County adopts a $1.94 billion budget on flat tax rates

St. Johns County is running on a budget of $1,939,752,566, and the exact figure has not been published anywhere a resident would look.

The board adopted it on Sept. 15, at a 5:01 p.m. hearing in the County Auditorium. The county announced it on Oct. 5, twenty days later, in a release that calls it $1.9 billion. The minutes carrying the final vote are not posted. They go to the board for approval on Tuesday, as item 24.

So the figures here come from the first hearing, on Sept. 3, which is the one with approved minutes behind it. The county’s budget page says nothing changed between the two: “Since there were no changes from the 1st Public Hearing to the millage rates or budget, the Fiscal Year 2027 Tentative Budget Workbook remains the same for this 2nd and Final Public Hearing.” Both workbook links on that page resolve to the same document.

The rates did not move

Resolution No. 2026-294 set four countywide rates. All four are what they were last year.

A mill is a dollar for every thousand dollars of taxable value.

The aggregate is the one line that moved, and it moved down, by fourteen ten-thousandths of a mill. It is a blend, weighted across the street lighting districts and the beach restoration taxing units as well as the four rates above, and each of those carries its own rate and its own values. Nothing in the record says the board set out to change it.

The minutes also record that the board gave itself room to go lower and did not use it. Commissioner Clay Murphy, the chair, asked for consensus to approve the flat rate tentatively, with the chance to consider a lower one at the second hearing, and the budget director told the board that a tentative rate can be lowered afterwards but cannot be raised. Twelve days later the rate was the same. That option was live the whole time and it closed at 5:01 p.m. on Sept. 15.

The levy did move

Resolution No. 2026-295 records the certified taxable value of the county at $63,056,698,242, and an estimated $426,006,002 in taxes generated by those rates.

Last year the same resolution recorded $59,070,778,205 and an estimated $399,156,113. So the value rose by roughly $4 billion and the estimated levy by roughly $27 million, on rates that did not change.

The county’s own resolution states the consequence in one line, printed directly under the millage table:

Percentage increase in Property Taxes from rolled-back rate: 2.14%

The rolled-back rate is the rate that would raise the same money as last year, setting new construction aside. The county’s aggregate rolled-back rate for this year is 6.6143. The board adopted 6.7559. Under Florida law the gap between those two is a tax increase, and the statute makes it the first substantive issue to be discussed at the hearing, ahead of everything else.

Last year the same line read 3.58 percent.

Where the money sits

The total rose from $1,898,131,598 to $1,939,752,566, which is about $42 million, or a little over two percent. The General Fund rose from $487,973,694 to $543,610,743. Special Revenue Funds are recorded at $204,279,506.

Most of the increase is not a decision made this year. The county’s budget page puts the total down to capital work carried over: “the Fiscal Year 2027 Tentative Budget reflects over $482 million in capital carryforwards, bringing the Fiscal Year 2027 Tentative Budget to $1,939,752,566.” A carryforward is money already appropriated for a project that did not finish inside one fiscal year, and it is counted again in the year it gets spent.

The release lists more than $264 million in new funding for capital improvement projects and approximately $126.3 million in Utility Services borrowing for the same work. It records an increase to the General Fund emergency response reserve, and a new one for the Transportation Trust and the Fire District Fund.

The number behind the next three budgets

The release spends more words on Amendment 3 than on the budget it is announcing. That is reasonable. The amendment is on the ballot on Nov. 3 and the budget is already law.

If it passes, the Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research estimates the county loses $68.3 million in property tax revenue in FY 2028, $136.1 million in FY 2029, and $191.6 million in FY 2032.

Set those against the $426,006,002 this year’s rates are estimated to raise. The first year’s loss is roughly a sixth of the whole property tax levy. The last is close to half of it. Both of those are this paper’s arithmetic on two figures the county publishes separately, and the comparison appears in none of its material.

The release says the county does not advocate for or against the amendment. Nothing in it does.

What is not in the record

The Sept. 15 hearing adopted the final rates and the final budget by separate motions, in the order the statute prescribes. What those motions said, who moved them and how they carried is in a minute book nobody outside the building has read.

It reaches the public on Tuesday morning, near the bottom of a regular agenda, as two lines under a motion to approve minutes.

Item 24 is where the vote on $1.9 billion gets written down.