Jacksonville’s Duval DOGE committee members are questioning a Florida DOGE report that recently blasted the city for “wasteful and excessive” spending.

At a Tuesday meeting of the City Council’s special DOGE committee, the city’s financial watchdog critiqued the state DOGE report released last week. The Council Auditor’s office noted discrepancies, and a lack of context, echoing reporting by The Florida Trib which found the report fell far short of the claimed $200 million in waste. 

In some references to Jacksonville, the numbers provided in the Florida DOGE’s 98-page report did not accurately reflect current expenditures in the city, Council Auditor Kim Taylor said in a presentation to the committee. 

At the meeting, city council members said it’s still unclear how Florida DOGE and CFO Blaise Ingoglia calculated the bulk of the $200 million in alleged misspending, a number first announced during his September visit to the city last year. The initiative was the subject of a Florida Trib story on Saturday about the discrepancy.

Duval DOGE shared the report from the auditor’s office with Ingoglia this week in hopes of gaining clarity with state officials.

However, Ingoglia has already expressed an unwillingness to collaborate with local leaders who do not agree with the numbers produced by Florida DOGE.

“Unless they prove to me that they are going to stand on the side of taxpayers, and against the side of bigger government, I don’t think it’s going to be much of a conversation,” Ingoglia said in a recent interview with The Tributary.

Across the state, local government officials are initiating their own investigations into the Florida DOGE report to determine the accuracy of the alleged $1.9 billion in excessive spending.

Despite Florida DOGE’s suggestions to slash funding, Jacksonville council members will not propose cuts to the budget for the foreseeable future, but they see the review of its report as an opportunity to enhance the budgeting process.

“We want to make sure we get everything done as we need to for our city and provide the services, but we also want to make sure we’re being good stewards of the taxpayer dollars,” said council member Chris Miller, who is also part of the Duval DOGE committee. 

City auditor responds

After the release of the Florida DOGE report, the Council Auditor’s Office compiled its own review responding to each allegation that mentioned Jacksonville and its spending.

Although some of the state DOGE’s calculations are accurate, Taylor saidshe still found incorrect figures displayed on graphs and littered throughout the report. 

One Florida DOGE bar graph included a 30% increase in personnel spending on a graph. But Taylor said she could not “verify the exact percentages in the report” without having Florida DOGE speak to their findings.

Taylor found that the spending surge from 2021 to 2025 was closer to 39% when including the significant growth in public safety workers — the same first responders Ingoglia has vowed to protect.

While additional funding for first responders’ salaries and pensions make up about a 70% increase in the budget from last year, the council members are not looking to make adjustments to those budgets. 

“I’m a big believer in police and fire, and it’s not something we’ll be taking a look at,” said Duval DOGE chair Ron Salem.

The auditor’s office also determined that inflation was not factored into Florida DOGE’s calculations in some instances, and in another case, the auditor was perplexed at the budget figures cited by Florida DOGE — because those numbers did not match the city’s budget.  

DEI debate

With Governor Ron DeSantis pushing to eliminate DEI from the public sector, Florida DOGE criticized the Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville and its grant funding. 

Florida DOGE specifically highlighted the Cathedral Arts Project’s ‘Justice Involved Youth’ program and Jacksonville Symphony as examples of DEI. But in a memo to Duval DOGE committee chair Ron Salem, both entities disputed the accusations that they are receiving city dollars to fund DEI programming.

The ‘Justice Involved Youth’ program has been privately funded since the pandemic, and the symphony receives $538,000 from the city to pay for musician salaries, according to the two nonprofit groups. 

And when committee members had the chance to speak on this section of the report, Councilman Raul Arias retorted that “to state that we were funding DEI projects, I think that’s  not correct.”

Florida DOGE also condemned efforts by local governments to convert to clean energy or execute climate change policies, such as the use of electric vehicles.

An electric vehicle conversion plan for Jacksonville — that is not yet enacted — costing $105 million over the next 15 years was also dismissed as unnecessary, but Arias argued the benefits, including fuel savings, will outweigh the costs.

“I guarantee you will be saving a lot more than that over the course of 15 years, just with fuel alone… So this definitely would be a big savings for us, not a waste,” Arias said. 

Duval DOGE committee member Chris Miller said that a bulk of the $200 million figure may come from this electric vehicle plan. Without it, only $95 million can be attributed to alleged wasteful spending, according to The Tributary’s reporting.

“I would like to see an overall list of everything that went into that $199 million estimate of waste for Jacksonville,” Miller said.

Trinity Webster-Bass is The Tributary’s inaugural Investigative Journalism Fellow. You can reach her at trinity.webster-bass@floridatrib.org.