Wakulla sets its FY26/27 tax rate Tuesday night - here's what's actually in the packet

BOCC Regular Meeting, Tuesday, September 8, 2026, 6:00 p.m. — Final Agenda, 301 pages

This is the first of two required public hearings on next year's county budget. If you only read one BOCC packet this cycle, this is the one. Tuesday's meeting sets the fire assessment, the solid waste rate, two neighborhood broadband assessments, and the tentative countywide budget and millage rate, all in a single sitting. Here's what they are actually voting to have levied on you, and a few things in the county's own paperwork that don't add up the way the county says they do.

A reminder before we start: Wakulla's county fiscal year runs October 1 through September 30. Everything below is about FY2026/2027 (Oct. 1, 2026 – Sept. 30, 2027) unless noted otherwise, and it's all tentative. The second and final hearing is Monday, September 21, 2026 at 6:00 p.m., and the Board can lower any of these numbers between now and then, but cannot raise them (p. 8, p. 17, p. 36).

The headline number

The tentative FY2026/2027 countywide budget on the table tonight is $245,143,345, set out in the Tentative Budget Resolution and Exhibit "A" (pp. 13–14). The tentative countywide operating millage rate is 7.7000 mills, which the county's own resolution says is 1.55% below the "rolled-back rate" of 7.8216 mills (p. 12, p. 15).

It's worth being precise about what "below the rolled-back rate" means, because it's easy to hear "millage cut" and assume the county is bringing in less money. It isn't necessarily accurate. The rolled-back rate is the millage that would raise the same property tax revenue as last year, adjusted for new construction. It moves every year as property values change. A rate below rolled-back is not a tax increase under Florida's TRIM law (F.S. 200.065), but it also doesn't mean flat or falling revenue if property values rose enough. And notably, this packet never states what the county's actual millage rate was last year (FY2025/26), only the rolled-back comparison. So from this document alone, you can't tell whether your own tax bill is going up, down, or flat; you can only say the county chose a rate below what would have held its total collection flat.

What the budget itself shows is that the General Fund is projected to grow 7% year over year. From $45,915,867 (FY25/26 Amended) to $49,130,404 (FY26/27 Preliminary), even as the millage nominally comes in under rolled-back (Exhibit A, p. 14). That's not a contradiction, it's exactly how rolled-back-rate mechanics work when property values are climbing. But it's a useful check on any messaging that frames tonight's vote as simply "a tax cut."

The math that doesn't reconcile

You know we've been looking at the budget for some time, following it closely. And when reviewing the new material in the agenda packet we noticed an anomaly.

The budget total itself. The background section for Item #1 (p. 7) walks the reader through the budget's evolution in three steps: the Preliminary Balanced Budget handed to the Board on July 13 totaled $249,656,336; changes announced at the August 17 workshop added $383,813; and "additional changes to the budget" made since then amount to a $4,129,178 decrease. Doing that arithmetic ($249,656,336 + $383,813 − $4,129,178) comes out to $245,910,971.

But that is not the number the county is actually adopting tonight. The Attachment #1 line-item schedule (p. 11), the Tentative Budget Resolution (p. 13), and Exhibit "A" (p. 14) all converge on a different total: $245,143,345. The gap between the two is $767,626, not a rounding error, and not explained anywhere in the packet. Both figures are stated plainly and both are page-cited; they simply don't match each other. That's worth an on-the-record question at the hearing: which number is the walk-through missing?

What residents will actually be charged

Four rate-setting items are on Tuesday's public hearing docket, each adopting a final or annual assessment rate that will show up on a tax bill.

• Fire protection assessment (Item #2, pp. 17–29): $277.00 per dwelling unit for residential property; $0.289/sq ft commercial, $0.038/sq ft industrial/warehouse, $0.619/sq ft institutional, $4.16/acre vacant land. Projected to raise about $6,111,070 for fire services countywide (p. 18). This assessment applies inside the county's Municipal Service Benefit Unit for fire protection, which both the City of St. Marks and the City of Sopchoppy have opted into by ordinance (p. 22).

  • This is up from the previous year which was at $263, a $14 increase.

• Solid waste assessment (Item #3, pp. 36–53): $214.00 per dwelling unit, projected to raise about $3,427,539, which pays the county's contractor Waste Pro plus landfill operations and monitoring (p. 37).

  • This item holds steady. No increase.

• Elm Ridge Subdivision broadband assessment (Item #4, pp. 54–67): $905.32 per lot. This is the fifth and final year of a five-year assessment that began with the November 2022 tax bill, reimbursing the county for the $110,133.99 it originally spent building the neighborhood's broadband infrastructure (p. 54–55).

• The Park Subdivision broadband assessment (Item #5, pp. 68–81): $187.70 per lot, also the final year of a five-year term, reimbursing $113,666.67 in original project cost (p. 68–69).

As with the millage rate, this packet does not disclose last year's fire or solid-waste rate anywhere in its 301 pages, so there's no way to independently confirm from this document whether either bill is rising or falling for an individual property, only what the new rate is.

The $15 million line nobody explains

Exhibit "A" (p. 14), the fund-by-fund budget breakdown, shows Fund 195 (the county's Industrial Development Authority fund) growing from $31,926,544 (FY25/26 Amended) to $46,926,369 (FY26/27 Preliminary): an increase of $14,999,825, or 46.98%. That is, by a wide margin, the single largest dollar swing anywhere in the entire $245 million budget. Nothing else in the packet, no accompanying agenda item, memo, or footnote, explains what's driving it. This is worth flagging as a vague/open-ended item rather than a finding of any wrongdoing: it may well have a mundane explanation (a bond proceeds pass-through, a grant drawdown, a large capital reimbursement), but the packet as published doesn't say, and a $15 million move deserves a plain-English answer on the record before the September 21 final hearing.

The lobbyist contract, and a decision that happened somewhere else

Item #20 asks the Board to approve Amendment No. 1 to the county's Consultant Services Agreement with CAS Governmental Services, Inc., its Tallahassee legislative liaison ("lobbyist," in plain English), extending it retroactively from September 3, 2026 through September 3, 2027, at the existing rate of $30,000 per year, billed at $2,500 per month (pp. 220–221). Retroactive because the prior agreement had already expired on September 3, 2026, five days before this meeting, meaning there was a gap during which the county had no signed contract in place with the firm, if it continued any advocacy work during that window.

The item's own background section discloses something worth separating clearly from tonight's vote, per our usual rule about not letting one meeting's history read as if it happened at another meeting: back on June 16, 2025, a different Board meeting, over a year before this one, staff presented the Board with options for legislative liaison services after CAS's prior contract exhausted its extensions, including soliciting the work through competitive procurement. The packet states that the Board's Vice Chair proposed a different option not on staff's list: waive the county's competitive-procurement policy and simply re-engage CAS directly. The Board approved that unanimously (p. 220). Tonight's Item #20 is not that decision, it's the one-year contract extension that decision set in motion, exercised under a renewal option in the resulting September 2025 agreement. But it's fair background for readers to understand how Wakulla's current lobbyist arrangement came to exist without ever going back out to competitive bid.

The same background section (pp. 219–220) lists a running tally of state and federal appropriations CAS has helped the county secure since 2021 (including $3M toward a new Emergency Operations Center (2022), $3.25M more for the same EOC (2023), $750,000 for a fire rescue engine (2023), $2.1M for a fire station north of St. Marks (2024), and $673,100 in EOC furnishings (2025)) but also notes that in the 2026 legislative session, "Wakulla County did not receive any appropriation funding from the legislature" at all, amid a session focused on property tax reform.

Everything else worth a page-cited mention

Panacea sewer engineering, procurement with only two bidders (Item #21, pp. 230–232). RFQ 2026-13 for professional engineering on the Panacea Inflow & Infiltration project drew only two responsive proposals. The Selection Committee scored Dewberry Engineers, Inc. highest (210 of 240 possible points) over Anchor Consulting Engineering and Inspection, Inc. (182 points). Tuesday's vote authorizes the County Administrator to negotiate a contract with Dewberry, it does not set a dollar figure. Staff's own memo says "the cost of the requested services is unknown" at this time (p. 231); the contract will come back to the Board separately.

Grant money that's proposed, not decided. Two items are easy to mistake for enacted funding but aren't:

• Item #24 (pp. 295–299) authorizes submitting a grant application to FDEP's Coastal Partnership Initiative program for improvements at the Big Bend Maritime Center. The total estimated project cost is $35,200, and the grant requires a 1:1 match, meaning if the county is awarded the grant, it's on the hook for $17,600 from the Parks One-Cent Sales Tax Fund.

• Item #15 (pp. 175–179) similarly authorizes applying for a Northwest Florida Water Management District cost-share grant for a weather station, estimated at $8,000 with no county match required if awarded.

Restricted grants the county's budget leans on.

• Item #13 (pp. 148–165) is the FY2026/2027 State Aid to Libraries grant application, estimated at $134,524. The item states this accounts for nearly 30% of the library system's entire projected FY26/27 budget. That's a meaningful dependency on one state grant program for any reader wondering how resilient library service would be if that funding were ever delayed or cut. Worth knowing, not evidence of any current problem.

• Item #18 (pp. 202–211) is Amendment No. 4 to a Florida Department of Environmental Protection Springs Protection Program grant agreement (LPS0111) connecting several subdivisions to the county sewer system; the agreement's overall reimbursement ceiling is $11,468,890, though this particular amendment carries no new budgetary impact.

• Item #19 (pp. 212–217) is a Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission grant amendment for channel-marker repairs in the Ochlockonee River and Bald Point, a cost-reimbursable award up to $152,750 with a required $25,000 county match from the One-Cent Sales Tax Boating Fund (total project: $177,750).

A long-running contract, extended again. Item #23 (pp. 287–294) is the thirteenth amendment to the county's State Housing Initiatives Partnership (SHIP) program administration contract with Accenture Infrastructure and Capital Projects, LLC (formerly CSG). The program is funded through the state's Housing Trust Fund and Accenture is paid on a percentage basis under F.S. 420.9071(7); this item's own budgetary-impact section discloses no new dollar figure for this particular amendment, and the packet does not state Accenture's cumulative compensation across all thirteen amendments.

Small, explicit program eliminations. In the Attachment #1 budget-change schedule (p. 9), two line items are explicitly tagged "Eliminated": a $6,000 Annual Physical Incentive employee benefit in General Administration, and a $6,000 CDL Fees revenue line tied to a Fleet Department program. Both are small relative to the overall budget but are the only two items in the schedule the county itself labels as eliminations. These items were listed as cuts in the Strategic Organizational Restructuring and Financial Sustainability Plan.

A quiet reorganization of courthouse maintenance. Several line items in the same schedule (p. 9) move courthouse maintenance costs (utilities, contracted services, maintenance and repair) off the Clerk of Court's budget and onto the county's own Facilities Management Department, described as "County Assuming Courthouse Maintenance from Clerk." This is a bookkeeping and responsibility shift between two government offices, not a service change visible to residents, but it is a real reallocation of who administers that spending going forward. This is interesting since the county pitches in its Strategic Organizational Restructuring and Financial Sustainability Plan to recover shared costs from other constitutional offices. Perhaps the court house is getting a paint job.

Nothing new in land use. The Planning and Zoning section of Tuesday's agenda is empty. No rezoning or land-use items are before the Board at this meeting (p. 4).

Impact fees: a study, not a fee. Commissioner Fred Nichols (District 2) is asking the Board to direct staff to finish the county's existing Recreation and Mobility Impact Fee Study (Item #25, pp. 300–301). The item is explicit that "no impact fee is being adopted by this agenda item". This authorizes finishing the analysis of whether new development should help pay for the recreation and road capacity it uses, with any actual fee coming back for a separate vote later. Worth watching, not yet a decision.

Everything above is arithmetic anyone can check with the page numbers we gave you. We can't read all 301 pages out loud to you, and we won't catch everything every time. What we will keep doing is opening these packets, digesting them, then handing you what we find instead of a 300+ page document you don't have the desire or time to read. The rest is on you: show up, ask it out loud, make somebody answer on the record. We just try to make staying informed enough to do that, a little less boring.

Stay sharp, Wakulla!

Sources: Wakulla County Board of County Commissioners, Final Agenda, Regular Public Meeting, September 8, 2026 (301 pages). All dollar totals and percentages in this piece were independently recomputed from the packet's own line items, not taken on the county's word. Page numbers refer to the PDF's internal pagination as published. Links in green go to the source documents located on our MediaFire drive.

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