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Back in April of 2025, Hillsborough County commissioners voted to create their own DOGE committee to look for waste fraud and abuse in their budget. Their idea. Their vote. They handpicked accountants, auditors, and finance professionals, people who actually know how to read a budget. Told them to dig into every dollar and find the waste. So they did.
After nearly a year of work, committee chair Jake Hoffman handed those commissioners a 50-page report identifying $678 million in wasteful spending. In one county. And since 2020, Hillsborough's budget has already exploded 60%, from $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion. Their own people just said $678 million of that is waste.
You know what happened next? Nothing…(imagine you're listening to crickets chirping)… Every commissioner has a copy sitting on their desk right now. Not one has invited Hoffman in to present it. No meeting. No public hearing. Not even a comment to the press. They built the watchdog, the watchdog found the waste, and now they're pretending it doesn't exist.
Here's a few things they found. The county's Indigent Healthcare Plan, a program funded by a half-cent sales tax collected since 1991, has hundreds of millions sitting in reserves doing absolutely nothing. Hoffman didn't call it bloated. He called it a $296 million slush fund. Then there's $214 million in miscellaneous contracts the county simply can't explain. No justification. No accountability. In a public company, people would be going to prison! In Hillsborough, it gets you a line item nobody questions. And the fleet management budget? $89 million for county vehicles. $44 million of it went completely unused in a single fiscal year. Just sitting there while homeowners keep getting bigger property tax bills.
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And Hillsborough is not the only one. This is happening all over Florida. In 2019, cities and counties across the state collected $30 billion in property taxes. Today that number is $60 billion. It doubled in seven years. Your city services aren't twice as good. Your neighborhood isn't twice as safe. They just found twice as many ways to spend it. At this rate that number hits $84 billion by 2031.
So DeSantis put CFO Blaise Ingoglia in charge of FAFO, the Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight — and told him to go find the waste. They've now audited 17 Florida cities and counties and found over $2.4 billion in wasteful spending. Jacksonville wasted $623 million since 2020. Orange County wasted $747 million. Miami-Dade wasted $807 million. Palm Beach County wasted $1.2 billion. And they've only looked at 17 places. Florida has 67 counties. They're just getting started.
What'd they spend it on? Broward County dropped $890,000 on DEI training including something called the Genderbread Person. Hillsborough spent $572,000 on unconscious bias training. Pensacola is paying $150,000 a year to a management company that books drag shows at the city theater. And Orlando spent $460,000 just to count trees. That's what doubling your property taxes actually bought you.
Now there's a group spending your own tax dollars to make sure none of this changes. The Florida League of Cities, the lobbying arm of over 400 Florida cities, has already launched a campaign called the Florida Formula designed specifically to defeat HJR 1F at the ballot box. Full toolkit. Videos. Talking points. All of it built to get you to vote no on your own property tax cut. And here's the part that should make you furious: cities collect your property tax money and send a chunk of it straight to the FLC as dues. So they're taking your money, handing it to a lobbying group, and that lobbying group is running a campaign to make sure you keep paying property taxes forever. You're literally funding the campaign against your own tax cut.
HJR 1F is on the ballot in November. It raises your homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027 and then to $250,000 in 2028. At $250,000, roughly 60% of Florida homestead owners pay zero on the non-school portion of their property tax bill. Average savings of $1,500 to $1,800 a year. And the legislature is required by law to develop a schedule for full elimination after that. This is the biggest property tax cut in Florida history. The only thing standing between you and that cut is a yes vote in November.
Grant Warrington
Think like an Investor
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