Photo courtesy of The Argus Foundation.

Sarasota County kicks off its budget workshops for the year on Thursday, February 26th, and the numbers deserve your attention. The county has budgeted $23 million more in economic uncertainty reserves than it collected in general fund revenue, and that gap has real consequences for taxpayers.

To help residents understand where things stand, we have launched a social media campaign presenting county slides, memos, Argus letters, and our columns in an accessible format. The slides are screenshots taken directly from county materials available on their website and from commission meetings. Nothing has been edited or reinterpreted. We are showing you the source documents.

This is our second transparency campaign, modeled after the Sarasota Schools Data Dig we launched a few years ago, which compared school statistics across the district and against the rest of the state.

On our official Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts, we are posting multiple times a day leading up to the first budget workshop. We began posting last week, so there is already material available for you to review. After the workshop, we will continue posting new information throughout the year as it becomes available, leading into the budget hearings in September.

The response has been telling. Many people are genuinely surprised by what they find in the posts.

Ad valorem revenue has grown by more than 30 percent since 2022. The county has added more than 111 full-time equivalent positions since last year alone. The general fund budget grew by more than 9 percent over the same period. Since 2022, spending in commission-controlled departments and the Sheriff's budget has grown faster than the county's own population increase. The Tax Collector's budget jumped 34 percent from last year.

In the coming days, we will post county memos explaining how constitutional officers' budgets work, where pending capital projects stand and how much general fund money it would cost to operate them if construction is not delayed, and a breakdown of the current budget gap.

The most important post comes next week. It is a county slide showing their own budgeting model, and it projects the county will be in the red within a year and a half if current spending patterns continue. The slide shows a clear trajectory toward depleting reserves that were set aside specifically for difficult economic times.

Taxpayers should be paying attention. Your tax bill is at stake, and so are the county services you rely on.

Christine Robinson is the Chief Executive Officer of the Argus Foundation.

Photo courtesy of The Argus Foundation.