Data & Sources

How these numbers were produced

Extracted from 25 source documents and reconciled against the printed page totals in each. The rules below exist because each one caught a real error during the build.

• Audited actuals and adopted budgets are never mixed in one trend.

  An early draft spliced the FY2026 adopted budget onto the audited series and produced a 104% one-year increase. Adopted budgets include appropriated reserves and transfers that audited statements do not; the jump was an artifact of changing definitions mid-series.

• Restricted pass-through money is excluded from growth and from every savings base.

  A $403.7M Disaster Recovery line routed through a finance cost center with 82 staff produced an apparent 5,509% increase. It is federal hurricane relief that cannot be redirected and falls back to about $2M the following year.

• Budget totals are summed once per department, never blindly.

  The budget book prints each measure at both section and department level. A blind sum returned $1.62B of operating expenditure inside a $2.52B budget — arithmetically impossible. Correcting it cut the headline savings estimate by nearly half, from $92M–$259M to the published figures.

• Savings percentages apply to measured bases, never to the whole budget.

  A percentage of $2.52B is arithmetic theater. Each range is applied to the specific line it can actually touch, and overlapping tactics are carved out so Fleet, General Services and IT dollars are not counted twice.

• Authority is tracked separately from dollars.

  An earlier version claimed to cover Board-controlled departments only. It did not: it silently included seven independently governed units while excluding the Sheriff's Office, the county's largest at $222.98M. Tiers now reconcile exactly to the 4,155.12 total staff published on page 85.

• No ranking is reported from an incomplete filing year.

  Only 28 of 67 counties had filed FY2025 Annual Financial Reports when this was compiled. The per-resident figure is shown; no rank is, because a rank drawn from 28 counties is not a rank out of 67.

• The strongest counter-argument is presented alongside the finding.

  Most Florida counties spending more per resident have almost no incorporated cities, so their county budget carries city services. That objection is shown in the ranking table rather than left for a critic to raise.

Scope. Board-directed totals cover BCC departments only (2657.85 FTE). The independent tier (constitutional officers and other boards, 1497.27 FTE) is reported separately because the Board appropriates a lump sum but has no line-item authority. The Sheriff is 67.8% of that tier's dollars and may appeal a reduction to the Administration Commission under Fla. Stat. 30.49. Combined figures are contingent on officer cooperation and must be labeled as such, never presented as a Board decision.

The source documents

The complete corpus: 25 unique public documents, verified against their own first pages before any figure was extracted. Originals are available from each government's published budget and financial reporting pages.