville, Ingoglia also tweaked Orlando for spending almost $70,000 on “hot yoga classes”; offering training in microaggressions and advanced energy equity, “whatever the heck that means”; and allocating almost $500,000 “to count trees.”

“Maybe they’re trying to find the money tree. Oh, wait, never mind, they actually found it — you the taxpayers,” he said.

A city spokesperson said Orlando inventories its trees to evaluate, maintain and treat for damage or disease. But no property taxes — the ostensible focus of Ingoglia’s auditing — are used. Instead, the city received three grants totaling $70,500 over the last five years from the state with the remaining funds coming from the Street Tree Fund paid into by developers for new construction.

The spokesperson said yoga is provided as part of the city’s Employee Wellness Program that helps create a healthier workforce and leads to lower costs for health care and risks associated with workplace accidents.

(Sentinel staff writer Ryan Gillespie contributed to this report.)

©2025 Orlando Sentinel. Visit orlandosentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.