Saying Jacksonville must reduce its city budget to avoid deficits in coming years, Jacksonville City Council member Ron Salem is calling for the launch of a local version of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Mayor Donna Deegan and others are calling the effort into question, with Deegan saying she has already streamlined city government and that her administration is working on finding more efficiencies, including through an exercise asking all city departments to find ways to cut up to 10% of their budgets.
Before a March 11 meeting called by Salem to explain his legislation, several dozen people gathered outside City Hall to protest against it.
During the meeting, Salem said his intent was to target specific city expenses and that he did not anticipate any city employees losing their jobs as a result. He identified the areas he wishes to explore as “controlled expenses,” offering such examples as potential overlap in city expenditures on child services and in incentive programs for economic development efforts overseen by both the Office of Economic Development and the Downtown Investment Authority.
Salem is eyeing a two-pronged approach in which Council would look for immediate reductions and form a special committee that would seek more efficiencies in the long term.
The meeting included a report from Council auditors with suggestions on areas that could be evaluated, including examining city departments with workforces and budgets that have grown at a faster rate than inflation and the local population percentage in recent years. Another idea was to dissect the list of capital improvement projects to find any that are no longer needed.
“This is not a saw to our government,” Salem said. “This is a very specific approach.”
The special committee could be modeled after a 2007-08 Council ad hoc committee that pared down a city budget hammered by the Great Recession. That committee ultimately removed about $885,000 toward a goal of reducing the budget by 2%.
A 2% budget reduction today would equate to about $10 million.
Council member Nick Howland commended Salem, saying that although the initiative had sparked an emotional response among some residents, “Really all we’re doing here is looking at spending taxpayer money as wisely as we can.”
Kevin Carrico, the Council vice president, said he also supported the effort. He and Howland were among 14 Council members who attended the meeting.
“This is not an attack,” he said. “It’s just accountability and transparency.”
Salem has scheduled a follow-up meeting at 12:30 p.m. March 18 for questions and comments from Council members and residents. Based on the meetings, he will form a plan.
Deegan’s effort
Deegan says she has been working to make city government more efficient since taking office in mid-2023. Her efforts include establishing the 904 LEAN program, which employs a strategy used by businesses to improve such factors as efficiency, customer experience, project delivery times and collaboration to reduce duplicated effort.
During a media conference before Salem’s meeting, Deegan said the 904 LEAN program had saved 216,000 work hours among city employees through such means as digitizing applications and approvals. She said that figure equates to a year’s worth of work by 103 employees.
“What does that mean? It means faster response time, less bureaucracy and better service for the public, because when our people are spending less time on paperwork and administrative duties, that gives them more time to fix a pothole, to help deliver meals to the food insecure, to help a business owner get his permit faster, to save lives in the fire department.”
“904 LEAN means a better quality of life for everyone.”
Deegan said the savings in work hours had not resulted in any workforce reductions at City Hall. She said eventually, some positions may not be refilled and others may be transferred to different departments.
As an example of improved efficiency, she said the new online system for building permitting, inspections and compliance, JAXEPICS, has resulted in the elimination of 56,142 work hours while cutting wait times for permit approvals by a third.
Further efficiencies are coming, she said, through the city’s use of artificial intelligence and advanced financial modeling to improve its budgeting process. Those innovations are designed to catch redundant spending, hold vendors accountable and more, according to a city news release.
During a March 11 appearance on the WJCT News talk show “First Coast Connect,” Deegan said she didn’t oppose efforts to find other efficiencies but didn’t believe they should be modeled on the approach instituted by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk.
“I’d say, after five years on the Council, welcome to the party. Happy to have him,” she said of Salem.
“But at the end of the day, what I would say is let’s make sure that if we’re going to go through, what to me, frankly, appears more performative than practical, since we’re already doing a lot of things to be efficient in government, that we don’t do it like a chainsaw.”
Deegan warned against making across-the-board cuts that would reduce the quality of life for Jacksonville residents.
“I’m very interested to see what comes out of this,” she said. “But frankly, I don’t know that I really understand what we’re doing here.”
Regarding her initiative involving departmental cuts of up to 10%, Deegan said it wasn’t a mandatory reduction but rather an “exercise” to determine where departments could reduce their expenditures through such means as attrition.
“What are your greatest inefficiencies, or what are the places where you could dial back if you absolutely had to?” she said, describing the questions being asked of department heads.
Budget pressures
Salem and other Council members have called for belt-tightening in the upcoming 2025-26 budget after a year when Deegan and the Council agreed to high-cost items such as raises for first responders that will eat into the budget cushion in this and coming years.
Among the short-term effects of the increased compensation for first responders is a $21 million increase in the city’s encumbrance for pensions for firefighters and police officers.
Meanwhile, the city also faced rising costs from inflation while pandemic relief funding ran out.
Another drain on this year’s budget is what Council member Will Lahnen calls the “cash incentive cliff,” a commitment by the city to pay off cash incentives for economic development projects that include $73 million for Downtown projects such as Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s Four Seasons Hotel and office building under construction in Shipyards West.
Although property tax revenues are expected to increase thanks to Jacksonville’s population growth and rising values, Council auditors project deficits of $104 million in the next four years under current trends in revenue and spending.
Meanwhile, the city is facing at least one other big-ticket expenditure to replace its aging jail, the cost of which has been estimated at $1 billion.
On the WJCT program, Deegan said she was working with Sheriff T.K. Waters with hopes of establishing a public-private partnership in which a private firm would build the jail and lease it to the city.
Regarding Deegan’s efficiency efforts, Salem noted that Deegan recommended spending down a portion of the city’s reserve funding in her proposed 2025-26 budget.
“This is the same mayor that wanted to use $47 million in reserves last year that we removed from her budget,” Salem said.
“It’s like the jail. The City Council was working on the jail for 18 months, and now she wants to build a jail. That’s great. Jump on the train, mayor.”
Deegan says Council members making dire predictions about this year’s budget aren’t taking into account new incoming revenue such as a proposed record contribution from JEA. The city-owned utility, which annually contributes part of its revenue to the city to fund municipal services, is considering a proposal to provide $137.4 million this year and increase that amount 1% annually through 2029.
Council also aided the city’s bottom line this year by approving a phased-in increase of the fee it charges Jacksonville residents for curbside trash and recycling service.
That increase, from the current $12.65 per month to $32 in 2027, will rein in a growing subsidization of the service by the city through an annual “loan” from the city general fund. That obligation had been on track to surpass $500 million by 2031 before the fee increase, Council auditors said.
The increased fee will bring in $40 million in new revenue in its first year.
‘Publicity stunt’
Council member Jimmy Peluso, who like Deegan is a Democrat, pointedly criticized Salem’s Duval DOGE initiative during the March 11 meeting.
“This meeting is a farce. It’s a publicity stunt,” he said, adding that in identifying the legislation as DOGE in the meeting announcement, Salem signaled “clear intent of what you meant to do.”
Peluso offered a comparison of the consolidated Duval County government’s budget and workforce with the combined city and county governments of such metros as Orlando, Tampa, Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
Jacksonville had the fewest employees and lowest budget of the comparison cities.
“If you look at the document, it shows how efficient we are,” he said, adding that local city departments are underfunded and understaffed.
Salem, a Republican, said his effort was aimed solely at responsible stewardship of tax dollars and efficiency in governmental operations.
He said that if Council members, in looking for efficiencies, instead find examples of the city being unable to provide services due to lack of funding or staff, they should address those issues as well.