The chair of the Jacksonville City Council’s special DOGE committee says auditors are seeking explanations from city administrators as to why some $90 million in capital improvement projects remain on the books despite there being no spending on them for well over a year.
Speaking to the Jacksonville Kiwanis Club on April 28, Council member Ron Salem said auditors found dozens of projects in the city’s Capital Improvement Plan for which there had been no activity in at least 17 months. That included $10 million that remains on the budget for projects that have already been completed.
In September, Council approved a $1.88 billion general fund budget with a five-year Capital Improvement Plan that included $489 million in first-year spending. Salem is chair of the Finance Committee, which reviews the budget.
“We will again be meeting a week from tomorrow and we’ll hear more about what the auditors have found,” he said.
“I was shocked by the fact that that much money was sitting there. We’re out borrowing money for new projects when we’ve got money sitting there. Who would do that? It makes no sense to me.”
Salem proposed the local DOGE initiative and chairs the Special Committee on Duval DOGE. He said the effort differs from the Trump administration’s version in that all analysis is being done internally by Council auditors.
“There is no one outside our government – an Elon Musk, for example – leading this effort,” he said.
Budget pressures ahead
Salem said the committee’s work was aimed at addressing budget pressures in coming years. Council auditors have issued projections showing deficits of as much as $105 million over the next four years, brought on by factors such as raises for first responders in 2024 and incentives for redevelopment projects Downtown.
In a related remark, Salem said he was weighing a proposal to put Council in direct control of about $20 million in “controllable expenses,” or funding that could be spent at the discretion of city administrators. Through that arrangement, he said, the city could possibly find other cost savings.
Salem’s plan would place 2% of the general fund “below the line” in the finalized 2025-26 budget, a term meaning that it could not be spent unless expressly allowed by Council during that fiscal year.
To spend that funding, administrators would need to receive Council approval on a case-by-case basis as needs arose. He said Council took the same approach during the 2008 recession, and the result was about $4 million in savings.
In a response, Mayor Donna Deegan’s administration said Deegan was already focusing on reducing expenditures and “creating efficiencies in a thoughtful way” through her 904 LEAN effort, which employs a strategy used by private businesses to improve such factors as efficiency, customer experience, project delivery times and collaboration to reduce duplicated effort.
Regarding Salem’s proposal to subject 2% of funding to Council gatekeeping, the statement from Deegan’s office said it “gives no real consideration to Jacksonville’s needs and priorities and is the opposite of the surgical approach Councilman Salem has said he’s committed to.”
Salem said at the April 22 Council meeting he would distribute a list of the budgeted projects yet to start to Council members and asked them to vet the items to see which projects were still needed.
The Kiwanis Club event was held at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Jacksonville Riverfront.
Projects await warranty process
In response to an audience member’s question about the $10 million for projects that have been completed, Salem said some projects are not removed from the budget until the completion of a construction warranty process to ensure the work was done correctly.
He said the warranty often involves as little as $2,000 to $3,000 of a project’s budget. He said he was exploring the creation of a fund to cover warranties and also suggested the city should build the cost into their contracts.
In response to other questions, Salem said he had heard of no direct effects of the federal DOGE cutting on the city budget and that a legislative proposal to reduce the state income tax by 1% would lead to a $40 million to $50 million reduction in city revenues.