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 — s

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