Furst explains situation during Dec. 16 presentation to board
On Jan. 13, during their first regular meeting this year, the Sarasota County commissioners will conduct a public hearing on options for the county to pay for new software that Sarasota County Property Appraiser Bill Furst has requested.
On Dec. 16, during their final regular meeting of 2025, the board members heard a presentation from Furst about how critical that software will be in the preparation of accurate tax rolls. He wanted it to be ready for his staff’s use as of Jan. 1, 2027, Furst said, because all Florida property values are set as of Jan. 1 each year.
While expressing frustration that they would have to increase their budget for this fiscal year — which began on Oct. 1, 2025 — the majority of the commissioners nonetheless concurred with Furst’s remarks about the necessity of ensuring the accuracy of his staff’s work.
Commissioner Tom Knight talked of his worries about adding to a projected shortfall in the General Fund budget starting in the 2028 fiscal year. (The General Fund contains all of the property tax revenue; it is the account that covers the expenses of county departments and the offices of the constitutional officers — such as Furst and Sheriff Kurt Hoffman — that do not generate any funding on their own.)
Additionally, then-Chair Joe Neunder referenced local government leaders’ concerns about looming actions of the Florida Legislature that could reduce property tax revenue as early as the 2027 fiscal year, which would begin on Oct. 1, 2026.
When Commissioner Mark Smith made a motion on Dec. 16, 2025, to “finance the software for the property appraiser,” County Administrator Jonathan Lewis reminded him that no budget amendment was advertised for that regular meeting. Thus, the earliest the board could vote on the extra funding would be during their first meeting of this year, which was set for Jan. 13.
Therefore, Smith made a new motion, directing staff to have that budget amendment ready for board action on Jan. 13.
Commissioner Ron Cutsinger seconded the motion.
“It’s not desirable,” Smith said, referring to the necessity of covering the extra expense, “but I do believe we need to keep the property appraiser up and running.”
“This puts us in a very difficult position,” Neunder pointed out. “It would have been nice to have this during our budgeting process,” before the board voted in late September to approve the final budget for the 2026 fiscal year, Neunder told Furst.
“I know that this has been on the radar for years,” Neunder added of the situation Furst had described.
Neunder also stressed the necessity of the commission’s efforts to keep constitutional officers’ and county department budgets as low as possible going forward. “It’s going to be very, very difficult next year on all of us,” Neunder added.
The motion passed 4-1, with Commissioner Knight in the minority.
A memo in the Jan. 13 agenda packet proposes that the funding Furst has requested could come out of either the county’s General Fund or Government Impact Fees, with the initial expense of $883,500 in the current fiscal year.
In the 2027 fiscal year, the amount would climb to $1,497,000; then, it would drop back to $883,500 in the 2028 fiscal year, an agenda document shows. The total investment would be $3,264,000, a document notes.
A memo in the board’s Dec. 16, 2025 agenda packet pointed out that if a three-year funding plan that Furst had proposed were approved that day, the anticipated General Fund shortfalls in coming years would increase by the following amounts:
- FY 2028 — $3,592,570.
- FY 2029 —$338,428.
- FY2030 — $348,580.
The December memo further noted that the initial, annual subscription for use of the software would cost $319,000, with the expectation that the amount would rise about 3% a year from the 2028 fiscal year through the 2030 fiscal year.
The County Commission meeting on Jan. 13 will begin at 9 a.m. at the Robert L. Anderson Administration Center in Venice, which stands at 4000 S. Tamiami Trail.
Going back to 2009 …
During his Dec. 16 remarks, Furst explained that in 2009, Bob Hanson, who then was the county’s IT director, “came to us and said, ‘I’d like you to convert to this software. We will buy it for you.’ ” That way, Hanson had added, the Property Appraiser’s Office would join the Tax Collector’s Office and the Office of the Sarasota County Clerk of the Circuit Court and County Comptroller in being “ ‘on the same program, and you can talk to each other, and this just makes all the sense in the world,’ ” Furst continued.
(Hanson died in 2012; he had moved to Colorado after leaving county employment.)
Therefore, Furst told the commissoiners, county staff entered into a contract with Thomson Reuters to purchase the software for those constitutional officers’ operations. The county “assumed all the costs …”
Then, in 2019, Thomson Reuters sold the software program to the Harris Corp., “which I found interesting,” Furst said, “ ’cause Harris had an appraisal software that does the same thing,” and it is three to four times the size of the program that Thomson Reuters had.
Since that acquisition, Furst noted, Harris had reduced the staffing for the former Thomson Reuters software — Momentum — by 50%. “And tech support has become non-existent.”
The county had been paying for the maintenance of the system, Furst said, billing the Property Appraiser’s Office for one-third of that expense, with the Tax Collector’s and Clerk’s offices paying the other two-thirds. After the latter two constitutional officers ceased using Momentum, Furst pointed out, county staff told him that the Property Appraiser’s Office would have to shoulder the full expense for maintenance.
“I understand the rationale there,” he added, “but the other interesting point” is that the staff members of Momentum, who wrote the program, installed it on his office’s servers and trained his employees in using it — plus the sales team who sold it to the county — “all have quit” or were let go, and are working for a different company. That firm, he noted, is Vision.
Furst did explain why he had not included the expense of the new software in his budget for this fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1, 2025. “We were going to put it in the budget,” Furst said. “We were looking [to advertise Requests for Proposals for new software].” Then the current staff of Momentum learned about that, Furst continued, “so the president and two other senior staff members made the first visit [to his office] in the 16 years we’ve owned the software … because they knew we were shopping the contract.”
They told him, Furst continued, that they could “get everything straightened out,” including a three-year backlog of tickets that needed to be addressed.
One person “was assigned to work very closely with us,” Furst added, but, three weeks later, that individual also joined Vision. “So that kind of shot that deal.”
“My greatest fear,” Furst told the commissioners, “is I think the state’s going to come up with some changes [for property appraisers’ work],” though he said he has no idea what they will be. “I don’t think anybody does,” he pointed out. “But any change that the state makes is going to require programming.”
Thus, without tech support for the Momentum system, he said, his staff would be unable to produce another tax roll.
“If I can’t keep my current program up-to-date,” Furst added — stressing that he does not think he will be able to do that — “I’m going to have a lot of problems.”
Further, Furst explained, “A conversion [to new software] takes 12 to 14 months. A conversion’s not something I want to do,” he emphasized, but he felt he had no choice. His staff would have to run two separate software programs for that 12- to 14-month period, he pointed out, “to make sure everything works and goes together.”
The company whose software he wants to begin using, Furst continued, is Vision, which is the company the former Momentum employees joined. In other words, “They’re the people who wrote my [current] program.”
He has talked with Vision representatives about his situation, Furst continued. “They said they’d be glad to help me out.” The staff would be able to keep his program running, he added, until the new software was ready for use.
Noting budget slides that Kim Radtke, director of the county Office of Financial Management, had shown the commissioners in regard to the anticipated General Fund shortfalls in coming years if the commission agreed to his request, Furst said that he had asked a Vision vice president whether the company could spread the expense of the new software over three years, instead of the two that he initially had discussed with Vision employees. Furst noted that he had requested that timeline with a provision for “no interest, no fees, no nothing. … [The vice president] said, ‘I’d be glad to.’ That would help out a little bit,” Furst told the commissioners.
“I know it’s a cost you don’t want to stomach,” he acknowledged. Yet, “We have kept our budget very low, I think,” he added.
The price and the need
“Is it the cheapest vendor?” Commissioner Knight asked Furst in reference to Vision.
“They’re all priced about the same,” Furst responded of the vendors who provide the type of software he requires. “Vision has pretty much taken over control of Florida,” he added, “so they’re very attuned to Florida.”
Commissioner Teresa Mast told Furst that she believed that a number of county IT issues had arisen about the same time, “as far as getting ‘long in the tooth,’ so to speak.”
She then extended her appreciation to him for discussing with the Vision vice president the potential of spreading the new expense over three years.
Mast also pointed out how vital accurate tax assessments are to the county’s budgeting process.
The software, Furst replied, is “the heart of us putting out the tax rolls.”
When Mast asked County Administrator Lewis about the budget planning for the millions of dollars for software changes for various offices, Lewis told her that Clerk of Court Karen Rushing and her staff faced a situation similar to Furst’s about three of four years ago. In that case, Lewis added, Rushing set aside a certain amount of her annual budget over several years, so she and her staff finally would have most of the money available for the switch “without a huge increase” in spending in one fiscal year.
“We try not to buy any IT stuff you could provide for us,” Furst told the commissioners and Lewis.
Commissioner Knight said he believes that the board members and the constitutional officers in February will spend a bit of time talking about the amount of money that is being spent on new technology. He was referring to the first county workshop planned in regard to the 2027 fiscal year budget. The commissioners have asked Lewis to let all of the constitutional officers know that they should attend that session, as the commissioners already have agreed to limit the General Fund budget increase to 1.6% for the 2027 fiscal year.
‘Between a rock and a hard place’
Following Furst’s remarks and the board members’ exchanges with him, Commissioner Mast told her colleagues, “Although I don’t like having to do this, I don’t feel that we can leave our property appraiser in a precarious situation.”
Commissioner Smith said he agreed with Mast. “[We are] kind of caught between a rock and a hard place,” given how critical the need for accurate tax assessments is. “I believe we are … going to have to get him his software as soon as we can.”
Commissioner Knight added that he would support Furst’s request, though he would have preferred waiting until the February workshop to make a decision. “This would have been a better conversation in August,” Knight also noted, referring to the board’s last workshop before approving the current fiscal year budget.