Council sits for a special call first reading for the Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26) budget adoption hearing Wednesday evening with a regular session Thursday morning. Thursday morning’s agenda with just 42 items is one of the shorter agendas in a long time but that doesn’t mean it will be a short meeting.

Wednesday Budget Adoption

One of the refrains during the future land use update meeting last week was to delay the vote on the update until after a representative for district 5 was elected. In the same breath was how district 5 won’t have a vote on the budget because it has to be approved by October 1. Wrong. When the mayor’s millage increase was voted down 2 years ago there was question if they could come to agreement before October 1. It was made clear by council attorney there’s a mechanism for the mayor and council to push that date back outlined in the city charter. Agree to a resolution to fund basic operations through a set date. If there is the presumed run-off for D5, that election is October 28. Plenty of time for both candidates to become familiar with the budget to be able to cast a vote in November before Thanksgiving break or first week of December.

The wrench in that would be addressing all of the negotiated contracts with the unions and the expectation those will go into effect Oct 1. Which again, I find it backwards that the admin negotiates salaries and contracts before a budget is approved. But then again, they’re 3 year contracts so what ever is negotiated in this one will be carried into the next mayor and council’s term.

As to the special call hearing, I don’t expect much. You’ll hear about how much we pay people. And it’s a lot. Thursday council will be approving the negotiated contracts for police and transit unions (which also includes non-uniformed police related positions). Both include a 4% increase in FY26 and FY27. 3% in FY28. A starting Tampa Police Officer will increase to $74,942.40 base salary (starting salary in 2022 was $60,257). Lieutenants start at $150,000 annually. Under the transit union negotiations there wasn’t a base salary increase for entry level. The lowest pay grade in that contract will still stay at $31,200.00 — $15/hour. The ceiling increases to $46,883.20 — $22.54/hour. The first 4 pay grades all stay and start at $15/hr with higher ceilings; up to $25.25/hr — $52,520.00 annually. 80% of area median income for a single adult household by HUD/state income standards is $58,450. And none of that gets into administrative and professionals who aren’t union. Tampa firefighters are still negotiating.

You’ll also hear about how much money we’ve left on the table by having not raised transportation impact fees and development services fees since the first desktop computers were installed in city hall. Back in May I shared my thoughts about the future land use/comp plan update and noted:

Someone will point to impact fees. Yes, that’s been a topic of discussion at every budget meeting I’ve watched. Finally last year Council allocated the funds and the city hired the required consultant to do a rate study. It’s currently in the works. The Lakeland Ledger reported, the city of Lakeland discovered the “impact” of a new single family home was 70% more than what they are charging now. A warehouse was over 300%. But because of a law passed by Tallahassee in 2021, the municipality can only increase the impact fee 50% every 4 years unless they can demonstrate “extraordinary circumstances”. Maybe mitigation from the hurricanes could be sold as extraordinary circumstances, but chances are it could be 10 years or more before we “break even” on the impact of new development. That’s 10 _more _years of subsidizing new development. We are also years away from getting our other permitting fees in order.

I haven’t seen the fee study yet, but I’d bet if you take what we should have been charging compared to what we are—just in this mayor’s administration—we’ve subsidized development to the tune of 100s of millions of dollars. Add to that the fees that have been previously discussed like permitting and it’s going to be even more.

There’ll probably be a lot more wish casting about how the Community Investment Tax (CIT) or the partial refund of transit tax will somehow solve the budget dilemma “next year”. Yeah, too bad kids, no trip to Disney World this year, but next year, I’m going to win the Fantasy 5 and we’ll go to Disneyland. Definitely beats the harder discussions about the budget and priorities.

No discussion of future revenue will change anything about the FY26 budget. And aside from some discussions about social action/arts funding, council seems content with the mayor’s proposal. One change that has been discussed is Council member Hurtak indicated early in the process her desire to continue funding fare free Route 1. At some point during Thursday’s meeting (new business?) she shared with council she had good discussions with both the admin and HART. It sounds like her proposal has the support of the mayor at perhaps a lower cost than initially anticipated. I believe the Regional Infrastructure Accelerator may come into play. Beyond that, I haven’t heard of any suggested changes and expect first reading to pass unanimously. All I want is to not hear a council member utter the phrase “the mayor’s budget” again until next July when she presents her final budget. They are not merely approving the mayor’s proposal, they are adopting the budget. It’s their responsibility now.

Thursday Regular Meeting

As to the regular meeting Thursday, beyond approving the aforementioned police and transit union contracts, among the 42 items are a few I want to highlight.

Item 5 is only $43,450, but it’s an agreement for TPD to use Flock license plate readers. If you’re not familiar with Flock, they were recently found to be sharing data with ICE and CBP. They claim they are “pausing federal pilot” programs but that doesn’t mean they won’t unpause or simply provide the data to a different department or source. But I guess it doesn’t really matter since I learned from listening to the WMNF D5 candidate round table (discussion between Mitch Perry and John Dingfelder is around 43rd minute of first hour) that Tampa Chief of Police Bercaw signed a 287(g) agreement with ICE on behalf of the city of Tampa. Stuck in my agenda bubble I’d missed the news as it didn’t require any council approval. It was actually signed February 26 as a “task force model”. According to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center “The “Task Force” model grants the most powers and effectively gives local or state law enforcement officers most of the powers of immigration enforcement agents.” There is a “Warrant Service Officer” model that only gives limited powers to local agency.

If that’s not enough surveillance state for you, item 29 is yet another multi-year multi-million dollar contract with Axon. This one is $10 million for 10 years to expand the “First Responder Drone” program. Not to be confused with the $40 million contract TPD signed with Axon last year for bodycams and what ever else their suite of tools for law enforcement includes. Nor to be confused with the virtual training pods TPD purchased from Axon in April. I understand in some circumstances where a helicopter isn’t available a drone could be useful. TPD have drones. In March of 2024 TPD bought replacement drones with FDLE funds. The $40 million contract in December 2025 was to include “unlimited video storage” which explicitly mentions drone footage. But now we need to spend another $1 million a year for an expanded program? With a police operating budget that’s increased from $167 million to $221 million from FY23-FY26 I question if the TPD drone program really needs expanding. At $74,000 annually, $1 million in drones is the salary of a dozen officers. A million would fix up more than a couple of parks. This specifically comes with a request to use $500,000 of general fund dollars with an anticipated grant from the State Attorney’s office. “Interim financing” for a possible grant from the state. What’s the rush? Why can’t they wait until the SAO secures the grant?

Item 32 is a milestone for the streetcar expansion with a $6 million contract for a consultant to do necessary studies and a conceptual/preliminary design for extending from downtown to Columbus along Florida Ave/Tampa St. Emphasis on necessary studies. No plan could go forward without them and might as well start fleshing out what exactly it will look like. But we are still a long way from funding the construction. This contract is using previously approved (unanimously) CRA funds.

The final item I’ll mention is the 1:30pm public hearing for consideration of suspension of alcoholic beverage permits. Plural. When the date for the hearing was set I wrote:

I suspect there are more problematic establishments on the list than others, but the law has to be applied evenly. Thus 10 businesses with incomplete documentation and 47 who have not submitted the necessary documentation have until September 4, 2025 or face a potential suspension of their license. Included in the list is the award winning restaurant Big Ray’s Fish Camp owned by the mayor’s partner’s family. Again, these are clerical in nature and can be resolved with filing the specified information outlined in their zoning approval.

The required documentation is a signed statement reflecting separately gross sales from food and from alcohol. Their permits are conditioned on 50% or more of gross sales to be from food. Considering this is the first time I’ve seen this brought before council, either everyone had a bad year with paperwork or it’s something that’s not been enforced. As I said, it’s my guess there’s a couple of bad apples in the bunch clearly abusing their permit. It will definitely be interesting to see how many have complied by Thursday and what the city attorney is recommending in terms of fines or suspension. The last AB suspension hearing before council (Cathedral Cigars in Tampa Heights) the city attorney recommended a 30 day suspension. Council voted for 7.