OPINION | Jacksonville’s budget showdown begins

You may be sick of political theater.

But political theater isn’t sick of you.

Expect a big dose through the end of September regarding the city’s budget, which is to be proposed by Mayor Donna Deegan in a few hours. 

The specifics of that proposal will be heavily debated for months to come. But the attacks on it will be sui generis in Jacksonville history.

That’s not because there are any particularly radical or novel proposals in what is Deegan’s fourth proposed budget.

Rather, it’s because of the non-zero chance that a constitutional amendment passes in November to increase Floridians’ homestead exemption to $150,000 next year, $250,000 the year after, with future increases yoked to yearly upticks in the Consumer Price Index.

In Jacksonville, that could remove nearly $300 million of revenue, according to projections, which comes out to about 15% of the city’s $2 billion general fund budget.

It’s far from a slam dunk. Gov. Ron DeSantis has essentially divorced himself from the legislative product, objecting to school taxes being exempted from the formula. While he doesn’t oppose it, he won’t use the power of his platform or his office to sell it.

Lawsuits challenging the ballot language as vague and misleading are also out there.

Various groups are mobilizing against it. 

And people in bedroom communities, which rely on residential property taxes even more than urban areas like Jacksonville, are realizing that the infrastructure they expect depends on them paying for it.

While proponents of the plan have suggested that locals with budget needs can simply appeal to Tallahassee to backfill them, that’s unrealistic.

For starters, the Legislature’s Office of Economic & Demographic Research predicts deficits in the coming years, with a $6.6 billion shortfall expected by FY 28-29. 

That will require hard choices even on the baseline budget. Member projects, which DeSantis has cut for reasons including not aligning with the legislators who have wanted them, will be much tougher to get through. Add a bunch of cop cars and community centers to that, and whoever the next governor is will have even more to chop out. 

But even if the money was there, the timing would be off. It is impossible to root a municipal budget cycle into the legislative plan. A city would have to program money speculatively, hoping the state would come through in the following fiscal year. 

The equation gets further complicated given the realities of election cycles, with turnover in Tallahassee every two years and locally every four. 

All of this is to say tailwinds are not behind the homestead exemption increase.

But regardless of that, no one is going to rule out success before this budget passes, and that’s why there is a hard push among some on City Council to put lots of spending “below the line” this year – meaning that for certain priorities to be reanimated later in the fiscal year, it would take 13 of the council’s 19 votes.

Beaches-area council member Rory Diamond is one of those saying that’s not a big deal. His take is that if something is worth funding it should be able to get a two-thirds supermajority.

Of course, Diamond was also the reason last year’s budget vote was delayed until the morning news shows started, all over an amendment to dump “DEI initiatives” from the city budget. Eventually even his fellow Republicans backed away from that Dumpster fire.

Who knows what the City Council Finance Committee ultimately does with Deegan’s budget next month. Regardless, you can expect floor amendments galore to put one pet project after another below the line. After all, what is there to lose? 

The drama may be the first real test of the kumbaya dynamic between the mayor and council President Nick Howland, who seems to have decided to look at how his predecessor Kevin Carrico handled the gavel and took the opposite approach. 

Deegan can always veto a product that disrespects too many of her priorities, forcing council back to the dais to give her what she wants. 

Ultimately, it’s in the legislative branch’s interest not to hold too much below the line, especially since the mayor is better-known than all of them combined. 

And it’s likely in the interest of whoever the serious Republican mayoral candidate ends up being also. 

The general election is always won by whoever stakes out the center. And Deegan has done a good job of being there on most issues during her term so far.