ORLANDO, Fla. — Orange County is accusing the now-defunct onePulse Foundation of obstructing its efforts to understand exactly how the group spent millions in tourist tax funds — and the dispute may be headed to the courts.

In a county commissioners meeting on Tuesday and follow up interviews with the Orlando Sentinel, Orange County Comptroller Phil Diamond said that the county has been insisting — with no success so far — that the foundation provide bank statements and other records relevant to the county’s review.

“We were told that we would receive records relating to the county’s expenditures to the Pulse foundation. And those are things that we have not received in spite of the foundation’s promises to the contrary,” Diamond said.

The dispute comes amid broader questions about onePulse’s expenditures of tax and donation dollars, which totaled nearly $20 million over the group’s seven-year existence. The Orlando Sentinel detailed what is known about the group’s spending and what questions remain unanswered in a recent investigative report.

In a March 12 email exchange between Christopher Dawkins, the county’s assistant comptroller, and Scott Shuker, the attorney representing onePulse, the county specifically requested bank statements, the final financial statement and the meeting minutes of the foundation. Dawkins indicated that onePulse has offered to allow the county to “blindly look through records, which could be in electronic format or in boxes scattered in no particular order,” but refused to locate and hand over the requested records itself.

In response, Shuker said the county is “free to commence legal action against the foundation for the alleged default and I will happily take it from there.”

In 2018, the onePulse Foundation secured from Orange County a grant of $10 million in tourist tax money to put toward its efforts to build a memorial and museum to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting that left 49 dead. The group spent $6.5 million of the money — most of it on a potential site for the museum — before going belly up late last year with the museum unbuilt and only a temporary memorial in place.

The city of Orlando has taken over the memorial portion of the project.

Diamond said that onePulse Foundation initially had agreed to provide the requested documents shortly after a discussion in a November 2023 commissioners’ meeting. He said he is uncertain why the group changed its position.

“There just seems to be no accountability. We may never get any accountability,” Commissioner Mayra Uribe said at the meeting. “There seems to be no one accounting anywhere for anything that’s being done.”

The onePulse Foundation previously returned to the county the museum site it bought with $3.5 million in tourist tax money, but that created another issue that commissioners wrestled with at their Tuesday meeting: The foundation left $52,000 in property taxes unpaid on the land.

After discussion, commissioners decided it would be in the best interest of the county to pay the tax bill now, in part to avoid the penalties that could be levied for a late payment.

“For now, it is in our financial interest and that of the taxpayers to at least pay it so that we don’t have a further calamity from this set of circumstances,” Mayor Jerry L. Demings said.

Demings also said that the onePulse Foundation has indicated it has no staff post-dissolution, using that as an excuse not to provide the county with the documents it has been requesting.

In addition to the $3.5 million cost of the property, which is at 438 W. Kaley St. in Orlando, the foundation also spent $3 million on various planning and design fees for the museum and memorial, an amount that has drawn criticism.

As part of its due diligence, the county’s real estate management division has obtained two appraisals of the Kaley Street property, and said the average came back to be just over $4 million.

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