Jacksonville’s budget season doesn’t officially start until the summer, but it’s already bringing political heat at City Hall.
Mayor Donna Deegan recently barnstormed the city in a series of town halls where residents told her what they want in next year’s budget and she called on them to make their voices heard with City Council.
While Deegan assembles her proposed budget that she’ll unveil in July, City Council members are pursuing DOGE-branded scrutiny of the city’s spending. A new Duval DOGE special committee, which takes its name for the federal Department of Government Efficiency headed by billionaire Elon Musk, is meeting every two weeks.
City Council member Terrance Freeman wants to add another layer to that number-crunching by inviting Gov. Ron DeSantis’s state DOGE to audit the city’s spending by using artificial intelligence for data analysis. Deegan calls that unneeded because the city already pays to bring in outside firms to conduct independent audits every year.
University of North Florida political science professor Michael Binder said the DOGE efforts show Deegan, a Democrat, continues to face opposition from the Republican-controlled City Council as they head toward hammering out their third budget since taking office in July 2023.
“It’s been political since day one,” Binder said. “I’m not sure that it’s becoming more political necessarily. I certainly think the fact that she’s a Democrat is egging on a great deal of the consternation and hand-wringing from certain members of City Council.”
He said the DOGE movement does strike a chord with many taxpayers who believe there is wasteful spending in government, but the question then becomes how people define waste.
“Is it a partisan viewpoint because you don’t happen to like the policy that a government program is supporting?” he said. “That’s not waste. That’s a policy difference.”
As the DOGE efforts play out, the big unknown is how much tax revenue the city will have for next year’s budget because the real estate market has cooled off since the roaring growth of just two years ago. The tighter the budget, the more intense the choices will be on what gets left on the cutting-room floor.
Mayor Deegan held town halls around the city
Deegan said the message that came through loud and clear during her seven town halls around the city is “infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.”
“That is 90% of what we heard — streets, sidewalks, ditches, traffic — no matter where you go around the city,” she said.
She said creating more affordable housing also keeps coming up. City Council eliminated $10 million she sought for an affordable housing program in this year’s budget. She said she’s working on a plan that could set up an affordable housing trust fund.
Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan talks with residents during a March 4 town hall she hosted at Riverside High School. Deegan had seven town halls across the city to hear what residents want to see in next year’s budget that she will unveil in July.
“We have to find a way to increase the inventory of affordable housing,” he said. “We’ve got 4,000 units coming on this year, but what we need are those affordable housing units that are for people on the lower end” of the income scale.
She also wants to boost spending on homelessness, an issue City Council members have focused on in light of a state law that makes it illegal for people to “camp” on public property, just as it already is illegal for them to do that on private property.
Deegan said the city has put building blocks in place to tackle homelessness.
“We think it’s a very successful plan,” she said. “It’s just a matter of to what level can we fund it, and I think that will come down to a negotiation with council.”
City budget is $330 million higher than it was two years ago
The bottom line of the city’s budget has grown substantially since Deegan and the current edition of the 19-member City Council took office.
In Lenny Curry’s last year as mayor, the city had a general fund budget of about $1.58 billion in the 2022-23 fiscal year. Two years later, the city’s general fund totals about $1.88 billion, an increase of $330 million.
On big-ticket spending items, Deegan and City Council have been on the same page.
They’ve supported renovating the football stadium to keep the Jaguars in Jacksonville. They’ve backed, increasing pay at record-setting increases for public safety employees, striking incentive deals for downtown development, boosting support for UF Health Jacksonville’s medical center on Eighth Street, and helping JaxPort pay to raise electric power lines for passage of big cargo container ships.
Mayor Donna Deegan speaks as Council President Randy White looks on during a budget address meeting Monday, July 15, 2024 at City Hall in Jacksonville, Fla.
They’ve agreed to help foot the bill for the planned construction of a new Museum of Science and History building and University of Florida graduate campus on downtown.
When they took office in 2023, the city’s property tax base was experiencing booming growth because of the red-hot real estate market. The city’s tax base grew by about 14% in 2022 and by 13% in 2023.
In 2024, the property tax base grew by 6.6%, which is in line with what the growth rate had been in previous years. That still represents growth in tax revenue but not nearly at the same pace as a couple of years ago.
“That was an anomaly,” Duval County Property Appraiser Joyce Morgan said of the double-digit growth years.
The projections for the growth of the property tax base this year will become more clear in the coming months while Deegan is putting together her proposed budget. She said she will build her budget around keeping the same property tax rate the city has had since 2022 while taking into account what she heard at the town halls.
Ron Salem says Duval DOGE will take ‘surgical’ approach
City Council member Ron Salem, who is chairman of the Duval DOGE special committee, said the city faces deficits of $70 million to $100 million in the next three years, and that requires a “hard look at how we operate to make sure we are maximizing efficiencies without compromising essential services.”
The Duval DOGE committee is using the in-house expertise of the City Council Auditor’s Office. Currently, the committee is examining $90 million the city set aside for dozens of construction projects that haven’t had any financial activity since October 2023.
The Duval DOGE committee of Jacksonville City Council heard a barrage of critical comments from the public during a kick-off meeting on Tuesday, March 18, 2025 at City Hall.
Salem said if even 10% of the money can be redirected, it can help close looming budget deficits he expects will be $70 million to $100 million a year unless the city makes changes.
“I’ve said from the very beginning this would be surgical,” he said. “We’re not looking to whack departments or anything close to that. We’re looking at savings such as the CIP (capital improvements program) where dollars are sitting there and could be used in other places.”
Councilman Freeman wants invitation for DeSantis’s DOGE task force
That DOGE effort could expand to DeSantis using his own state Department of Government Efficiency for an examination of the city’s budget if City Council agrees over Deegan’s objections to bring in the governor’s task force.
Freeman filed a resolution (2025-259) asking City Council to support bringing in the state DOGE, an idea the Deegan administration said duplicates an outside independent audit the city already does every year.
“I believe inviting the governor’s team to take an outside look at our finances, combined with the Duval DOGE, will equip our city with every tool possible to ensure we are operating at peak efficiency,” Freeman said.
The Deegan administration shot back that City Council committee voted last week to commence negotiations for hiring a firm that will conduct an annual independent audit that’s been done for years.
“It seems Councilman Freeman missed the memo that his colleagues are already hiring an independent external auditor, an annual process that is outlined in the City Charter,” Deegan spokesman Phillip Perry said. “It’s hard to understand why he wants to waste taxpayer resources on duplicating this effort.”
DeSantis created the State Department of Governmental Efficiency in February to examine state agencies, colleges and universities, and local governments. The task force will use AI and other technology. The task force will use publicly available financial records “to expose bloat in local governance,” according to DeSantis’s announcement of the state DOGE.
Deegan has given a “welcome to the party” response to Duval DOGE by saying her Lean 904 initiative that uses Six Sigma training already has been helping city employees identify inefficiencies in how they do their jobs. The city launched its Lean initiative in June 2024.
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Deegan said the city shouldn’t “take a chainsaw” to the budget and if it does need to make cuts anywhere, that should be done “very intentionally in terms of what we need as a city.”
She said she won’t propose any layoffs of city employees but whenever positions become vacant, her administration examines whether to hire someone to fill it.
“In those departments where we have vacancies, how long have we had those those vacancies (and) are those positions we need?” she said. “I’m interested in taking a look at all of that and seeing where can we perhaps not fill positions that have been vacant for a while.”
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: DOGE enters budget jockeying at Jacksonville City Hall