Property tax distribution and constitutional officer budgets
What the county recorded
This item is not from the published agenda
It is a stretch of the recording that this archive identified as a separate matter — a call to order, a recess, or something taken up that the agenda does not list. There is no official title, no staff recommendation and no disposition, because the county never recorded one. Everything below is inferred.
The source document
The county’s agenda for Board of County Commissioners, Jun 19, 2025
The published PDF. Its text could not be extracted — it is an image-only scan — so nothing in it is searchable here, but it reads normally.
What was said
Machine transcription of 17m of recording, with speaker names inferred from voice matching. 100% of 53 lines carry a name. It shows what was said, not what was decided, and both the words and the names can be wrong.
All right, so now when we're talking about your property tax dollars. Where does that money go, right? And so these are just your ad valorem property taxes. So what we're looking at here does not include any CDDs one might pay. It really just is, it's not your stormwater assessments. This really just is property taxes. For every dollar of property taxes that the common citizen pays, where does that money go? And
so one penny of every dollar goes to Swift Mud. One penny of every dollar goes to Mosquito Control, Thirty-eight cents of every dollar goes to the school board. So forty cents for every dollar that the taxpayer pays does is not under the purview of this board that's sitting with me today. But 60 cents of every dollar is. And so now let's talk about how that 60 cents is distributed throughout the county. And so this is based off fiscal year
25, right? So property taxes that people are now paying. So two cents of That 60 cents goes to maintaining our roads. Um and that's not the only revenue source that goes toward our road program, but for maintenance, that's your road MSTU. Um twenty-one cents goes to the sheriff. 20 cents goes to board side public safety, so fire rescue corrections. Um, two cents goes
to our parks department. Our other constitutional officers, not including the sheriff, and our support of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, that equates to four cents on every dollar. Public services, so think senior services, libraries, your veteran services. So that's three cents of every dollar. Three cents goes towards general obligation, bond, debt payments, and our contribution to our community redevelopment areas. And then five
cents goes to our support services. So think about those services that are kind of behind the scenes. means keeping the wheels moving but aren't necessarily public facing. So our facilities management team, our information technology department, Our administrative departments, right? So kind of all that behind the scenes. My department is lumped in there in a a support service standpoint.
Now this graphic right here, oop, this graphic right here that we just showed you, the that county distribution of property taxes, that makes up that big slice of our overall general fund revenue. But in our general fund there are other types of revenues as well. So the next biggest piece of the pie is that starting off fund balance number. That next bit of the pie is money that comes to us from the federal government and the state government. So think our half-cent
half-cent sales tax, our guaranteed entitlement, those types of revenue sources. Then you'll see our charges for service. So this is where we are charging for a specific service that's coming back into the county um and that is a very small piece of our overall revenue stream because most of our services um did we That are general funded are free to our citizens. We don't really charge for a lot of our services. And then internal charges. So this one, um, we just wanted to give some transparency
because there are some departments in our county who are supporting other departments. And so we try to the best of our ability to recoup funding to offset expenses to the taxpayer so that way our taxpayers are only paying for the services that they should be paying for. And so we do something called a cost allocation. study where we we do recoup some of the support from other funds like Solid Waste or Water Utility Fund. And again, it's to make sure that our property taxes are really only paying for those things that
they should be paying for. And then we've got um Some other revenues here. So in uh And our miscellaneous, um, so that includes a a big chunk of that, so roughly six and a half million dollars of that is where our fire rescue team is getting some public emergency medical transportation supplement. Um. to kind of offset because when you transport somebody who is uh under Medicaid coverage,
you are capped at the amount that you can receive in that transport. And so this program helps us offset some of those costs and uh keep our fire rescue team moving.
All right, so now let's talk about the other side of the equation, which is our expense side. So, how are those expenses broken out? And so the biggest chunk of expenses in our general fund are around public safety to include the sheriff, corrections, fire rescue, emergency management, our 911 team. So they're they make up that other. And then that green part of the bar is our outward facing department. So that's our parks department, community services, libraries.
Um the blue one is our general government. So again, think of those like those support services that we saw that were five cents of every dollar that the taxpayer pays. So we've got our facilities department, IT, our different administrative departments.
All right. And so back on this slide
We said that there was about fifteen million dollars in increased property taxes coming back to the board. But some of that is already accounted for.
And so we are looking at, like I said earlier, trying to maintain the progress we made from fairly paying our team members so that way we can retain our high talent. So we are modeling a wage increase here. There's a retirement state-mandated retirement increase that we also have that we're accounting for. We are still working through our phase-in approach of being able to expand to operate our jail expansion when that whole project comes live. When
we look at the other constitutional officers, not including the sheriff, that was about a $1.3 million increase. And we have some slides to talk about some of the pressures that they're feeling as well. So you can see why their budget requests are up a little bit from last year. year um it includes ten additional sheriff deputies um that the board is contributing over and above the forty percent of the taxable assessed value increase. Um Operating our Wesley Chapel Library, which is you'll
remember is going live this year. And we're in negotiations with our corrections union and so there's some some more to come there. We don't have a firm number because that that's still underway. And we are in the process of working through um Making sure that we really are putting our resources in the strategic plan where the board has told us these are priorities. And so the team's looking on bringing on a homeless program administrator
to help us with some creative solutions to solving our homeless issues in the county.
Any questions or thoughts before we move on to the next slide?
All right. So here is our one-time capital fund um Our capital our general fund capital investments that the county administrator is proposing. So we're looking at the Hudson Library renovation. We think that the animal shelter
We're still waiting to see how but it looks like that might not be getting funded from this date. Yeah, so but we have this placeholder in here um just in case um but we'll see when Uh everything gets through the governor.
Is there anything in the budget for the animal shelter? No? Yeah.
Yeah.
That's
that's a shame. We went to sleep on us.
And so in twenty-five we had design money for an armory for the sheriff, and so this year in the program is the construction bit of for that armory. Um the next thing you see here is facilities budget requests, so investing a million dollars into things like carpet replacement, reconfiguration of spaces, um you know, to meet our department needs. Uh four point six million um into our facilities renewal and replacement program where we're
looking at maintaining roofs and um HVAC units and things like that, trying to maintain the longevity of our buildings. Um 2.2 million invested into our facilities. Master plan. Uh one roughly 1.6 million into IT projects and capital, and then 1.25 million into our parks non-capital maintenance and sod replacement.
All right, so then our five-year lookout for our general fund capital, we've got everything you saw from the other slide, and so we um we build into our five-year plan. Um
maintaining our facilities, our IT, um and we've got the parks non-capital maintenance and sod replacement built out for five years. And then we also are we've got programmed in an FY twenty nine electronic poll books for the supervisor of elections and then an FY twenty seven Um Mm-hmm. Back when we got ARPA funding, there was a list of projects that the board had approved. And so we had a cash flow plan to fund all of those projects,
even though it's not technically being funded with ARPA. anymore. We do like to let you all know that those projects are still happening. Here's the year in which it is happening and I believe this is the last one and this was our um our economic bit of it, so our harbors redevelopment program.
And then we had talked earlier about how we're seeing some um general inflation applying some pressure. And so when we look at some of our um General fund departments, this really just shows you what that pressure looks like. And so we are looking to be able to absorb some of that pressure by modestly increasing by roughly 5.3% just normal operating budgets for our departments in the general fund without including any new initiatives. in
order to be able to maintain the level of service that our citizens have come to expect from us, that is going that is roughly a five point three percent increase in our operating budgets, that equates to almost thirteen million dollars, um more than last year's adopted number.
Alright, and so also within the general fund, we have what we call our outside funding contributions. Anything that you see here that is bold and italicized are state mandates for us to fund. Anything that is not bold and italicized is um we are contributing at the board's discretion. And so our biggest increase is that Medicaid number we did. Get it that did come to us from the state, so we are looking at 1.09 million increase
over last year for that Medicaid.
All right. So what else is in our general fund? Well, we've got our other constitutional officers and just a reminder to the board of the timeline driven by state statute of when those budgets are due to us. And you'll be happy to know they all made it on time. And the only one that were left Uh that we haven't got in yet is the tax collector because that doesn't come to us until August first.
All right, and so here's the high level picture of our constitutional officer budget requests and um the change from FY25 adopted. And then like I said, we've got individual slides behind here so we can show you what are those details. All right, so we'll start with the clerk. And so some of the stuff on this slide is baked into the clerk's request, but the stuff at the bottom is not yet in there. You'll remember in April when we did the uh workshop with our constitutional officers on the budget, um,
the clerk let us know that there was a bill running through that might impact her workload. And so um it's Still It's still out there, it's still viable, and if it gets signed by the governor, um That she will be requesting one additional FTE above the budget that she already submitted to us, and she's estimating that cost to be about 60,000. But what is baked into her request, and you can see it broken out between
Board Services and then our multi-agency CGIS, she is requesting two new positions: cybersecurity and for documentation, a refresh of the audit software. Which all this was discussed at the April workshop. And then those two buckets you see reflected in the board side. And then the salary and retirement increases are across both of those operating units.
And then the sheriff um So his his number includes those 10 additional deputies that that we are funding on his behalf, the 40% of new property tax revenue allocation, and in his budget submission, he did let us know that he's looking at 2.5% increase for salaries, benefits, self-insurance, and retirement, $1.37 million for contractual and equipment costs as Escalators and then his capital purchase of $2.4 million,
but this does actually represent a little more than half a million dollar reduction from his 25 budget.
And the supervisor of elections is increasing his budget submission by a little bit for vote by mail and sample ballot postage because 26 is an election year. The property appraisers includes a wage increase and some network switches and firewalls.
I notice I notice the property pricer has five percent. Is that like negotiable. I mean no one else is doing five percent. Just Throwing that out there. Have you talked with him?
Yeah we I mean we we did have some initial conversations they believe um you know uh currently with what their employees are paid that that five percent is is the right market.
What was he last year?
Uh I think they matched with us. I don't recall last year.
I'll let you know.
Um did the I'm sorry, did the clerk have a oh that's not me. That was the proper phrase.
Technology upgrade. Was there a did the clerk put in what she is talking about for salaries?
Um so I can say that the clerk historically tracks with us, so wherever we settle um they will have a like wage increase.
Okay, like the payments when it comes to supervisor election.
And I've asked the county administrator to get us a track of the count the constitutional officers budget s from twenty ten to today, just like we tracked ours.
All right. Any further discussion?
That's what we said for two.