Two Percent of What?

At 6:54 p.m. on September 22, a few minutes before council adopted the FY27 budget, Council Member Guido Maniscalco asked to move funding for two community TV networks, Tampa Bay Community Network and Tampa Bay Arts & Education Network, out of the Social Action and Arts Fund and into workforce development. $75,000 apiece. Council Member Lynn Hurtak wanted more: “I thought either 100 or 150,000 dollars each is what I would want.” Chair Alan Clendenin: “That is an awful lot.” Council Member Charlie Miranda: “Better be conservative, because what’s coming, we don’t know.” Maniscalco: “I would love to give everything, but amendment 3…” Clendenin: “75 each.”

Motion carried.

That’s the scale council works at when the money on the table is theirs to divide. The table was set almost two hours earlier, when Chief Financial Officer Dennis Rogero told them how much there was:

In contrast to our recent history of fund balances at about 23%, our fund balance right now is 25%. The difference between 23 and 25 percent is that $13.5 million. It’s being retained in abeyance, again, as originally anticipated to see what happens in November with Amendment 3.

Two percentage points on the city’s own numbers is $15.4 million. What’s there is 1.8 points. The difference, $1.9 million, is almost twice the entire FY27 Social Action and Arts Fund.

Call me pedantic, but when council is splitting the difference between $75,000 and $100,000 on the dais, the description of the pot they’re splitting ought to match the math.

What $2 million buys around here

On a $2 billion budget, $1.9 million is a rounding error. It’s also bigger than most of what council fought over this year.

• The Social Action and Arts Fund. In February council went through the list one nonprofit at a time. The Penguin Project, “75,000. Down to $15,000.” The Ybor City Museum, “cut down from $150,000 to $45,750.” Council Member Luis Viera offered to split the difference: “Give them $90,000. I am fine with that.” (The museum’s agreement came back in August at $75,000.) The final FY26 list was 58 organizations for $1.5 million. For FY27 the fund was redesigned at $1 million. I wrote in May that I could write a book about this fund. I’ll spare you.
• South Tampa parks. In February, residents asked for $2.5 million of the FY25 surplus for repairs: special-needs swings broken for years, a shelter with its roof caved in, slides boarded up. Council’s list in March gave them $2 million.
• Sulphur Springs. In June, council directed $985,725 for sidewalks on the routes kids walk to school. On September 22, Council Member Naya Young asked for at least $500,000 more to finish the loop and $1 million toward the housing and public realm pieces of the neighborhood action plan. A $1.5 million bridge repair went to the Community Investment Tax side of the ledger.
• Stormwater maintenance. The request was $7 million and the recommended budget had $4 million. Hurtak had her aide dig into it. Getting maintenance back to last year’s level took “only about a million,” which council added.
• Alleys. $1.2 million for the first two phases of a study.
• Youth programs. $175,000 for Rising Explorers and $85,278 for summer youth leadership, two workforce programs on the deferral list that Young asked to add back.
• Special needs internship. $76,000, moved out of the arts fund and paid for from the money in abeyance. Viera: “When you put it in the nonprofit sector, it makes it fragile. First to go in a budget wash.”

By the end of the night, the spreadsheet council’s budget analyst Hagar Kopesky put on the overhead showed $2.77 million in General Fund asks. Alleys came after, another $1.2 million that wasn’t on her list. Rogero said he’d bring a financial resolution with all of it by October 15, and the rest of the $13.5 million waits on another workshop and on November.

Where $13.5 million came from

The unassigned fund balance has always been a black box to me, and this is the first year I can recall hearing anyone put a dollar figure on it. Except I couldn’t figure out where the $13.5 million came from. If the unassigned fund balance is 25% and that’s “about $190 million,” as Rogero put it in July, the “fund” would be “about” $760M. 23% of that would be $174.8M, a difference of “about” $15.2 million. So the day after the hearing, I asked.

Rogero answered Friday afternoon:

This calculation is frequently misunderstood. The unassigned fund balance is typically represented as a ratio of operating expenses. The City’s recent annual history is ~23% of estimated operating expenses, and retaining the $13.5M in FY27 projections would bring the number to ~25%.

Thus, each ~2% of operating expenses is ~$13.6M, each ~1% is ~$6.8M, etc.. Note slight differences due to rounding.

With it came a small table: net expenses $770.0 million, unassigned fund balance $190.7 million at 25%, $177.1 million at 23%, variance $13.60 million, “numbers approximate.” (It arrived as a transparent image of pasted Excel cells, which in my dark-mode inbox was a black box. Fitting.)

The 23% line is right. The subtraction is right. The label isn’t. $190.7 million is 24.8% of $770 million. Two points of $770 million is $15.4 million, not “~$13.6M.” One point is $7.7 million, not “~$6.8M.” The percentages were rounded up: 24.8 became 25, and 1.8 became 2. The dollars went the other way: $13.6 million in the email became $13.5 million at the podium. Round one up and the other down, and the reserve looks fuller while the pot looks smaller.

The part that bothers me is that the city had the precise number the whole time. The fund balance chart the finance team shows off all the time, the one in the screenshot, is a PowerPoint chart, and the file the city posted carries the data behind each bar. There are no dollar figures on the bars, just percentages typed in as text boxes and rounded to whole numbers. The FY27 bar says 25%. Under it: an ending balance of $190,810,959 against a 20% target of $154,015,036.80. That puts the base at $770,075,184 and the reserve at 24.8%. The amount above 23% is $13.7 million.

Count the versions of that cushion council has been given. On September 8, Deputy CFO Michael Perry told them $11 million, then “about $10.5 million” an hour later. Rogero’s written statement to me on September 17 said $13 million. At the podium on September 22, $13.5 million. His email, $13.6 million. The city’s own chart, $13.7 million. None of them is $15.4 million.

Twenty-three percent of what

Three years ago I asked, “We claim to have a 23% fund balance. I’d like to know what we have twenty-three percent of.” Here’s what I can answer now, mostly from the city’s own documents.

The balance is two funds, not one. The city’s audited annual financial report says so in its notes. Whether the target is met is measured with “the unassigned fund balance of the general fund and the utilities services tax fund (combined in the general fund when reported in the financial statements).” The chart’s balances match the audited statements to the thousand dollars for every year from FY18 through FY25.

The base is harder. The policy is written at least three ways. The budget book’s forecast page says “20% of the budget.” Its policy page says “20% of the combined operating expenditures.” The audited report says “20% of the current year actual expenditures,” then tests it “compared with the annual appropriations budget.” That’s three different numbers.

The closest I can get to the city’s $770 million is the General Fund’s spending before a $47 million line called “Cost Allocation - General Fund Contra,” and without its capital purchases. That line is how the General Fund books what it bills the city’s other funds for overhead: the same $46,967,191 shows up as “Cost Allocation-General Fund Services” in the budgets of Water, Wastewater, Solid Waste, Fleet, the CRAs and others. That spending figure lands within a third of a percent of the chart’s base for FY22 through FY25 and within 1% for FY26 and FY27. Not to the dollar. It does explain why the “$731 million” General Fund Perry cited and the email’s $770 million never matched.

Where the money sits

When Hurtak asked on September 22 where the $13.5 million was, Rogero said, “That’s the General Fund.” By the city’s definition, it is, both funds together. But the General Fund you’ll find in the budget book ends FY27 with less than it starts, $66.0 million down to $63.7 million, about where it’s been since FY22. All the growth in the reserve is in the Utilities Services Tax Fund, which has gone from $62 million to $126 million in the same stretch. How that happens is a post of its own.

What council will actually have

The $13.5 million is a projection. The real number shows up in January, when the books close on FY26. Rogero said as much in July: “Again, I recall the process this year, we came to City Council I think it was in January with the itemization of not only what was available above the 23%, the 23%, that is always our goal, and then the mayor’s recommendations for those particular allocations.”

Last January is what that looks like. On January 8, Rogero started from “almost $213 million.” Holding 23% took “almost $160 million.” Health care, hurricane funding, claims, union contracts, settlements and open purchase orders brought the total to about $203 million. “About $10 million is what we have left over.” Then came school zone camera revenue that hadn’t arrived and new sidearms for police. “There is about a little over $5 million remains in General Fund balance for allocation.”

One of the South Tampa parks advocates told council in February, “You should have had a lot more than 5 million to allocate, but turns out you’ve been approving things with that extra money without the knowledge and transparency that you were even doing so.”

Council built its list anyway. When the money was appropriated in May, the resolution moved $4,815,000 “of budget reserves from the Utilities Services Tax Fund.” The same document calls it “General Fund reserves.”

The policy already has a place for this

If the extra money really is being held for Amendment 3, the city’s own financial policies have a name for it. When unassigned fund balance runs above 20%, “excess amounts may be designated as a Budget Stabilization Reserve to support subsequent fiscal year budget shortfalls.” The establishment and use of it “will be recommended by the Mayor and approved by City Council as part of the annual budget process.”

That’s a shortfall from Amendment 3 in a sentence. The FY27 budget doesn’t use it. The money sits as unassigned fund balance, “retained in abeyance,” and what happens to the rest of it after November isn’t written down anywhere. That’s a process problem, and a post of its own.

What I make of it

Put away the pitchforks and torches. This isn’t a scandal, and no one is hiding money. As I said, $1.9 million in a $2 billion budget is a rounding error. In this case, literally.

It’s a precision problem in the one place where precision should matter. The drum I’ve been banging for three years is council understanding what it adopts. On September 22 council divided a pot, live, on a percentage rounded up and a dollar figure rounded down. The same numbers, from the same office, are what council will be handed in January.

Earlier that evening, Tampa Bay Community Network’s executive director told council it’s the only public access station left in Florida and asked the city to “restore our full annual funding of $208,000.” Without it, she said, “we will not make it through the year.” Hurtak’s high number was $150,000. Council settled on $75,000.

The label on the bar says 25%. The data under it says 24.8%. What’s two-tenths of a percent, anyway? That station’s whole ask is less than three-hundredths of one.

And a correction of my own. The site’s Budget Glossary and FY27 overview both called the reserve a General Fund figure of about 25%, roughly $190 million. That was the city’s framing, repeated. Both are fixed.