Where’s the Oversight? Florida’s Local Governments Are Spending Like There’s No Tomorrow

Let’s start with something simple: it’s your money.

Every dollar that county commissioners and city managers move around — every “infrastructure reserve,” every “impact fee,” every “economic development incentive,” every “tourism tax grant,” every “consultant contract,” every quiet land deal for a private developer — that’s not government money. That’s you. Your mortgage money. Your grocery money. Your retirement money.

And yet across Florida, local governments are behaving like there’s no tomorrow, pumping spending faster than population growth, hiking property taxes, stockpiling cash, and handing out sweetheart projects while telling working families “services will be cut if we don’t raise your millage.” Meanwhile, most residents couldn’t begin to tell you where a single line item in their county budget actually goes.

That’s not an accident. That’s how they like it.

This is the fight: transparency versus extraction. And right now, extraction is winning.

The pattern: revenue spikes, spending spikes, and then they tell you they’re broke

Here’s what’s happening almost everywhere in Florida: property values shot up after the pandemic-era housing rush, which drove assessed value up across the board. When taxable value skyrockets, counties and cities don’t technically have to “raise taxes” to pull in a ton of new money. They just quietly cash in the higher assessments.

If your home’s taxable value jumps 8%, 10%, 12% in a single year, your county doesn’t have to vote for a tax hike to take hundreds more out of your pocket. They just… take it.

Instead of treating that unexpected windfall like one-time revenue or sending relief back to the people who actually earned it, many counties baked it into recurring spending.

Florida’s own Chief Financial Officer, through the state’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has started touring counties and calling this out in public. He’s been blunt: local governments are “wasting money and spending taxpayer dollars obnoxiously,” and not just in blue urban strongholds — in Republican-controlled counties too. He said it plainly: “Republicans and Democrats are spending us into oblivion.”

In Seminole County, for example, the CFO’s office says the county built a general fund budget tens of millions of dollars larger than what’s actually needed to provide core services — to the tune of roughly $77 million in what he calls “excessive and wasteful spending.”

Now pause on that: $77 million, in one county’s general fund.

According to those findings, Seminole County didn’t just keep up with inflation and population growth. It blew past both. Population grew by about 25,000 people in recent years, and yes, that means more fire, EMS, sheriff, road work. Nobody’s arguing against police, firefighters, or first responders. What’s being challenged is the claim — repeated like scripture from county dais microphones across the state — that “we had no choice but to raise the millage.”

The CFO argues Seminole didn’t need to raise the millage at all. In fact, he says they could have lowered it by 0.81 mills instead of increasing it.

So why didn’t they?

Because once local government gets used to a fatter budget, it never wants to go back.

Orange County: hundreds of millions and “fuzzy math”

Orange County (Orlando and the attractions corridor) has become basically the poster child for what insiders politely call “aggressive” spending.

The state CFO’s office has publicly accused Orange County of nearly $200 million in “wasteful spending.” The allegation is that county leaders greenlit or absorbed spending that simply outpaced what’s needed to deliver essential services, even as tourism tax dollars — historically the county’s favorite slush pool — are under pressure.

Orange County’s mayor fired back and called the accusations “fuzzy math.”

Let’s talk about that back-and-forth, because it matters.

When a watchdog says, “You’re overspending by almost $200 million,” and a county mayor responds with “Those numbers aren’t true,” normal people assume the truth must be somewhere in the middle.

That’s not really what’s happening here.

What’s happening is a definition game.

Local officials will always defend high spending by pointing to “quality of life,” “future growth needs,” “economic development,” and “tourism impact.” They’ll invoke police, fire, ambulance, clean water, roads — because they know that if you even look like you’re questioning those, they can brand you “anti-safety.”

But here’s the reality Florida’s CFO is trying to drag into the light: most of the bloat is not frontline deputies and paramedics. It’s layers of administrative expansion. It’s consultant contracts. It’s carve-outs. It’s politically-connected “economic development” packages. It’s massive tourism tax commitments to big-ticket legacy projects, even when tourist-tax revenue is slowing down. Orange County has faced repeated warnings from its own comptroller not to overpromise tens or hundreds of millions from its Tourism Development Tax for new mega-projects when the revenue trend is cooling.

Translation: They’re making future spending promises on money that might not exist — the local equivalent of putting a boat on your credit card because you got a good bonus this year.

That’s not conservative budgeting. That’s gambling with taxpayer dollars.

Surpluses and reserves: your money sitting in their accounts

Here’s another angle most folks never see: accumulated surpluses.

At the state level, Florida ended the most recent fiscal year with roughly $23.4 billion more than it needed to pay its bills, earning what an external fiscal watchdog group called a “Taxpayer Surplus” of about $2,900 per taxpayer.

That sounds great — “surplus” sounds responsible.

But at the local level, the story gets trickier.

Counties love to say, “We’re under pressure, we’re stretched thin, our hands are tied,” but at the same time many of them are quietly sitting on huge reserves, capital project funds, impact fee balances, and special revenue accounts that rarely get explained to actual residents in plain English.

Ask yourself: when was the last time your county commission looked you in the eye and said, “Here’s how much unrestricted cash we’ve banked, here’s what we plan to use it for, and here’s why we haven’t used it to reduce this year’s tax burden on homeowners who are drowning”?

Right. You’ve never heard that speech.

Because the system is designed to make “reserve” sound sacred and untouchable, while “cutting taxes” is painted as reckless.

Let’s be clear: responsible reserves for emergencies, hurricanes, and infrastructure repairs are essential in Florida. Everyone understands that. We get hurricanes, we get washouts, we get saltwater doing ugly things to roads and pipes.

But “responsible reserve” is not the same thing as “we’re stockpiling your money while telling you we’re broke.”

If you’re hoarding tens of millions above established reserve policy, and at the same time telling homeowners you “have no choice” but to hike their bill — that’s not prudence. That’s extraction disguised as prudence.

And without real-time transparency tools, regular people have no way to tell the difference.

The transparency gap is not a glitch — it’s the feature

Here’s the core problem: Florida counties and cities do not make it easy for you to see, line by line, where your money is going this month, this quarter, right now.

Budgets are often hundreds of pages long, buried in PDFs that only insiders read, full of internal fund transfers, acronyms, vague categories (“professional services”), and lump-sum “special projects” allocations. If you want to track how a developer incentive package actually moved from pitch to approval to disbursement? Good luck. If you want to see whether tourism tax dollars went to actual public benefit or to a politically-connected venue upgrade? Pack a lunch.

It’s not that the data doesn’t exist. It does. Counties have it. Cities have it. School districts have it down to the penny — school districts in Florida literally file expenditure breakdowns under the Educational Funding Accountability Act that identify how money is allocated across instruction, student support, administrative overhead, and so on.

So why don’t taxpayers get that same clarity for county government general funds, tourism taxes, infrastructure surtaxes, and CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) dollars?

Why is education funding held to itemized public reporting, but county government spending is treated like classified material?

Answer: because once people see it, they start asking hard questions.

“Why are we paying this consultant six figures to ‘study’ something we already passed?”

“Why did we give that private organization discounted public land or exclusive access to facilities instead of requiring them to buy and build their own?” (This is one of the classic quiet favors at the local level — hand a private group effective control over public assets instead of making them carry their own cost of land, permitting, and infrastructure. It saves them potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, all subsidized by you, the taxpayer. You just don’t get told that directly.)

“Why is there money for new offices and branding campaigns but not to roll back my millage by even half a point?”

These are not theoretical questions. These are questions people in counties like Bay, Seminole, Orange, Manatee, Hillsborough, and others are already asking out loud at meetings — and getting stonewalled. The state CFO has started literally holding press conferences in counties accusing them of “excessive spending” and saying local officials “do not understand” what waste looks like.

Local governments hate that kind of sunlight.

Good. More, please.

The solution: mandatory Spending & Development Accountability Dashboards

Here’s what needs to happen statewide, county by county, city by city:

Every local government in Florida should be required to maintain a public, real-time “Spending & Development Accountability Dashboard” that any resident can pull up on a phone.

Not a fluff PR page.

Not a two-year-old PDF.

A dashboard.

At minimum, that dashboard should include:

1. Line-item spending, updated monthly.

Show every department’s actual expenditures versus budget. If Parks spent $312,000 this quarter on “consulting,” I should be able to click and see who got paid, for what scope of work, and who approved it.

2. Active capital projects and who benefits.

Road widening? Drainage upgrade? New municipal complex? Waterfront “revitalization”? Show total project cost, contractor, funding source, and whether it primarily benefits the public or serves as an incentive for a private developer.

3. Development deals and land-use favors.

Any rezoning, land transfer, tax abatement, special district, PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) deal, or “public-private partnership” should be listed, along with the projected taxpayer exposure. If a private entity gets effective free use of public assets instead of fronting its own land and build costs, taxpayers deserve to see that spelled out.

4. Reserves and surpluses.

Show how much unrestricted cash is sitting in each fund, how that compares to the county’s own reserve policy, and whether that surplus could be used to roll back the millage rate. If you’re going to tell people “we had no choice but to raise taxes,” prove it.

5. Population + inflation vs. budget growth.

This might be the single most important snapshot. The CFO’s office is already doing this behind the scenes: comparing how fast a county budget grows relative to actual population growth plus inflation.

That graph should be public. If your budget is growing two or three times faster than your population and inflation combined, residents deserve to know.

This is basic accountability. Private businesses track spending versus growth. Families track spending versus income. Counties? They too often track spending versus “what can we get away with this year.”

If local officials are proud of how they’re spending, why hide it?

“But what about essential services?”

We all know the script.

The moment you question any of this, county PR staff jump in front of the cameras and say: “So you want to defund police and fire? You want potholes and slow 911 response times?”

Don’t fall for it.

That’s a scare tactic used to protect the non-essential spending.

In Seminole County, when challenged on overspending and a millage hike, county leadership said essentially: we did the math for 18 months, and you can’t “cut your way out of it” if you still want to provide “quality of life.”

Translation: “We defined what ‘quality of life’ means, we decided it costs more, and now you’re going to pay for it.”

No one is arguing against paying for deputies, paramedics, and roads. The argument is about everything layered on top of that — the expansion of government lifestyle spending that gets sold as “quality of life” but really functions as political insulation and developer candy.

The whole point of a Spending & Development Accountability Dashboard is to separate real need from nice-to-have vanity.

If a county says “We need X more firefighters,” cool — show the line. Show the cost. Show the call volume per station. People will support that.

If a county says “We need $25 million for this downtown redevelopment vision,” also show the line. Show the private beneficiary. Show the lobbyist. Let the people decide if they’re actually on board with that kind of subsidy.

That’s the heart of self-government.

Why this matters right now

Property taxes in Florida have turned into what a lot of homeowners — especially seniors on fixed incomes — openly call “rent to the government.” When your assessment jumps, you’re paying more just to stay in a home you already own. That’s why reforms like cutting the Save Our Homes cap from 3% to 1.5%, or tying assessment growth to inflation, are gaining serious energy. That kind of reform is meant to slow down how fast local governments can harvest rising home values without ever taking a public vote to “raise taxes.”

But here’s the catch: tax relief without spending accountability is just a temporary Band-Aid.

If you don’t force transparency, local governments will always come back later and say, “We’re in a crisis, we need to raise rates, it’s for safety.”

We’ve seen this play in Seminole. We’ve seen it in Orange. We’ve seen CFO briefings in Manatee and Hillsborough accusing counties of overspending by nine figures while still pushing cost increases onto residents.

So yes, cap growth. Slow the tax creep. Protect people from being taxed out of their own homes.

But pair it with teeth.

Teeth = mandatory public dashboards.

Because once ordinary citizens can click a button and see, “Wait, you’re sitting on tens of millions in reserves and just approved a seven-figure ‘consultant study’ for a developer-driven waterfront plan while telling me you can’t afford to roll my millage back?” — the game changes.

Sunlight changes behavior.

This is where you come in

Here’s the truth nobody in a county administration building is going to volunteer: the only thing local government actually fears is organized, informed citizens showing up together.

One loud taxpayer at a budget hearing? They’ll nod, thank you for your time, move on.

Twenty citizens backed by receipts? Whole different conversation.

That’s why we’re building county-level watchdog teams across Florida.

We’re calling them County Captains.

County Captains are local residents — parents, small business owners, retirees, homeowners on fixed income — who are willing to spend 5–10 hours a week tracking budgets, pulling public records, showing up at hearings, and sharing what they find with their neighbors.

County Captains are the front line for real spending oversight. They help expose waste, highlight games being played with land deals and special taxing districts, and pressure commissions to adopt public Spending & Development Accountability Dashboards so taxpayers can finally see where their money actually goes.

That’s how we win this fight: not just in Tallahassee, not just in headlines, but in county chambers on Tuesday nights where 90% of the decisions that affect your wallet are actually made.

If you’ve ever looked at your tax bill and thought, “How is this possible?” — this is your moment.

If you’ve ever watched a developer walk out of a meeting smiling while your neighborhood got told “there’s no budget for drainage,” this is your moment.

If you’ve ever heard “we’re broke” from a county that’s sitting on millions, this is your moment.

Florida’s local governments are spending like there’s no tomorrow.

Let’s make sure they start answering to the people who pay the bill.

Sign up as a County Captain to help expose local waste.