By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
OK, City of Tallahassee, explain this to taxpayers like we’re stupid.
Earlier this year, City Hall paid nearly $3.9 million in incentives to get 171 employees to leave.
Now, just months later, the city’s proposed FY2027 budget calls for 20 more employees than it has in the current budget.
We’ll wait.
The numbers are right there in the budget documents headed to the City Commission for the first of two public hearings Wednesday. Tallahassee’s current FY2026 budget includes 3,044.75 full-time equivalent positions. The proposed FY2027 budget has 3,064.75. Go back a little further and the trend is even more striking: the city had 2,981.75 FTEs in FY2024 and 2,996.75 in FY2025. If the new budget is approved, Tallahassee City government will have grown by 83 FTEs in three years.
Ordinarily, another 20 employees might not be particularly remarkable, especially because the new positions proposed for FY2027 are police officers. But this isn’t an ordinary budget year. City Hall spent nearly $3.9 million earlier this year on its Voluntary Separation Incentive program, which persuaded 171 employees to leave. The departing workers represented about $12.15 million in annual salaries before benefits, and 28 of them were making six figures.
At the time, city officials projected the program would produce about $8.46 million in annual savings. Red Tape Florida thought that sounded like a number worth understanding, so we asked for the spreadsheet, financial model, workbook, emails, memoranda or presentations used to calculate it.
The city’s response: “No such record exists.”
That was curious enough when RTF later found that the city’s salary line wasn’t going down. It was going up, from roughly $181.5 million in FY2026 to about $187.1 million in the proposed FY2027 budget. Those are still the numbers on the “award-winning” budget portal Mayor John Dailey loves to crow about (which hasn’t been updated since June 9). Now the workforce numbers create another obvious question: if 171 employees were paid to leave as part of a cost-saving strategy, why does the budget authorize more employees than before they left?
Anybody heard of Amendment 3?
And what about the impending doom we’ve been hearing about with Amendment 3, the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that the city says could cost Tallahassee approximately $29 million over the next two fiscal years?
You might expect the nearly $4 million voluntary buyout program — pitched as a way to prepare City Hall for exactly that kind of financial hit — to get some serious attention in the proposed budget. Instead, you have to hunt for it. The 171 departures aren’t mentioned. Neither is the $3.87 million cost or the projected $8.46 million in annual savings. The VSI gets little more than a couple of passing references, including one describing it as among the “prudent financial strategies” that are “critical” to preparing for Amendment 3 and another saying it supports “long-term financial planning.”
That’s a pretty modest victory lap for a program City Hall has portrayed as an important part of preparing for a potential $29 million revenue hit — particularly when the same budget proposes a workforce of 3,064.75 FTEs, 20 more than the year before the buyouts.
Biggest budget cut: Details
The budget doesn’t tell commissioners how many of the 171 positions were permanently eliminated, how many were refilled, how many remain vacant or what the recurring annual savings from the buyouts actually are. It doesn’t explain how the city arrives at $8.46 million in projected savings, and it doesn’t reconcile that claim with a salary budget and authorized workforce that are both growing.
Instead, the agenda item talks about “proactive workforce planning,” “disciplined long-term financial management” and continued efforts to “streamline operations” and “consolidate work groups.”
Those phrases sound reassuring. The numbers require a little more explanation.
Perhaps all of that can be reconciled. Authorized FTEs are not the same thing as filled jobs, salary savings can occur when highly paid employees are replaced by cheaper ones, and commissioners may have perfectly sound reasons for adding police officers while reducing costs elsewhere.
But taxpayers shouldn’t have to reverse-engineer the city’s personnel strategy from footnotes and payroll tables.
The city spent nearly $3.9 million to get 171 employees to leave. It told residents that would save roughly $8.46 million annually. It is now citing that program as a key part of its preparation for a possible $29 million property-tax hit.
And the budget it is asking commissioners to approve authorizes the largest city workforce of the last four years.
So we’ll go back to where we started.
City of Tallahassee, explain it to us like we’re stupid:
What exactly did taxpayers get for their $3.87 million — and how, exactly, is this preparing Tallahassee for Amendment 3?