- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] - A steady paycheck used to be enough to get by in the Bay Area, and a new report puts a hard number on what it really takes.

It finds nearly half of Florida's families can't reach it.

What factors underpin the rising cost of living?

Then Hillsborough County goes looking for places to save money and turns up nearly $700 million that could be cut.

Everything from speed cameras in school zones to health care programs for residents.

Supporters call it common sense belt tightening, but critics say it's cutting services that families count on.

And the one statewide office that touches every dollar Florida spends is on the ballot.

We'll break down the race to be the state's money watchdog, an appointed incumbent defending the job and the challengers lining up to take it.

Plus, don't miss our panel's big stories of the week.

It's all next on Florida This Week.

[music] Welcome back, everybody.

I'm your moderator, Lissette Campos.

On our panel today is Kourtney Sanchez.

She's the chief executive of the United Way of Suncoast here with results of the latest affordability report in Florida.

Ali St.

Cyr is a broker and owner at Gulf Shores Realty who follows the Tampa Bay housing market every single day.

Jake Hoffman, a Republican who chairs the Hillsborough DOGE Liaison Committee that's the group behind a new report on proposed county cuts.

And Victor DiMaio is a Democratic strategist and president of the Hillsborough County Democratic Hispanic Caucus.

For a lot of families in the Bay Area, a steady job still isn't enough to keep up with their financial obligations.

A new report from the United Way Suncoast puts numbers to the squeeze.

It's called the ALICE Report, and that's short for, "Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed."

In other words, people who work and earned above the poverty line but still are struggling to cover the basics.

The report finds that a family of four with two children and child care now needs more than $106,000 a year just to get by in this region.

Compare that to Florida's median household income of about $77,000 a year.

Statewide, the report says that nearly half of all households, 47% fall short of affording that basic budget, and the cost of living is steepest right here in the Tampa Bay region.

Pinellas County has one of the highest survival budgets in the state.

Housing is a big piece of that equation.

It's the same pain point for really our entire region.

And Kourtney, I'd like to start by asking you to explain for the viewer at home who doesn't know what the ALICE report is.

Tell us what that is.

- So you mentioned ALICE stands for, Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, neighbors.

So when I think of that, I think of that as people that we know that we see every single day.

They are our neighbors.

Sometimes they're our coworkers.

Teachers are ALICE.

Nurses are ALICE.

Our grocery store baggers are ALICE.

Right.

These are people that are hard-working community members who are struggling to make ends meet.

And I think something that's important when we talk about ALICE is that we're not talking about trips and cars.

We're talking about basic necessities.

We call it a survival budget.

So when you mentioned that 47% of the state is below that ALICE level, 46% here in the Suncoast region, um, we're talking about just paying their bills.

And so for us, when we think about our ALICE neighbors, they're just one unexpected bill from real financial crisis.

- When you look at the data, there's so much in there.

Share with us some of the data that struck you the most.

- So as you mentioned, Pinellas County is particularly high, second-highest, um, survival budget needed in the entire state.

So a family of four, so that's two adults and two young children in Pinellas County has to make over $114,000 just to cover the cost of living.

But what we also see is our elderly population is really struggling.

Um, they are ALICE.

And we see every single year we do free tax preparation through our VITA program.

We have this, this aging population coming to us saying, I need to work to live, but how much can I make before it impacts my Social Security?

- How is the ALICE report data used by other organizations in the region?

This is something that's very collaborative.

- Absolutely something that makes me proudest of United Way and United Way Suncoast is our ability to collaborate and convene.

And that's really the spirit of the ALICE report.

We create this data, we we collect this data, and then we make it into bite-sized digestible information so that not just United Way.

It's not this is not a challenge that nonprofits can solve alone.

We give this to employers.

We raise this with policymakers and politicians.

Our public policy committee is very much in this and how we can partner together to collaboratively solve this problem.

- And as I look to the rest of the panel, no one is really surprised by these numbers that families are struggling.

Ali, how do you see this play out in the real estate market?

- Sure.

We absolutely saw a boom during the pandemic.

And fortunately, unfortunately, this is a very desirable place to live.

So people continue to come to the area.

More money continues to come to the area and it makes the prices go up.

We even though we have more inventory right now on the market than we have in quite some time, there's still a shortage of housing really happening.

And so the prices have not come down.

Even though we saw those surges in '21, '22, they've still maintained even though we have more inventory on the market.

So it's been very interesting to watch.

But when you talk about Pinellas County, the condos have had a significant decrease in pricing separate from overall single-family and and townhome.

But the more high rise condo communities, because of the regulations after the Surfside collapse.

- The Surfside collapse and the whole issue of the repairs that have to be done.

And that was a starting point for many young couples, young professionals in owning their own, their first home, they would go the condo route.

And that's it's been difficult to see those prices go up in terms of policy leaders.

Um, the two strategists in the room, Jake and Vic.

How do you how should people be looking at this data when they're looking at policies?

I know that we've all talked about property taxes and whether or not they will be repealed.

Um, Victor, I'd like to start with you.

- Well, we're going to talk about a little bit about property tax amendment on the, uh, coming up later in the show.

- But the first thing that's going to get slashed, everybody agrees 100% is going to be the social services that people need to survive.

I don't know if goodwill receives any government help at all from the county or the city, but, uh, you know, that's the sad part about this whole thing that we're going to have to face reality here coming up a few months in November when we have the election, because social services do provide a very serious need to a lot of people who need help.

- And United Way Suncoast does provide funding to several organizations in the community.

Jake, how do you see this, this, this data coming on the ALICE report?

- Sure.

I mean, I'm not surprised.

I mean, I live in the world too.

We all see how much it costs to live, and we all understand how much it costs.

Housing and everything else has gone up in the Tampa Bay area.

But let me give you the opposite opinion of my friend Vic over here is that if this property tax goes through, that is a lot of people who will get a meaningful cut from their yearly budget that's pulled directly out of their bank account You know, for a lot of people, that might be $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a year on a on a median house, you know, $400,000 house.

It's not this is a meaningful cut if the property tax amendment goes through.

So that's a big deal.

That's a big deal that can add into some of these numbers that you see because every every penny adds up.

And so that might be a direct way to give money back to people.

- And let's get started on that conversation.

Hillsborough County is taking a very hard look at how it spends your money.

A volunteer advisory committee appointed by the Hillsborough Commissioners has been looking over the budgets for a year, approximately in search of possible cuts.

It's named the Hillsborough DOGE Liaison Committee.

It's made up of five professionals who have identified about $678 million that could be trimmed.

That's roughly 6% of the county's $12 billion budget.

Targets to cut range from school zone speed cameras to County Film Commission.

Most significantly, is nearly $300 million for the county's health care program for low income residents.

County officials are still reviewing the findings, and the recommendations are non-binding.

The timing of this report matters deeply, with sweeping property tax cuts on the ballot coming up for November.

Supporters say that these findings do show that counties can trim budget without touching police, fire or essential services.

But opponents argue that money is paying for services that residents depend on.

Jake, when you talked about the results of the study, first, let's get to how long.

What was the logistics of doing the study?

What did you all look at?

What are the backgrounds of the people who are doing the looking?

- Sure.

To give a quick background, because it's very extensive, our entire report is up there on HillsboroughDOGE.com.

You can go.

It's 69 pages long.

It's a lot.

It's very meaty, but I encourage.

If people are interested, they should go and they should read through every word of it.

Now, how this works is that you've got it's very complicated because at the federal level, you have Elon Musk and DOGE, and there's a preconceived notion of what that means and that he's given all this power.

You can start chopping off agencies in the federal government.

It's not that.

Then you have the state level with our CFO and our governor, who have been looking at our our counties being efficient with our money.

And so then there was a statewide effort.

And so Hillsborough County was trying to get ahead of that.

The commissioners decided, let's do a local committee to liaison with the state.

Now, the state didn't really do a lot of liaisoning with the county.

And so we got a report back in December that basically 3 or 4 pages of Hillsborough County.

They said it was around $300 million.

But there's this baseline of formula.

And so I'm not one to sit around twiddling my thumbs.

And so I said, we're going to put out the report that we were here to do.

And so for the last six, eight months, we have been digging through line by line, all of the county budget, and figuring out which contracts have been inefficient, which ones have been misspent; ones that are labeled miscellaneous.

That's $214 million right there that they just don't really give us an explanation for what they're spent on.

And there's a lot of practices.

And so, that this is a very thorough report.

It's done by...you had to be either an IT professional or a forensic auditor, CPA lawyer or something along those lines.

So, but but we weren't looking for transactional fraud.

You know, we have a clerk's office that does audits.

We do they do third party audits and everything.

This is not that this is also collaborative.

One of the things I would like to get across is that we sat down with county staff every single month, once or twice or three times a month asking questions about each thing.

So we didn't just come up with numbers.

We didn't just come up with a formula, we didn't do this aggressively.

This was done in collaboration.

And that's how we come up with the report.

- Talk to us about the suggestion, the recommendation that the indigent health care plan be looked at.

- Sure.

And so this is controversial because you're talking about our lowest serve communities, the indigent health care.

But this is something that was set up in 1991.

People don't realize that this is a 0.5% sales tax on every purchase we make in Hillsborough County.

That goes back to this is a you know, all the studies will say that's the most aggressive type of tax.

And they take a lot of money into this program for about $300 million a year.

There's almost $500 million in reserves just from this study, from all the money that they're collecting, and they only serve 2,000 people with it.

They actually can't get people to sign up fast enough.

They're trying really, really hard.

- And so what was the recommendation?

- So the recommendation that we have is that the county needs to stop acting like an insurance provider because we all understand that health care is very opaque, is the word I like to use.

We don't know how much an aspirin cost.

We don't know how much it costs to stay at the hospital.

And, you know, we got these contracts where we're giving, you know, a million, $2 million to an oral surgeon for a single year.

That's in the report.

We're giving a $10 million over here to this hospital and $20 million, $50 million.

And we don't really understand where that money goes to because it's health care and we understand that.

So we've got a local county program that that does insure people.

But our recommendation is to start moving people to the, the ACA, the marketplace, the Obamacare, as people call it, to move people to Medicaid or Medicare if they're not on those and they are there's, there's an eligibility overlap that exists there.

And so it starts getting very complicated.

And I'm not saying it's perfect, but it costs us almost $12,000 a year per person that's on this program.

And we think that it can be done for about $1,000 or $2,000.

- Victor.

- With all due respect to my friend Jake, we do we do agree on one thing.

Is there fat in different parts of the government, whether it's the city or the county?

Yes, there is some fat.

However, the indigent, as an example of this indigent health care program which was founded by the late, uh, Phyllis Szymanski, who was very instrumental in making this a model for the nation, what the purpose of that program was to to try to try to catch people in the donut hole between people who have insurance, people who are not on Medicare or Medicaid or have private insurance or Obamacare.

This fills that need in the community.

And these people are going without health care because they were either had too much money to not qualify or too less money.

So that is and it's kind of a misnomer to say this is $300 million of fat.

First of all, there's a dedicated tax for just that.

It doesn't come in a big budget and then we can cut it out.

The second thing is the Republican majority in Congress, through their Big Beautiful Bill has cut out.

It's going to start in January.

They cut $1 trillion out of Medicaid, which helps the poorest of the poor.

They cut $1 trillion out of Medicare, which helps elderly people who need help.

So that's not the the umbrella that Jake's talking about, that they can just go into Obamacare.

And and by the way, the Republican majority in Tallahassee decided not to take up the Obamacare Medicaid expansion program, which we've lost probably $10 or $20 billion a year in the state of Florida because.

Well, one of the things that's a big, big need out there.

Like what?

- One of the things that folks on either side of the political spectrum, whether you're a Republican, a Democrat or no party affiliation, is the fact that looking at inefficiencies is not a bad thing.

Jake, tell us about the inefficiency, some of the examples that that you found in that regard.

You talked about fleet management, film commission, the speed cameras in the school zones.

- Yeah, I could I could go on and on about each one of these, you know, the speed cameras.

They've been a very controversial for a lot of different reasons.

Speed cameras, a lot of a lot of controversy.

Now they make a lot of money.

I call them a racket.

I think that's fine a racket.

And but but beyond it being a racket where they are collecting money for it, they are also paying for them to install cameras.

So we've got contracts in there, $600,000 for like ten cameras, another million dollars to install another ten cameras.

So all of a sudden we're $4 million into buying cameras.

When I'm thinking, well, that that company that's on the other side of that gets $21 for every ticket that they write, that's $100.

That's a 3 to $10 million a year that they're going to get in recurring revenue.

They would install these for free.

So so that's inefficient to create a contract where you're paying someone to go get paid.

- And what about the film commission?

- Well, the film commission, we've got a Film Commissioner that costs somewhere between $130,000 to $200,000 a year, depending on the year he travels to 100 film festivals.

Admittedly, this was in the in the newspaper that he did 100 film festivals last year.

I called it the best job in Tampa Bay.

I'd like to go travel to 100 film festivals for the year.

He doesn't even.

I mean, and then he he has a million and a half dollars a year budget to give to to friends for pet projects.

And we asked I asked a very simple question on day one.

I said, how do you get one of these grants for $50,000 to, to, to do a movie or to do a show or something like that?

And they came back to me and said, well, there's no application process, there's no website, there's no, there's no link, there's no.

So I'm like, how does that happen?

That seems like a bad.

- Things sound great and they're great.

I agree with you on that.

But frankly, you want to really go after the fact, go after the sheriff's department.

They got a multibillion dollar budget.

Well, that's, you know, that's, that's where you really got to go after the fact.

But but see, that's why you can't have this tax relief bill coming up here in November and said, well, you can't touch the police.

You can't touch the fire.

You can't touch it.

I mean.

- Well, there were agencies that you all were not allowed to look.

- At.

Let me make a this is an important clarification.

This is really only the county's budget.

They would not let us go look at the fire department.

They would not let us look at the sheriff's department.

We are not allowed to look at.

We're not looking at the school board.

We're not looking at the city of Tampa.

People get this stuff confused.

We're not looking at any of the constitutional offices.

This is very limited to just the county's budget.

And I agree, Vic, I think that, again, the only contract we can see from the sheriff's office is this school zone camera one, because it was forced by the state to do so.

And it's not a very good one.

- The red light camera deal they make 80.

The guy with the contract makes 80% of the ticket.

Yeah.

- Well, this is an issue that's really fueling the conversations around whether or not people are going to vote in favor or against the constitutional amendment on property taxes.

So definitely have to have you both come back and we can go over this more in detail.

We're going to shift now.

We've been talking about local budget and property taxes, and the one statewide office from which all of Florida's financials flow is up for election this year.

We're talking about the state's chief financial officer.

The Republican auditing local budgets is running to keep his job, and Democrats have a primary to settle.

First, take a look.

The chief financial officer is Florida's money watchdog.

The office oversees state finances, serves as fire marshal and is a check on the insurance industry.

The man in the job now is Republican Blaise Ingoglia, appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis last year.

Since then, he's undertaken a vast audit of local budgets, calling out what he labels, "Wasteful Spending."

- I would love for every county, every city, every taxing authority in the state of Florida to have their own DOGE committee because they should be looking at line by line spending.

It should be part of their job.

It should be normal for them.

- Front-runner Ingoglia ties local government audits to the bigger fight on November's ballot.

A constitutional amendment to cut property taxes.

But first, voters will decide in the primary who gets to challenge him.

The two Democrats squaring off are seen as two very different candidates.

One is from right here in the Tampa Bay area, Earl Ford.

He's an Army veteran, an attorney, and a former IRS investigator.

He recently left a Pinellas congressional race to run for CFO.

Ford's platform centers on the homeowners insurance crisis and calls the property tax debate a distraction from the insurance premiums, squeezing families.

- The state needs to be the referee and needs to be the gatekeeper and make sure everything is on the up and up.

- His opponent is Annette Taddeo, a former state senator from South Florida.

A familiar name in Democratic politics, she was a nominee for lieutenant governor and for Congress.

She's built her campaign on insurance costs, government accountability, and she argues the office should be an independent check on the governor.

- It's supposed to be, I should say, the watchdog.

And what we currently have is a lapdog for the governor.

This should not be about going after blue cities or blue counties versus red counties.

I, you know, the people suffering in Florida, they're they're both Republican, Democrat and Independent.

- And we want to point out that Florida runs a closed primary.

So only registered Democrats get to pick that nominee next month, Victor, I'd like to start with you and then move on to Jake.

What do you think about the candidates for CFO on the Democrats?

- Well, you know, I think overall what the polls are showing now that I've seen is the, the, uh, the level of excitement for Democrats is off the charts right now.

I mean, independents are going.

I've seen 70%, 80% for the Democratic side.

Democrats are very excited.

Republicans are not as much because there's no Donald Trump on the ballot.

There's a very controversial primary going on in the Republican side between Byron Donalds, who's Trump's pick, uh, which some people are not too crazy about and other.

- Candidates for governor would like to get some more attention to force a debate between the Republicans.

- And even DeSantis came out and said, you know, I wouldn't qualify in the debate because they're making it.

You got to have ironically, it's exactly what Donald has the same number of contributions, the same amount of money in the bank, and the same percentage in the polls.

So it's kind of weird the way they set up the.

- But the CFO is really it's really not getting a lot of attention.

And yet it is a very important position.

Yeah.

Jake, do you think that the the reports and the activities that have come out since Blaise Ingoglia was appointed will help him or hurt him in the actual election for the role.

- Well, I think this is going to help him.

I mean, it only helps to go around the state and try to make local government more efficient.

It only helps to tell people that they're going to keep more money in their pocket.

I think to your point, people don't pay attention to the CFO, and as much as we may talk about it, or your viewers might talk about it because they watch Florida This Week and they're interested to go in depth on these things.

The average person is not going to know who the CFO is, and it's going to be a down ballot race, and they're going to vote for the governor and they're going to vote whether they like the governor, Republican or Democrat.

And then we are all all of everybody else down the ballot is, you know, a recipient of what happens at the top.

- Well, at the time that we have left, this is the part of the show where we like to do our big stories of the week, where we take advantage of the expertise of each of you on our panel to talk about the other big things that are important in your sectors.

I'd like to start with you, Ali.

What is your big story of the week for us?

- We are very excited.

It's hard to believe it happened so fast, but we are celebrating our ten year anniversary and over $1 billion in sales.

And we're very, very proud of that.

- And just remind our viewers that the company was started ten years ago, under which name?

And now you have you've rebranded.

- We were Tomlin St.

Cyr, and just in February we rebranded.

We owned Gulf Shores Realty after an acquisition in 2021.

And we decided to bring that name to Tampa to better define our geographic territory.

- Well, congratulations.

Thank you.

Kourtney, what is your big story?

- So just a few weeks ago, United Way of Florida hosted their statewide annual conference right here in Tampa.

So we had 28 local United Ways from across the state right here in Tampa, talking about the challenges our neighbors are facing and how United Way is uniquely rising to that occasion, but very exciting as we had our United Way worldwide interim CEO Rosy Herring Allen here with us as well, which was really special.

- Congratulations.

- Jake...Well, my big story is going to be whether or not the county commissioners are going to hear our DOGE report, because while I'm sharing it here with you and I'm sharing it on the news, they have not actually invited us to present this report in front of them.

They are the ones that have to take action on it.

So I'll be watching to see if we're put on an agenda for July 15th, which is the next meeting.

And then the other main story is the World Cup.

And so I'm excited about the World Cup.

I think everyone's excited about America.

We've done a great job hosting it.

I'm watching all the videos of of Scottish people march down Miami Beach, and I'm watching them take over bars in LA and all these places.

I think that everyone is really enjoying America, and it's really a great celebration of the 250.

- With so much bad news, the World Cup is giving us something great to cheer about.

Victor.

- Well, back to the bad news.

Uh.

To piggyback on a thing that Jake was talking about with his report, I think the biggest issue that we talked about today, and it's going to be a big issue between now and November, is these constitutional amendments on property taxes.

And, uh, I think it's going to be something that people really need to research.

And there's a lot of confusing stuff going on on the east side.

- So and you also think it's going to impact the conversations around the Tampa Bay Rays new ballpark.

- The Tampa Bay Rays is a perfect example of something.

Every, every city, they're going to put everything on hold.

The Rays are pushing for a vote in another month.

That's not going to happen.

I've talked to commissioners that are wavering now.

People that voted for it, they're now against it.

It's an election year.

There's a lot of stuff going on on both sides of the fence.

People voting for it are being attacked by Republicans who are very conservative and don't believe in any spending money for billion dollar owners and stuff.

So this is going to be a very interesting, uh, next few months here politically, uh, in to watch for this week.

- We are going to be really busy here in Florida This Week.

Thank you again for each of you for coming in and taking time out of your busy schedules to join us.

Thank you again to our panelists Kourtney Sanchez, Ali St.

Cyr, Jake Hoffman, and Victor DiMaio.

Folks, we really appreciate you watching and joining us.

We know that you have plenty of choices for your news and information, and we thank you for choosing us.

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