Q&A of the Day – How Efficient Are Florida’s Local Governments?
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
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Today’s Entry: Hi Brian & Joel, Hope you gentlemen are doing well! Is there any metric on Florida county government efficiency? I ask because Palm Beach County keeps adding or attempting to add 1% sales taxes. In Palm Beach County we have the highest legally allowed gas taxes in the state. Does Palm Beach need its own version of DOGE? (Department Of Government Efficiency)
Bottom Line: Great question and I love the thought process here. If you’ve listened to me over the years, you’ve no doubt heard me say...every election has consequences, however it’s the elections that happen closest to you that often have the biggest impact on your daily life. While I’ve been saying that for over 26 years, the COVID year of 2020 proved that point unlike any we’d previously seen during our lives and yet local only elections persist with paltry turnouts of about 20% of eligible voters give or take based upon the community.
These days the expression “Make America Florida” coined by Governor DeSantis is commonplace – especially with a Floridian as the president-elect of the United States, along with a chief of staff and cabinet full of Floridians in the mix. But long before Governor DeSantis was on Florida’s political scene, and well before Donald Trump decided to enter politics, the state of Florida, you might say, created its own version of DOGE.
In 2006 Floridians voted in favor of Amendment 1 which created an ongoing government efficiency task force. The Task Force meets each fourth year and submits its recommendations to the chairperson and vice chairperson of the Legislative Budget Commission, the Governor, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. About a year ago at this time, Governor DeSantis appointed five members to the current task force with a report that's due out next year. Previous reports have produced ways to reduce billions in wasteful spending by state agencies through streamlining government. Many of those recommendations have been acted on. The effort has been highly successful. There are multiple organizations that rank state government efficiency.
In this year’s “Taxpayer ROI” report from WalletHub, Florida ranked 2nd in providing the best return on state taxes, and by far the best of any large state with only New Hampshire ranking higher. In the just recently released 2025 Tax Competitiveness Index by the Tax Foundation, Florida ranked 4th overall, and again with best ranking of any large state by far with only Wyoming, Alaska and South Dakota ranking ahead of our state.
Empirically, Florida is the best run large state in the country from an efficiency perspective. Now, due in part to the success of the state’s efficiency agency, Governor DeSantis championed a Florida Local Government Efficiency Task Force.
The state’s Local Government Efficiency Task Force, created under a Florida law passed in 2020 evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of local governments across the state issuing recommendations. Areas studied include the handling of business taxes, elections, liabilities, meetings, pensions and reporting. These were the findings of the first task force:
Elections: “The task force recommends that the Legislature standardize the statewide local election.”
Public meetings: The task force recommends lawmakers “amend Florida statutes as needed to reduce the number of municipal hearings” to be equivalent to those required by counties to address discrepancies in the number of required public hearings on proposed ordinances between counties and municipalities. “Recognizing past and current legislation related to notice for public meetings,” the report continues, “the task force recommends legislators engage with the media industry to examine options for updating the notice process to use modern technology platforms.” The report also calls for state lawmakers to “amend Florida statutes as needed to allow local governments to hold virtual meetings in emergencies or extraordinary circumstances.”
Local government reporting: The task force recommends changes in reporting requirements that conflict with municipal fiscal years, require local government reporting requirements be reviewed every 10 years and local government reports submitted to the state be centralized and made readily available for use by the public and other agencies. “As much as it is practical,” the report suggests “the Legislature take steps to consolidate duplicative required local government reports into single reports or existing reports and eliminate any reports utilizing information that has already been developed for other reports, such as that found in the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR).”
Local government pension plans: “To address financial efficiency issues associated with operating local government pension plans, the task force encourages the Legislature to assemble a related task force … charged with examining issues related to migrating local government pension plans to the Florida Retirement System.”
Unfunded mandates: The report calls on lawmakers “to consider the funding impacts created for local governments by state legislation. For any state mandates that affect local government budgets, the state should partner with local governments to fund programs.”
Local business tax occupancy licenses: The task force recommends the Legislature “limit the amount charged for these licenses to no more than the cost of administering the license.”
Since the findings of the report, we’ve seen action in all of these areas. So now that we’ve evaluated the state’s two ‘DOGE’s’ and have determined that Florida is efficiently run and has been and is actively working to help streamline our local governments for better efficiency as well...let’s dive into how efficiently our local governments are operating to directly answer today’s question. I’ll cover that in part 2 of today’s Q&A tomorrow.