Despite eleventh-hour pressure from the state to cut spending and lower taxes, Orange’s Board of County Commissioners signed off on an $8.3 billion budget which grew the fund that pays for core services by about 2% from last year while not changing the property tax rate.
The Thursday vote came as Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia and Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings cited conflicting sets of numbers on county growth. The numbers weren’t wrong, an Orlando Sentinel review showed, but each man used different time frames that boosted their arguments.
Ingoglia, appointed to the post by Gov. Ron DeSantis over the summer, began the week blasting the county’s budget as bloated with “excessive and wasteful spending” to the tune of $190 million.
But Demings noted the county’s growing budget – up about 67% from 2020-2021 – still can’t cover all of its needs.
“[The budget] will be substantial, but it still will not be enough to address all of the issues our community has identified,” he said at Thursday’s budget hearing. “We’re under tremendous pressure to not only to maintain our budget but to reduce our budget, but yet at a time when people want us to increase it.”
The CFO has offered no specific programs or positions he deemed wasteful, but noted the county’s general fund had grown $599 million over the past five years and had added 661 employees in that time.
“Your local government here is taking the money and spending it and expanding government, creating new programs that probably shouldn’t be paid with your tax dollars … and wasting it willy-nilly,” Ingoglia said Monday at a press conference in Orange County. “They’re just seeing this as an endless trough that they can come back time and time again.”
Demings immediately fired back, accusing the CFO of “fuzzy math” as he contended the county’s population grew by 125,000 instead of the 79,000 figure Ingoglia had cited and argued that the general fund instead grew by $477 million.
The disputed numbers appear to be a product of the two men mixing their timeframes. The general fund grew about $477 million from 2020 through 2025, and it grew $599 million from 2019 through 2025. In his Monday news conference, Ingoglia said his data dated back to 2019.
On population growth, though, it appears to be the inverse. Demings was citing data dating back to the 2019 state-run Bureau of Economic and Business Research report, which does show the county grew by 125,488 people. Comparing the 2024 BEBR data to the 2020 Census, however, shows a growth of about 81,660 – closer to Ingoglia’s growth number.
The bottom line: Demings’ numbers seem to deflate the county’s per capita spending, while Ingoglia’s inflate it.
Demings also argued that only counting Orange County’s permanent residents is a partial accounting of who uses county services and resources in the nation’s top tourism destination. With more than 75 million visitors last year, that means about 206,000 people per day are visiting the region – more than the entire population of Fort Lauderdale.
Demings has contended the county has been responsible in allocating its budget toward community needs, saying, “We spend the people’s money on the people of Orange County.”
The property tax rate of $4.43 per $1,000 of taxable value remained the same as last year, meaning the owner of a property taxed at $300,000 can expect to pay $1,329 in taxes. Property values have been increasing across the region however, meaning potentially higher tax bills even as rates remain the same.
Ingoglia argued Monday the county is overtaxing its residents by $190 million annually, and should reduce its property tax rate by $.86 per $1,000 in taxable value — a savings of $257 on a home taxed at a $300,000 valuation.
Commissioner Mayra Uribe, a candidate for county mayor in 2026, was the lone vote against the county budget. In an interview following the meeting, she said she was frustrated the county hadn’t reached a deal with the union representing the county’s firefighters, despite raising the Fire & EMS tax rate last year.
“It is disappointing to be here one year later, and we have not done right by the men and women who work for Orange County,” Uribe said. “That’s really my biggest protest.”
Uribe also said she was concerned with county spending and was careful not to dismiss Ingoglia’s criticisms.
“We know that people are suffering financially, our needs are growing, but also there’s limitations on whether we can continue to keep funding all of these things,” she said.
More than $1 billion in the new county budget is dedicated to funding public safety among the sheriff’s office, fire rescue and corrections, including 77 new positions between the sheriff and fire agencies.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office receives the largest share of the county’s general fund, with $423.3 million allocated this year. That represents a 10% increase over last year and a rise of approximately $142 million since 2020.
During that time, the region’s largest law enforcement agency added 198 authorized positions, increasing its workforce to 2,640 employees. Among the reasons for the steep budget growth, Sheriff John Mina told commissioners this summer, is the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses effect of growing law enforcement salaries around the state.
“There is a big competition right now, everybody is trying to chase the highest paid agency and people are afraid of losing deputies to other agencies,” he said at the July budget hearing, noting one area agency is offering a $20,000 signing bonus for qualified deputies to join that force – a potential threat to agencies that don’t boost pay.
Orange County deputies’ starting pay is $62,556, slightly lower than the Orlando, Ocoee and Apopka police departments, which respond to a fraction of the calls Orange does. But the pay is expected to increase as the agency is negotiating a new three-year contract with the union representing its sworn deputies.
The corrections department is funded at $208.2 million this year, up $61 million from 2020. Budget chief Kurt Petersen attributed the increase to personnel costs, which make up 85% of the department’s budget.
Corrections, which operates the Orange County Jail, has 1,620 employees. Unionized corrections officers have seen substantial pay raises in recent years as the county has sought to fill vacancies and retain workers there, receiving at least a 4% wage bump annually and a 17% raise in the middle of this year. Retirement contributions through the Florida Retirement System also have increased from about 25% in 2020 to almost 33% this year.
“Our jail is very costly to operate,” Demings said.
The Planning, Environmental and Development Services department grew from ninth highest funded division in 2019 to the fourth this year – an increase of about $99 million in that time frame.
A key driver for that is increased investment by county leaders into “Housing and Community Development.” In 2019, it received about $300,000 in funding, a figure that has since risen to about $90 million.
Orange’s budget chief Kurt Petersen said much of that growth is in the county’s Housing Trust Fund, which is meant to subsidize developments to add affordable housing. The fund, started in 2020, is projected to receive $160 million in county funding over 10 years. So far, $55 million has been committed to 12 projects, county officials said in May.
“A lot of this funding has not been spent yet due to timing of projects, so that is why you see the increased budget amount over that period of time to account for rollovers of the funding in the trust fund,” he said.
