New technology and extra staff cited as primary reasons for increase
It took about 1 minute and 6 seconds during the Sarasota County Commission’s regular meeting on Sept. 9, in Venice, for the board members to unanimously approve an extra $1,963,595 for the current fiscal year budget of the Sarasota County Tax Collector’s Office.
Of that amount, $664,156 was designated for salaries, wages and fringe benefits, the formal budget resolution said, while the remainder was listed as “Operating Expenses.”
The item was listed as a Presentation Upon Request, meaning no remarks were planned by any person unless a commissioner asked for them. None of the board members did.
In addition, Chair Joe Neunder reported that no member of the public had signed up to offer comments.
However, when Commissioner Ron Cutsinger made the motion to approve the spending, he took the time to point out, “This is essentially ministerial on our part.” The County Commission does not approve the Tax Collector’s Office budget, he added. The Florida Department of Revenue does so — a fact that former county commissioner and new Tax Collector Mike Moran made when he presented his proposed 2026 fiscal year budget to the board during its July 1 budget workshop.
Commissioner Mark Smith seconded Cutsinger’s motion. Then, with no further comment, it passed 5-0.
The agenda packet for the Sept. 9 meeting did include copies of letters that staff of the Department of Revenue had sent to Moran. One, dated June 11, from Gavrielle Alday, resource management process manager for the department’s Property Tax Oversight division, said, “Under the statutory parameters outlined in section 195.087 [of the Florida Statutes], the Department of Revenue … has completed its inadequacy and excessiveness review of your office’s budget amendment request for Fiscal Year 2024/25 and finds it adequate to carry on the work of the tax collector.”
Alday noted that the approved budget amendment had been attached and that the department would send a copy of it to the County Commission.
A second letter, dated June 19 — also from Alday — was almost verbatim in comparison to the June 11 letter, except for the amount of the budget amendment that was attached.
The first attachment showed that the original 2025 fiscal year budget for the Tax Collector’s Office provided for 103 positions; Moran was seeking to add 14 new full-time staff members, it noted. The salary increase was put at $962,600.
Thus, the chart showed, the total personnel services expenses would be rising from $10,051,749 to $10,715,905.
The second attachment showed that Moran had requested an extra $171,499 in the “Office Space” category, along with $27,955 more for office supplies, and $8,010 for “Education.” Several other higher changes were included, with just acronyms, under the heading “Repair and Maintenance.”
That attachment further said that the original budget for operating expenses for the 2025 fiscal year was $895,650. That was submitted to the Department of Revenue before long-time Tax Collector Barbara Ford-Coates lost to Moran in the November 2024 General Election.
The new operating expenses total was $2,195,089.
A rundown of issues to be addressed
On July 1, when Tax Collector Moran appeared before the County Commission during its budget workshop that day, he began by calling his office’s work an “incredibly busy operation and growing.”
His staff handles more than 1 million transactions a year, he pointed out. More than 560 telephone calls come in per day, a slide showed, along with 1,200-plus transactions online and more than 700 pieces of mail to process every day.
His office has four locations, Moran continued. “It’s three locations and literally a closet in North Port,” he emphasized. Four staff members work in a space he estimated to comprise 30 feet by 20 feet, he added.
Later, Moran reiterated his comment about the North Port office being “literally a closet.”
Among his 2026 fiscal year priorities, he said, would be “getting the [offices] properly staffed, along with upgrading the technology that his staff uses.
“We are a deep concerning outlier,” he stressed, in regard to the age of his office’s equipment. Out of the 67 tax collectors in the state, Moran added, “We are the only one that is on the software platform that we’re on. Cannot stay this way; not even an option.”
Even if he signed the contracts that day for the new equipment, Moran pointed out, “It will be July of next year” before the office can begin using the new technology.
The expense of the equipment and getting it set up is “just shy of $2.2 million,” he added; the office will be paying $675,000 a year for it, as well. He did not offer any details about the latter expense.
Moran said he hoped to be able to spread the expense over three fiscal years, “to give some relief to the cash flow” from the county budget.
Yet another issue on which his office is an outlier, he continued, is its lack of kiosks at businesses such as Publix grocery stores, so customers can handle motor vehicle transactions with the Tax Collector’s Office. “Again,” he said, “we are the only one on the west coast of Florida without those services.”
Further, he noted that his staff had been working with the county’s Communications Department staff on suggestions for vendors with which he could contract to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) in his office’s operations starting this fall, perhaps by November.
Next, Moran turned to the issue of training. “It is a very long runway,” he said, to educate new staff members on how to handle transactions at what he called the “front counter.”
Commissioner Cutsinger told Moran that it sounded as though “there’s a lot of things that have been deferred here, and that sounds expensive to me.” Cutsinger added, “I really do not like hearing” that Sarasota County is the only county in the state without the type of kiosks Moran had mentioned, as well as the other issues Moran had cited.
Commissioner Tom Knight concurred with Cutsinger about the concern in regard to the higher expenses. Knight reiterated worries that he had expressed earlier in the day about projected deficits in outlying fiscal years for the General Fund, which contains the property tax revenue and other types of revenue the county receives. The General Fund covers the expenses of departments that generate few or no funds of their own. It also typically is used to cover unexpected costs that arise during a fiscal year.
Moran responded by pointing out, “We are literally 53 [full-time employees] away from the average” of other tax collector’s offices in counties with populations similar to Sarasota County’s.
“This affects everything,” Moran stressed, leading to turnover and employee burnout, as well as customers’ waiting time.
And in June 2024 …
When former Tax Collector Ford-Coates presented her proposed 2025 fiscal year budget to the County Commission in June 2024, she reported that the average cost per capita for tax collector’s offices across the state was 50% higher than her office’s figure. The number for her office, she noted, was $33.55. For other tax collectors in Southwest Florida, Ford-Coates continued, the average was $49.26, which was 120% higher than the figure for her office.
“To put this in perspective,” she pointed out, “my budget would be $5 million more if I was operating at the state level and $10 million higher if I was operating at the same rates as other counties in Southwest Florida.”
Then Ford-Coates explained the challenges for her staff, especially in the aftermath of the state’s decision to require Tax Collectors’ offices to take over all drivers’ license services by June 2015.
“The percentage of our workload increased by 30%” as a result of that state action, she said. Moreover, she added, the county population has continued to climb, meaning more customers to serve.
Nonetheless, she continued, after factoring out the financial effects of the drivers’ licenses change and the rise in the number of county residents since 2009, “The remainder of my budget increased significantly less than the rate of inflation during the same [16-year] period.”
“I give full credit for that efficiency to my exceptional staff of over 100 dedicated public servants,” she emphasized.