New Sarasota County tax collector vows a balanced budget future

During his eight years as a Sarasota County commissioner, Mike Moran often found himself sparring with department heads and constitutional and elected officers over spending requests during the annual budget season. 

They included a regular protagonist, former Sarasota County Tax Collector Barbara Ford-Coates, whose chair he now fills after defeating the long-time incumbent in the 2024 election. 

From across the table in the third floor “Think Tank” at the Sarasota County Government Center, the two regularly exchanged barbs over what he called excess collections of fees to the tune of $15 million to $20 million that Ford-Coates returned to the county coffers year after year.

This year, Moran found himself facing his former commission colleagues along with two freshmen members in Tom Knight and Teresa Mast, the latter whom was elected to replace Moran in District 1 upon the expiration of his second four-year term. And this year, he has a use for at least some of the that excess revenue while pledging to end in the near future the practice of collecting millions more in fees than the office needs to operate.

Last fiscal year, the Tax Collector's Office returned $20.15 million to the county. For fiscal year 2026, Moran has budgeted a return of $18.67 million, the primary factor in the difference being an upgrade in its collections software more than 15 years overdue, he said.

“It's kind of weird sitting here in this spot,” Moran admitted to his former colleagues.

It must have also been “kind of weird” to lay out the investment of some of the excess fee revenue he opposes, money the county has heretofore counted on annually to balance the budget. 

His argument had been that user fee revenue should more closely reflect actual costs rather than customers renewing licenses and other functions bearing the burden of helping balance the county’s general fund as a whole.

The Tax Collector’s Office annual budget is approved by the Florida Department of Revenue and is funded by fees it collects for services that it provides. Those fees are attached to property tax collections, motor vehicle and vessel registrations, driver's licenses and identification cards, hunting and fishing licenses, motor vehicle transactions and other state and local revenue collections. 

Fees collected that exceed the office's approved budgetary needs are remitted back to the county at the end of each fiscal year. Moran inherited the current fiscal year’s budget when he took office in January, and since has observed he has observed many changes necessary that will require use of some of next year's projected excess.

Priorities listed by Moran for fiscal year 2026 include:

• Improve personnel turnover trend with appropriate staffing.
• Implement kiosk services,
• Artificial intelligence integration.
• Improving and updating compensation and benefit models.
• Employee education and training.
• South county location improvements.
• Improving fraud prevention measures.

The office functions inefficiently, he told commissioners, because of antiquated technology, burnout and turnover resulting from an undersized staff operating in insufficient space, and other shortcomings.

“These are totaling well over a million transactions (annually), and those are done in four locations,” Moran said of the office’s body of work. “That’s not totally true. It's three locations plus, literally, a closet in North Port. It is a closet that was converted where we have four people in probably 30 by 20 feet making 1,200 transactions a day. I don't know if that even really tells the story because, if any of you have been in our offices on a Monday or a Friday … it could easily hit 1,600 people a day.”

Zero excess is the goal

To address staffing, Moran’s budget includes the highest number of new full-time equivalents, percentage-wise, among all constitutional and elected officers — 14 total new employees for a total of 117, an increase of 13.6%. At 103 FTEs, Sarasota is well behind the average of 156 for comparable counties including Collier, Lake, Manatee, Osceola, Seminole, Volusia, Brevard and Pasco; and has the fewest employees among all of them.

Likewise, the office’s budgeted spending increase for next year outpaces all other departments at 27% growth from $11.73 million in the current fiscal year to $14.92 million next year.

That’s a $3.18 million increase, and Moran went on to explain why he will be spending that money rather than returning it to county coffers.

“Out of 67 tax collectors in the state of Florida, we are the only one that is on the software platform we're on,” Moran said. “We cannot stay this way. It’s not even an option. If we sign those contracts today, we don’t go -live for a year. The setup initiation for that conversion is just shy of $2.2 million.”

That capital outlay, he said, will be spread out over three years. 

Sarasota is also one of the few counties, Moran said, that does not employ the use of kiosks in Publix stores where motor vehicle transactions may be executed. 

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“We are the only (county) on the West Coast of Florida, in our comparable demographic, that does not have these services, which is my goal to have those coming about as soon as humanly possible,” he said.

In addition to more personnel, the office needs to improve its compensation and benefit models to address what Moran described as a troubling turnover trend and funding to facilitate hiring and adequately training new personnel.

“I can't hire somebody who works in retail as a cashier and bring them into this facility and have them up and running in a week,” Moran said. “It is a very long runway for somebody to actually be on the counter to be able to handle some of these transactions. So making sure we're recruiting talented folks and making sure they're getting through the education and training funnel and coming out at the bottom to be able to handle these transactions is just a priority.”

Finally, the “closet” space in North Port must be addressed with the need for more facility room. 

Commissioner Ron Cutsinger noted the long list of deferred issues needing attention set against the amount of revenue the office has historically returned to the county, which it relies upon for budgetary balancing.

“We need to be very closely monitoring what you're looking at in terms of what we can expect and how much money your department is going to need to spend on upgrades and improvements on software and new space,” Cutsinger told Moran. “I really do not like hearing that we're the only county that's not there yet in these areas — the kiosks, the online, things that can take pressure off the facilities. I appreciate what you're doing, but we need to be very careful about what we're looking at for next year in terms of dollars as you as you make those upgrades.”

In future years, the County Commission will have to take an even closer look at its budget minus the return of excess fees from the Tax Collector’s Office. Moran said his ultimate goal — as he argued when he occupied the other side of the dais — is to collect zero revenue exceeding expenses from county residents.

“You have my commitment to make sure there's a tight relationship with you to make sure that you understand, and your finance folks understand, how that affects the excess that you were getting,” Moran said.