By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
When Red Tape Florida asked the City of Tallahassee to show how its voluntary buyout program would save more than $8 million a year, the city’s response was remarkable: there was no spreadsheet, no financial model, and no position-by-position analysis supporting the claim.
No methodology. No documented staffing plan. No record reconciling the promised savings with a salary budget that was still going up.
Which made it all the more surprising when Red Tape Florida uncovered that Commissioner Jack Porter attempted to hire a new legislative aide — at the same salary as the departing aide, with comparable qualifications and consistent with what the City’s other commissioners pay their aides — only to discover City Finance had already reduced the budget for the position without consulting her.
The city assumed – without communicating this assumption – that Porter would hire the replacement aide for approximately $13,400 less. When she didn’t, her office was expected to absorb the difference within its existing budget.
The episode offers the clearest window yet into one of the questions Red Tape Florida has been asking for weeks: How, exactly, did City Hall calculate the savings from its Voluntary Separation Incentive (VSI) program?
According to newly obtained emails, Porter’s longtime legislative aide, Terrie Hookfin, accepted the city’s buyout after earning an annual salary of $90,018, which is commensurate with the other four commissioners’ aides. Red Tape Florida independently confirmed that figure through the city’s VSI severance records.
When Porter selected a replacement, she proposed paying the same salary — $90,018.38, matching Hookfin’s salary to the penny. Porter told Human Resources the new aide possessed qualifications comparable to Hookfin’s and should receive compensation consistent with the legislative aides serving the city’s other four commissioners.
But finance had already made a different assumption. Instead of budgeting the position at its existing salary, the city reset it to what is called the Maximum Hire Rate, or MHR — an existing city compensation practice that generally establishes the highest salary at which a new employee may be hired without additional approval. In this case, Finance applied that existing practice as part of its FY27 budget assumptions, budgeting the position at approximately $76,600, more than $13,000 below the departing employee’s salary.
“The FY27 budget assumption resetting the position to the Maximum Hire Rate did not reflect my intended compensation level for this position and was made without consultation with my office,” Porter wrote Assistant City Manager Abena Ojetayo in an email obtained by Red Tape Florida.
New salary? That was news
In an interview, Porter said she first learned of the reduced budget only after selecting her replacement — and that no one from finance or the City Manager’s Office ever asked whether she intended to refill the position at a lower salary before building that assumption into the budget. Had they asked, she said, they would have learned immediately that her intention was to maintain salary parity with the other commissioners’ aides.
Porter also said the Commission received little discussion about the mechanics behind the city’s projected savings before approving the VSI program. Commissioners were told generally that savings would come from positions left vacant and others refilled at lower salaries, she said, but there was no discussion about budgeting specific vacant positions at the Maximum Hire Rate as part of the city’s projected savings or how those assumptions would affect elected officials and department directors responsible for making hiring decisions.
Hookfin, who spent nearly nine years with the city — including assignments in Human Resources, Housing and Commissioner’s offices — corroborated Porter’s account. She said neither she nor Porter’s office was informed before she accepted the buyout that her position would revert to the Maximum Hire Rate or that her replacement would be budgeted at a substantially lower salary.
“We learned about each new restriction only when it became another roadblock,” Hookfin said.
Hookfin also said legislative aides have historically been paid at roughly comparable salaries because each commissioner employs a single aide performing essentially the same job. “When I left, aides were earning approximately $90,000,” she said. “Requiring Commissioner Porter’s new aide to earn significantly less than every other aide abandons that equity standard without warning or a legitimate operational reason.”
HR, Finance not on same page
Further complicating matters is that apparently one city department didn’t know what the other was doing. The City’s Human Resources had already approved posting the position with a salary range that included Hookfin’s existing salary. Only after Porter selected her replacement and attempted to complete the hiring process did Finance advise that the position had already been budgeted at the Maximum Hire Rate. In other words, one department approved advertising the position at approximately $90,000 while another had already budgeted it at roughly $76,600. Whether that disconnect reflects poor communication, poor planning or something else entirely, taxpayers deserve an explanation.
Assistant City Manager Abena Ojetayo acknowledged the budget reduction in her response to Porter but defended it as routine. Resetting vacant positions to the Maximum Hire Rate, she wrote, is simply “standard for our budget planning.”
That sentence may be the most important one in the entire email chain, because of what it says about the City’s response to Red Tape Florida’s public records requests.
For weeks, Red Tape Florida has been asking City Hall to produce the records explaining how officials calculated the program’s promised $8.46 million in annual savings — specifically, the financial models, the methodology, the records identifying which positions would be eliminated, refilled or left vacant, and the analyses showing how those savings reconciled with a salary budget that nevertheless increased.
The city’s response has been remarkably consistent: no responsive records exist.
Yet here, in that same email, finance had already described that assumption as routine. If it’s really “standard for our budget planning,” where are the records documenting that standard? Because that is precisely the type of methodology Red Tape Florida has been seeking all along.
How does this play out 171 times?
The implications extend far beyond Porter’s office. The City’s voluntary buyout program affected 171 employees across virtually every department in city government. If finance routinely applied the Maximum Hire Rate to vacant positions as part of its budget planning assumptions, how many other positions were budgeted using similar assumptions? Were department directors consulted before those assumptions became part of the FY27 budget? Did every hiring authority intend to refill positions at those lower salaries — or were those assumptions simply built into the City’s projected savings before the people responsible for making the hiring decisions had weighed in?
Hookfin believes at least some positions were never likely to generate the recurring salary savings reflected in the city’s projections. Certain positions — including a commissioner’s sole legislative aide — were always going to have to be refilled, she said, and because of operational needs and longstanding pay equity, some would inevitably have to be filled at or near the incumbent’s salary. “Those positions would produce little or no ongoing salary savings,” Hookfin said.
Perhaps there truly are no spreadsheets. Perhaps there is no master financial model. But there was unquestionably a methodology — and taxpayers are only learning about one piece of it because Commissioner Porter attempted to hire a replacement for her longtime legislative aide.
Which leaves one final question: if this budgeting assumption existed all along, what other assumptions were built into the City’s $8.46 million savings estimate that the public still hasn’t seen?