Why I Do This

A Philosophy of Civic Engagement — and What Happens When You Actually Show Up

This morning, my sister, Cornelia, asked me why I spend my time fighting a public hospital over documents.

It’s a fair question. The litigation against Broward Health is now past its fourth month. The docket has 45 entries. I’ve been personally sued by the institution — a third-party complaint seeking to permanently bar me from ever filing a public records request again. My legal costs are real. My time is consumed. And the documents I’ve been asking for since March 2025 — payroll data, employment contracts, event records — are the kinds of things that should have arrived in an email attachment.

So why do it?

Because this isn’t about Broward Health. Broward Health is the example. The principle is bigger, and it is simple: you cannot participate in your own democracy if you don’t have information about what your government is doing. And you will never have that information unless you demand it.

This article is about that principle — what I believe, why I believe it, and what I’ve learned from fourteen years of putting it into practice.

The Ladder You Have to Climb from the Bottom

Everyone I talk to is frustrated by national politics. The dysfunction in Washington. The polarization. The sense that nothing works and nobody is listening. I understand the frustration. I share it.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe after more than a decade of civic engagement: you can’t fix national politics without fixing your state. You can’t fix your state without fixing your county. You can’t fix your county without fixing your community.

Your community is not an abstraction. It is a specific collection of public entities — a hospital district, a school board, a water management district, a housing authority, a city commission — each one spending your tax money, making decisions that affect your daily life, and operating under laws that say you have the right to know what they’re doing.

Every one of these entities shares a single structural requirement: transparency. If they are transparent, you can participate. If they are not, you can’t. It’s that simple. The conversation is rigged before it starts when the people making decisions control the information about those decisions.

And here’s the thing most people don’t realize: transparency is not a condition. It’s a practice. It’s not something that exists because a law says it should. It’s something that exists only when citizens exercise their right to demand it — and keep demanding it, and keep showing up, and keep filing requests, and keep attending meetings, and keep documenting what they find.

The moment you stop, the institution reverts. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve watched it happen in real time, at Broward Health, over more than a decade. And the record proves it in both directions — what happens when citizens engage, and what happens when they don’t.

How It Started: A Daughter’s Life and a Decision

I didn’t start this as an activist or a journalist or a litigant. I started as a father.

In 2011, my daughter nearly died from a rare medical syndrome. The emergency and ICU services at Broward Health — the public hospital system my tax dollars helped fund — failed her through systemic incompetence. She survived. But the experience changed something fundamental in how I understood my relationship to the public institutions around me.

I had a choice. I could litigate the medical failures. Or I could do something harder: commit my abilities and resources to making the system better so it wouldn’t fail someone else’s daughter.

I chose the harder path. Beginning in 2012, I attended virtually every open committee and Board meeting at Broward Health. Not occasionally. Not when something controversial was on the agenda. Every meeting. For three years. I met with current and former Board members, senior staff, physicians, and elected officials. I brought thirty years of experience in systems architecture and organizational strategy. I came with an evolving agenda focused on one goal: making this district one of the finest public hospital systems in the country.

That was the first exercise of transparency — simply showing up and watching. And it taught me the first lesson: what you learn by being in the room is different from what they tell you from outside it.

The $44,000 Lesson

My education in how transparency gets resisted began in earnest in 2015.

Dr. Nabil El Sanadi had just been installed as Broward Health’s CEO — a position he secured through political connections to the Board Chair and Governor Rick Scott. When I requested a meeting to continue the initiatives I’d been working on, his office first demanded to know my agenda in advance, then unilaterally cancelled the meeting without explanation, then had the corporate attorney send me a letter that amounted to a warning not to ask questions.

So I stopped asking for meetings. I started asking for records.

I filed a public records request — my first at Broward Health — seeking, among other things, El Sanadi’s outside compensation contracts with the Broward Sheriff’s Office and three cities. These were directly relevant: he was earning over $300,000 in part-time political appointments while serving as Broward Health’s “full-time” CEO at $675,000. The potential conflicts under federal anti-kickback law were obvious.

Broward Health’s response: hire a law firm. Berger Singerman billed 25.8 hours in February 2015 alone — including a partner conferencing with the CEO about “119 issues” and an associate spending 10.3 hours in a single day researching my records request. The February invoice: $10,859. The billing continued for months. Total cost to the taxpayers for responding to my request: approximately $44,000.

The response, when it finally arrived roughly 60 days later, was heavily redacted.

Then I did something that changed my understanding of what was really happening. I asked the other agencies — BSO, Fort Lauderdale, Sunrise, Tamarac — for the same contracts.

Every one of them produced the records electronically, unredacted, within 48 hours.

Forty-four thousand dollars and 60 days at Broward Health. An email attachment and 48 hours everywhere else. The same documents. The difference was not complexity. The difference was institutional choice.

That was when I understood: the resistance to transparency is not about logistics. It’s about control. And it will continue as long as nobody challenges it.

The Blog: Documenting Everything in Real Time

Starting in 2015, I began publishing what I was finding. First at BrwdHealthBlog.com, then at DanLewisReport.com. The articles were detailed, sourced, and public. “Just Say No — How Not to Cancel a Meeting” was a four-part series documenting the El Sanadi encounter. “The Best Broward Health CEO Contract Politics Can Buy” examined how political contributions secured the CEO appointment. When I obtained billing invoices showing what Broward Health spent to resist my records request, I published those too.

The blog was an exercise of transparency in itself. Everything I learned, I documented publicly. Not behind a subscription wall. Not in private letters. In public, where anyone could read it, verify it, and act on it.

This is a form of civic engagement that anyone can practice. You don’t need a law degree. You don’t need to file a lawsuit. You need a public records request, a computer, and the willingness to publish what you find. The public record is the raw material. Your willingness to make it visible is the act.

Recording the Meetings They Didn’t Want Recorded

In 2018, Broward Health did not livestream its board meetings. There was no online archive. If you wanted to know what happened at a meeting, you either attended in person or you didn’t know.

So I recorded them. Both cameras and audio. I posted the footage to YouTube. All-day committee sessions and full Board meetings — unedited, publicly accessible, free.

I became the institution’s transparency infrastructure because the institution wouldn’t build its own.

There were remarkable moments in those recordings — moments that would never have been documented otherwise. Commissioners making promises. Staff giving presentations that contradicted their own written reports. Community leaders standing at the podium and speaking truths the Board didn’t want to hear on any permanent record.

In September 2018, Vicente Thrower from Pompano Beach stood at that podium and said: “We are having some serious things that this board committed to us of transparency and trust... we have to stick to that commitment.”

Commissioner Ray Berry began drafting a formal transparency resolution. The board discussed livestreaming for the first time. By October 2018, I was able to write an article headlined “Broward Health to Finally See Sunny Days” — because the board, under public pressure, had agreed to begin livestreaming and archiving meetings.

That didn’t happen because the board woke up one morning and decided to be transparent. It happened because citizens showed up, recorded what was happening, published it, and made it impossible to pretend the public wasn’t watching.

Following the Money: Accounts Payable Analysis

In 2018, I obtained Broward Health’s accounts payable data through a public records request. Then I did what any competent analyst would do: I built a spreadsheet.

What I found was that General Counsel Lynn Barrett’s office was spending approximately $500,000 per month on outside legal counsel — a burn rate exceeding $6 million per year — on top of her staff of six to seven in-house attorneys. This was public money. Healthcare dollars. Money that could have funded patient care in the communities that needed it most.

I published the analysis. I identified the vendors. I cross-referenced the spending against Board presentations where Barrett had reported on legal costs — and found the numbers didn’t track. I sent the analysis directly to Broward Health’s CFO, copying the CEO and a commissioner, and asked pointed questions: Who is “Law Office Of”? Under what ethical basis is BH paying for an indicted former commissioner’s defense? Is this hush money?

This is what exercising transparency looks like in practice. You obtain the data. You analyze it. You publish it. You ask the questions that the data raises. And you do it all in writing, on the record, where the institution cannot later claim it didn’t know.

A Florida Bulldog investigation subsequently confirmed the broader picture: “Republican-led Broward Health paid $3 million in legal fees to firms tied to Gov. Rick Scott.” Even the Board Chair at the time acknowledged the problem on the record: “The legal bills are completely out of control. This is runaway lawyering with no governance from the board.”

He was suspended by the Governor less than a month later.

The Proof: When Engagement Works

Here is where the philosophy stops being abstract and becomes empirical.

From roughly mid-2019 through early 2021, everything I’m describing worked. Citizens had engaged. The pressure was sustained. The institution responded.

A reconstituted Board passed real governance reforms. On January 29, 2020, the Board adopted Resolution FY20-14 — a binding policy explicitly affirming that all district records are public records subject to disclosure. The legal budget carried a dedicated line item for public records compliance, funded at $325,000. The OIG findings were being taken seriously. A CEO search was conducted transparently, with published criteria, structured interviews, and documented candidate rankings.

CEO Gino Santorio — a career healthcare professional, not a political operative — trimmed $30 million from the budget, reduced taxes by $20 million, and disbursed $116 million in capital improvements. The institution was functioning. It was serving the public. It was transparent.

This happened not because the law changed. Not because the Board suddenly discovered a conscience. It happened because citizens engaged and refused to stop engaging. The meetings were being recorded. The records were being requested. The spending was being tracked. The blog posts were being published. The community leaders were standing at the podium. The pressure was constant, visible, and documented.

The institution worked because the public demanded that it work.

The Proof: When Engagement Stops

Then the engagement stopped mattering — not because citizens gave up, but because the political structure changed.

In April 2021, the Board replaced Santorio with Shane Strum — Governor DeSantis’s former Chief of Staff. The Board that hired him was composed entirely of gubernatorial appointees. The external accountability infrastructure — the community pressure, the reform-minded commissioners, the operational CEO who understood compliance as a management obligation — was replaced by internal alignment with an executive branch that does not prioritize transparency.

Within two years:

• The public records compliance budget was cut from $325,000 to $80,000 — a 75 percent reduction.

• The litigation budget grew from $785,000 to $6,700,000 — an increase of more than 750 percent.

• The institution stopped spending on compliance and started spending on resistance.

When I filed public records requests in March 2025, the response was nine months of silence followed by a lawsuit — mine against them. When I obtained the first records in April 2026, they revealed a CEO compensation package of $4.6 million with a $3.7 million gap that nobody on the Board could explain. Employment contracts were missing for 33 executives. A fundraising event that generated millions had no public accounting.

The information existed. It was always there. The institution simply chose not to share it — because nobody was making them.

This is what happens when transparency is not exercised. The muscle atrophies. The culture reverts. The institution serves itself instead of the public it was created to serve.

What I Believe — and Why It Matters for You

I am not doing this because I enjoy litigation. I am not doing this because I have a grudge against Broward Health. I am doing this because I believe — with evidence accumulated over fourteen years — that local civic engagement is the only thing that actually works.

The people who run your local public agencies are not, in most cases, villains. They are people operating within institutional incentive structures that pull toward self-protection, opacity, and the path of least resistance. Left unchallenged, those incentives win. The budget gets complex. The contracts get negotiated in shade. The board meetings become performative. The public records get delayed, then redacted, then resisted, then litigated.

But when citizens show up — when they attend the meetings, file the requests, analyze the data, publish the findings, and refuse to accept silence — the institutions respond. I’ve seen it. I’ve documented it. The record proves it.

This is not about being an expert. I started with no legal training, no journalism background, no political connections. I started with a public records request and a willingness to read what came back. Everything I learned, I learned by doing — and everything I learned is available to anyone willing to do the same.

Here’s what you actually need:

• Your state’s public records law. In Florida, it’s Chapter 119. Every state has one. Learn the basics: what’s a public record, who has to produce it, how fast, and what happens when they don’t.

• An email address. Most public records requests can be filed by email. You don’t need a lawyer. You don’t need letterhead. You need a clear, specific request sent to the records custodian.

• A willingness to read. The records are not exciting. They are budgets, contracts, meeting minutes, accounts payable reports. But they are where the truth lives. If you can read a spreadsheet, you can follow the money. If you can read a contract, you can find the conflicts.

• A place to publish. A blog. A Substack. A community Facebook page. A letter to the editor. The format doesn’t matter. What matters is that what you find becomes visible to your community.

• Persistence. They will delay. They will ask for clarification. They will estimate fees designed to discourage you. They will produce records in formats designed to be difficult to analyze. They will hire lawyers. They may sue you. None of this means you’re wrong. All of it means you’re asking the right questions.

The Bottom of the Ladder

I started at the bottom of the ladder. A father whose daughter almost died in a public hospital. A taxpayer who decided to attend board meetings. A citizen who filed a public records request and discovered that the institution preferred to spend $44,000 resisting it rather than answer it.

Fourteen years later, I have a blog archive spanning a decade. A Substack with a growing readership. A pending lawsuit that has already produced the first public disclosure of executive compensation data in years. A published record showing that when citizens engage, institutions work — and when they don’t, institutions default to serving themselves.

The ladder goes all the way up. County to state. State to national. But you have to start at the bottom. You have to start where you live. And you have to start with the one thing that makes everything else possible: information.

Your government has it. The law says you’re entitled to it. But you will never receive it unless you ask.

And when you ask, you must be prepared for the possibility that they will say no. That they will delay. That they will resist. That they will spend your tax dollars fighting your right to see how they spend your tax dollars.

That’s when you find out what transparency actually requires. Not a law on the books. Not a resolution on a wall. A citizen who refuses to stop asking.

That’s why I do this.

Dan Lewis is the Managing Director of Broward Public Interest Research Group, LLC (BPIRG), and the author and content creator behind DanLewisReport.com and DanLewisReport.Substack.com. He is a former board advisor to Broward Health and Memorial Health Systems and previously served as Broward Health’s Executive Advisor for Special Projects.

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