Election office budget and IT costs
What the county recorded
This item is not from the published agenda
This archive found it in the recording: a call to order, a recess, or business the board never listed. The county recorded nothing about it, so everything below is our reading.
The source document
The county’s agenda for Board of County Commissioners, Jun 18, 2026
The published PDF. Its text could not be extracted, because it is an image-only scan, so nothing in it is searchable here. It still reads normally.
What was said
Machine transcription of 4m of recording, with speaker names inferred from voice matching. 87% of 15 lines carry a name. It shows what was said, not what was decided, and both the words and the names can be wrong.
Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Commissioner. I'm gonna continue the trend of no PowerPoint. It's just me for a very brief time. Um thank you for the opportunity to be here and host this uh this workshop. These are indeed challenging times, as we've heard in our invocation and a consistent theme. However, I will stress again the continued partnership between not only my office and the board, as well as my fellow constitutional officers. During my tenure, I think it's pretty safe to say we've shared a collective goal of serving the citizens, as my good friend Mike Fasano would say, truly Pasco
proud. Um my office and its budget are unique. Some would say for a variety of reasons, but specifically with regards to the budgetary nature of our office. You know, we talk about the heavy versus less heavy budgets with overlapping primary and general elections. And something I don't talk about often, but our unique staffing dynamic. You know, we very, very small full-time complement, but swells up in even numbered years to be one of the largest employers in the county with our outstanding election workers that help us deliver secure and accessible elections
in 122 precincts to nearly a half million voters. And with regards to our budget, I'm proud to say the trend continues that my office, of all the SOE offices in the state, my office consistently has been one of the lowest costs per voter with regards to our respective budget. This particular budget submission at just over 4% increase. The increase is due primarily to the following. Something we all know about. Minimum wage increases. Of course, for us, it impacts those thousands of election workers.
We had multiple election-related IT services or computer services that had been previously funded by Washington, the Department of Homeland Security, and the impact of those cuts are direct relation to that as well. We also had additional IT equipment and replacements due to end-of-life and increased cost of service. And one of the biggest concerns we had is coming to fruition and that looks like we're going to have a two-page ballot and that increases the the actual paper costs, the logistics, all that stuff.
So again, thank you for the opportunity to be here and I look forward to answering any questions you all have. Thank you.
Yeah. How much did that cost us? Because it didn't cost us just with the base employee that gets the raise, but the ones above them that you got to offset the compensation as well.
Oh yeah, there's a direct I think it impacts literally everyone, um, public and private. It's undeniable. So uh the the good news is I believe we're we're maxed out now with the minimum wage increase, I believe. So at least we can have some stability going forward.
Good if we could maybe get a calculation with them all. Especially with the county as well. Gotta calculate that out.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you. And one if I could add on to that, you mentioned with unfunded mandates. Um With the recent recent um redistrict congressional redistricting um that impacted about a quarter of Pasco's voters and legally statutorily I had to mail out voter information cards. That's gonna be I believe going I believe one for y'all Tuesday. I believe, um, or it's going too soon. Um Tallahassee didn't provide the funding for those cards, so about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. So there's to Commissioner Weightman's point, there's an example right there of an unfunded mandate template.
I believe that is gonna be on the July fourteenth board meeting, so I think that's when that item will go before you guys.
It's off by a month, sorry.
That's okay. You well okay, you thought we were moving real fast and appreciated.
Absolutely straight. Um for raise increases, what did you propose this?
In what you're holding shows five percent, uh but I adjusted to three percent after consultations with Mr. Carpell.