Proposed city spending up $33 million for fiscal year 2024

Thanks to a 13.6% increase in taxable property values, the city of Sarasota expects to bring in $11.2 million more in ad valorem revenue next fiscal year while leaving the tax rate unchanged at 3.0 mills. 

Still, City Manager Marlon Brown’s proposed fiscal year 2024 budget will require a transfer from the general fund balance to meet expenses. With a citywide taxable value of $16.7 billion, general fund revenue is projected at $94.31 million, $2.72 million short of the proposed expenditures of $97.03 million. That’s up 13.04% over the current fiscal year’s adopted general fund spending of $85.83 million. 

The projected general fund spending for the current fiscal year stands at $89.45 million.

The transfer from reserves will leave the city with an estimated $28.9 million in the unassigned fund balance, or 29.8% of operating expenses. The city’s policy is to maintain reserves of 17-25% of general fund expenditures.

The proposed overall budget including enterprise funds, capital improvements and special revenue funds is $285.18 million, up $33 million over the current fiscal year. That prompted Commissioner Erik Arroyo to ask if recent years’ spending increases are an anomaly or a trend.

“From 2021 to 2023 we increased the budget by $20 million, and overall now we're increasing it by $33 million for the entire city. Is this a trend that you see coming?” Arroyo asked. "Are we going to increase it again significantly next year? I don't know if our population is going up by that percentage and neither is our fund balance.”

Brown and Director of Financial Services Kelly Strickland cited inflation, negotiated salary increases for the police department and pension fund requirements as primary reasons for the growth in spending.

“A lot of increases are due to some of the inflationary situations that we're seeing nationally,” Brown said. “We don't know what next year brings in terms of trends. We had some record increases in salaries for police officers and for the general employees. All of that is reflected in the budget, and some of the costs as we get into the special (revenue) you will see why that has increased. Once we get into the departments and the $33 million increase, you will see how that has been spread across all funds and all departments.”

Only one department, Parks and Recreation, has requested a growth in staff that adds to the bottom line.

“My budget message to the departments was that we would not be adding any new personnel,” Brown said. “The commission I believe at one of the meetings when Parks and Rec came up talking about some of the needs, especially for Bayfront Park and some of the new parks that are coming online, directed me to see what resources we can provide to them. You will see that there are positions that are added to this budget for Parks and Rec, and then there's one position in street sweeping that we're adding, which is actually a savings to the budget.”

The addition of five employees is modest compared to recent years. Between fiscal years 2015 and 2023, the city has increased staff by 269 full-time equivalent positions, an average of 33.625 per year. With the five new jobs, the city’s employment will grow to 808 FTEs.

“Each position requested represents an increase to a level of service in the city,” Strickland said.

Commissioners had plenty of questions for Director of Parks and Recreation Jerry Fogle about his personnel request, which will grow his team of maintenance workers from 41 to 45. Currently, the department has 71.67 full-time equivalents overall. The department, he said, is responsible for the maintenance of 630 acres of park and 70 acres of non-park space, the latter including roundabouts, median and other city right of way.

“The landscape maintenance techs are truly the backbone of Parks and Recreation,” Fogle said. “They do the manual labor through our park system and non-parks, and over the last several years we've added a lot of properties that Parks and Recreation is now responsible to maintain. We haven't come to the commission asking for additional personnel through the years. We’ve been strategic, we've been very efficient in how we're maintaining those properties.”

With properties coming on line in the next several months, though, including the revamped playground and splash pad at Bayfront Park, Fogle said his crew is now over-extended. 

Between now and budget adoption in September, Fogle’s request for more personnel doesn’t figure to meet with any resistance.

“Parks are one of the most important aspects of the city that we hear from citizens how much they appreciate you and your department,” said Commissioner Jen Ahearn-Koch. “Thank you for all your work and your dedication to this very important quality of life piece of our city and I fully support the addition of four people to your department. When I go to any park and I look around I just can't imagine the constant maintenance and responsibility of maintaining our parks. It's a high priority. It's what our citizens want. They want us to spend their dollars on parks.”