A $4 million municipal debt accumulated over 15 years is being investigated by the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, Cape Canaveral city manager Keith Touchberry announced on Tuesday, July 21.
Ahead of a budget workshop, Touchberry said he wanted to give the city council and residents a “clear and honest” picture of the city’s financial situation as a “result of policy decisions over many years.”
“During that period, the city routinely relied on a term known as cash forward from the prior year as a funding source to balance the budget,” said Touchberry, hired for the city manager job in 2025 after serving as assistant city manager.
“It’s not a recurring source of revenue and doesn’t resolve a structural imbalance.”
Now, he said, the city is facing the possibility of receiving an unfavorable audit for a third year in a row and having no cash reserves to face emergencies like hurricanes, infrastructure failures, or any other unforeseen events.
Touchberry, the former Fellsmere police chief, said using the cash forward method had the effect of “obscuring the extent to which the city was relying on accumulated reserves to finance operations.”
According to Touchberry, the dwindling reserves and imbalanced spending were “not clearly presented to the council as part of the annual budget process. The city’s financial position continued to weaken. The city didn’t comply with its own code in 2025. The council was not formally notified as required by code, nor was a recovery plan presented to restore the balance.”
Touchberry said he would not speculate on the possibility of wrongdoing and that the sheriff’s office investigation remains open in order to find out whether any wrongdoing contributed to the spending down of the city’s finances.
Tyler Vazquez is the Growth and Development Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Vazquez at 321-480-0854 or tvazquez@floridatoday.com. X: @tyler_vazquez.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Cape Canaveral asks sheriff’s office to probe city’s $4 million debt
Reporting by Tyler Vazquez, Florida Today / Florida Today
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By Tyler Vazquez, Florida Today | USA TODAY Network
