JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — On the same day Florida’s Chief Financial Officer visited Jacksonville, the city’s finance committee approved a cut to the millage rate.

Members of the city’s finance committee approved a reduction of 1/8th of a mill or $13,478,133.

“It’s time to let our citizens breathe a little bit opposed to spending their hard earned money on social programs quite honestly they probably didn’t ask for or even know that exist,” Raul Arias, Jr., the committee chair, explained.

This cut was praised by CFO Blaise Ingoglia during his visit to Jacksonville and he encouraged city council to do more.

“I would like to think that we had a little bit of a hand in that just making sure that people know that we’re holding people accountable, elected officials, cities and counties for excessive spending, so I’m very happy that we see that,” Ingoglia explained.

Ingoglia’s visit is one of many that will happen across the state as Florida’s DOGE task force audits local government spending. The CFO targeted Jacksonville for rising property taxes, claiming they have increased by more than 50% since 2020. His team could also take a look at several big spending items, including the $2 billion stadium deal.

“I think a lot of it is subject to review. Some of it is going to be subjective, and then some of it is going to be objective, so we have to separate subjective from objective, and make the decisions. We’re looking for things that maybe the taxpayers are not privy to,” Ingoglia said.

The CFO’s visit also comes days after he sent a letter to Mayor Donna Deegan’s office accusing her of trying to restrict auditors by having them sign an external user technology use agreement. Ingoglia argued his team does not have to sign any agreement before performing an audit under Florida law. 

Deegan said the agreement is standard procedure.

“That was really an effort to protect them and us so that we would know who was getting into to the system, So we would know just some basics. It was basically a one page form, so we just got that information from the auditors and that was fine. We just wanted to make sure we had the information we needed should there be a problem,” she explained.

The two did not end up meeting, despite multiple attempts by the mayor’s office. Deegan, who has already expressed her concerns with the redundancy of another round of DOGE audits, highlighted the amount of manpower it took to prepare documents for this visit. Her office said it took more than 500 staff hours to gather 3,780 files for just this visit. 

While Ingoglia praised the millage rate cut, Deegan warned against it. She said Jacksonville already has the lowest millage rate out of any major city in Florida and called the cut “fiscally irresponsible.”

“I think there’s a lot of pressure right now on these council people to behave in a certain way and I can tell you that many of them, not all of them, but many of them know that this is the wrong thing to do and have said so,” Deegan said.

Ingoglia’s audit will continue Friday and more are expected in other Florida cities.

“My message to local governments is tax relief is coming. My message to taxpayers is tax relief is coming. Local government should get ahead of the curve, cut property taxes now because they’re definitely going to be cutting them later,” Ingoglia said.