JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – According to those who crunch numbers for the city, there will be fewer tax dollars than expected coming in next year and that means when planning on how the city will spend it, some difficult decisions will have to be made.
Last year, there was $1.75 billion in tax revenue for the city budget, which was up by $187 million from the year before. But projections for this year’s increase in revenue is only in the ballpark of $87 million to $95 million, about $100 million less than what was previously expected.
This is really Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan’s first budget since last year, the budget was mostly prepared by Lenny Curry’s administration.
READ: You can read Mayor Deegan’s full budget address here
“So there are going to be choices we have to make, obviously, but we’ve asked every department head to look at where they can be more innovative, where they can shore things up and make sure that we’re not spending any more than we have to spend,” Deegan said. “It’s just that you end up with a whole lot more requests than you can actually fulfill. So we’re just looking at what we have to prioritize right now.”
One priority is public safety and a new police contract.
The Jacksonville police union is asking for a 17% pay increase. Fraternal Order of Police Jacksonville President Randy Reaves said that’s below the national average. The FOP and the city have been meeting about this since December and Reaves said he is frustrated over what he called a lack of urgency from the mayor’s office.
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“I haven’t heard anything from Randy, I think for sure he knows my phone number,” Deegan said. “But at the end of the day, we are very committed to those talks. And I have repeatedly said that public safety is job one for us here. So we’re just in a process where we’re trying to evaluate where we are with the budget and make sure we can come up with a good counter.”
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“I mean, the fact of the matter is, we’ve met multiple times, you know, since and she’s had this data in her hand,” Reaves said. “Any competent person is going to look at this data and it is going to sound alarms. I think if the public knew that their first responders and their law enforcement was 180 short in the jail, over 40 short on the police side, and we’re underpaid by 19%, I think that would shock a lot of people. And it also would probably bring a lot of attention to how the city invests money on other things while their first responders are being underpaid.”
Those will be the things debated in the talks.
But the real decision will come in the fall when the city council will vote on a budget and before that happens we will be hearing more details about how your money will be spent.