Measures made in light of concern about November property tax referendum
New Sarasota City Manager Karie Friling has placed a hold on filling city staff positions “at this time,” she informed the City Commission in a June 30 email.
She had been working with Deputy City Manager Jennifer Jorgensen and Dominique Anderson, the acting director of the city’s Human Resources Department, Friling wrote, “to develop a ‘position to fill request and justification process’ that [would] be rolling out [that] week. The form will be required to be submitted by the hiring manager to the department director, along with expected costs, funding source, and written justification on why the position is recommended to be filled and not held open. Positions that are in the middle of recruitment — i.e. — interviewing, offers [pending] — will continue to be filled.”
Sarasota County Government has adopted a similar approach, Kim Radtke, director of the county’s Office of Financial Management, told the county commissioners during their June 16 budget workshop.
Both City and County of Sarasota leaders are working to hold down expenses, they have explained, as they await the outcome of a state referendum that the Florida Legislature approved for the Nov. 3 General Election ballot. If it wins approval of at least 60% of the voters who address the question, it would have a dramatic effect on the budgets for cities and counties in the state.
The City of Sarasota’s Financial Administration Department staff has estimated that the city would see its property tax revenue reduced by approximately $3,182,464 in the 2027 fiscal year, with an additional decrease of $2,292,830 in the 2028 fiscal year.
County Office of Financial Management staff told The Sarasota News Leader that the county would anticipate losing $87 million in property tax revenue in the 2029 fiscal year.
In her June 30 email, Friling added, “While this certainly was not the position I wanted to be in upon arriving to the City, I strongly believe this is a good first step in identifying savings from vacancies, in the event the November referendum is approved by the voters. I understand this may cause uncertainty within our organization, and I appreciate your support and patience as we work through this process.”
Mayor Debbie Trice responded to Friling later on June 30, writing, “I believe your decision was a necessary response to the uncertainty imposed by the property tax referendum. Thank you for your swift action.”
With her note to the commissioners, Friling attached an email that she had sent at 8:55 a.m. the same day to the directors of the city’s departments. It mirrored what she had written to the commissioners, except she referenced having had a discussion with staff about the new policy.
On July 6, during her first City Commission meeting since she began work, Friling told the board members, “I wasn’t expecting that within the first 48 hours of starting the job that we would be facing one of perhaps the most significant property tax reform … referendums in Florida’s history. And, obviously, that’s taken a significant amount of time and effort from internally within the city, to figure out what the impacts could be and how we’re going to go about those in a very thoughtful and strategic — surgical — way.” Friling added, “This is not something that can be solved with the sledgehammer.”
The county’s approach with its employees
During the June 16 County Commission budget workshop, Commissioner Teresa Mast asked Radtke of the Office of Financial Management a question in regard to how county staff is handling open positions.
“Back in the [Great] Recession days,” Radtke responded, “we had a ‘mission critical process,’ which has been reinstated, if you will …”
If a manager sees the need for one or more new employees, Radtke said, the request first has to be reviewed by the director of that department, and then — if the director agrees with the request — it goes “to the administration level to be reviewed.”
Any director seeking a new full-time employee “has to justify the need for the position,” Radtke pointed out. The approval of the requests comes “at the highest level,” she said, again referring to County Administration.
Radtke also noted two slides in the PowerPoint presentation for the workshop that day. One showed the variations in the ratios of full-time county employees under control of the County Commission per 1,000 county residents, beginning with the 2007 fiscal year. The figure for that year was 6.39. It dipped to a low of 5.27 in the 2012 fiscal year, as the county was continuing its recovery from the Great Recession. The highest point after that came in the 2016 fiscal year, when it reached 5.65.
For the 2027 fiscal year, which will begin on Oct. 1, the ratio was put at 5.5. A note at the bottom of that slide said the county population estimates for the current and 2027 fiscal years were “based on past average annual growth of 1.6%.”
“It’s ebbed and flowed over the years,” Radtke said of the ratios in the slide, “but it’s never gone back to that pre-Recession level.”
Then Radtke showed the commissioners a similar slide, except it focused just on the number of county employees whose positions are paid for by the General Fund. That account, which is the repository of most of the county’s property tax revenue, covers the expenses of county departments and the operations of the constitutional officers — such as the sheriff and the supervisor of elections — that do not generate any revenue or insufficient revenue to cover their annual costs.
The ration of the number of General Fund employees per 1,000 county residents was at its highest level in the 2009 fiscal year: 1.81, the slide showed. The lowest figure was 1.42 in the 2013 fiscal year. The ratio for FY 2027 is 1.52.
As Radtke noted, “That [General Fund ratio] has really decreased over the years.”