- June 15, 2025
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As Manatee County moves into its annual budget season, Commissioner Amanda Ballard equated the county’s current process to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
“The way our budget process is currently structured, we have very limited ability to actually shrink government,” she said. “We only have the ability to slow growth or to say no to new positions.”
Ballard broached the issue during the June 3 commission meeting after Commissioner Bob McCann deferred an item he added to the agenda that could have implemented a temporary hiring freeze for county government.
His suggestion of a hiring freeze excluded the “critical roles required for Public Safety, emergency response and essential county operations.”
After Ballard shifted the topic from a hiring freeze to a review of the current staff, McCann had a request for each department head in the county. He wanted a list of every employee in each department that includes how much they are paid, what their duties are and how much money their positions save the county.
McCann complained that departments are too frequently asking to hire new staff and that some staff members are unnecessary. He used grant writers as an example.
“(United States Department of Health and Human Services) is pulling all their grants,” McCann said. “We’re hiring people to write grants. If those grants don’t come in, we’re still paying those people.”
On the other hand, Commission Chair George Kruse described Manatee County’s government as “lean,” noting the lack of bus service on Sundays. Most of the libraries are closed, too. The Lakewood Ranch Library offers limited hours on Sunday, but it’s the only branch to do so.
Kruse cited a recent presentation he heard at a housing conference. As a response to Governor Ron DeSantis’ push to lower and eventually eliminate property taxes, the Florida Legislature Office of Economic and Demographic Research analyzed how reliant Florida counties are on ad valorem taxes to pay for services.
Manatee County ranked No. 8 in a list of the 10 least reliant counties.
“We fell into that bucket of the 10 counties that utilize property taxes the least relative to services provided, implying we’re providing more services per dollar than other (counties) are,” Kruse said.
Commissioner Mike Rahn pointed to a potential legal problem with a hiring freeze.
“The county administrator’s (Charlie Bishop) contract states that he has the ability to hire and fire employees,” Rahn said. “In my opinion, if we were to implement a temporary hiring freeze, that could be considered a violation of his contract.”
Even when directors and deputy county administrators are brought before the commission, Rahn equated it to a “blessing.” He noted that it’s not the commission’s job to micromanage staff, their role is to set policies.
He did, however, agree with Ballard that the county’s budget process should include a description of base services.
Ballard’s complaint is that directors decide what constitutes a base level and continued level of services, and there’s no matrix for doing so. Commissioners are only seeing new requests from each department.
“Some directors might be real budgetary hawks,” she said. “Others might not be, and we just don’t know.”
She noted that programs that were necessary under prior boards might not be necessary now because either the problem is solved or the program doesn’t fall in line with the policy preferences of the current board, so there’s no way for commissioners to “meaningfully cut the fat.”
Kruse and Rahn contend that there's not a lot of fat to cut because so much of the overall budget is doled out to the county's constitutional officers, which are the clerk of court, the supervisor of elections, the sheriff, the tax collector and the property appraiser.
"We're spending like 27 cents on the dollar on all the rest of government services combined," Kruse said. "If you trim that dollar by 10%, you're effectively trimming all of our actual services by a third."
The first budget work sessions were scheduled for June 9-11. The commission takes a recess from June 23 to July 25, so the next budget meeting will be held July 31 when the tentative millage rate will be set. The public hearings will take place in September, but the dates are not set yet.
