Okaloosa County Board of County Commissioners / Budgets, financial reports and votes / FY 2007 to FY 2027
The Decision Ledger
Every September the Okaloosa County Commission sets a property-tax rate and adopts a budget. Through the housing bust it held the county-wide rate near 3.29 mills while taxable property lost more than a quarter of its value; it raised the rate twice, in FY 2014 and FY 2018, and has kept it at 3.8308 mills for ten straight budgets since. Property values then nearly doubled, and the budget grew from $257 million to $775 million. Read the decisions year by year, compare the last four budgets line by line, and see eighteen years of what the money bought.
Budget figures come from the county's approved budget books; actual spending, taxes and service figures come from the statistical sections of its FY 2016 and FY 2025 annual financial reports. This view organizes figures from the sources; it is a research annotation, not a substitute for the documents themselves.
Rate, value, taxes, budget
Sixteen budgets, three rates
Each column is one approved budget; the dark part is what the county-wide property tax was expected to raise. The line along the top is the county-wide rate: three steps in sixteen years. Select a column to read that year's decision.
Value, rate and revenue
Boom, bust, boom
Commission votes
Five votes, almost always
Budget comparisons
Line by line, year on year
FY 2027 sources of money
Where a budget dollar comes from
Nearly half of the FY 2027 budget is money the county already has: cash carried forward from earlier years, most of it in the enterprise funds (water and sewer, the airports, solid waste) and the capital funds. Property taxes supply about fifteen cents of each dollar.
The constitutional officers' share
The county hands $86.2 million of the FY 2027 general fund to four separately elected officers, who run their own budgets.
Property tax · the rolled-back rate
“No increase” and a tax increase
The county's own budget book defines the rolled-back rate as “a millage rate that would generate the same amount of tax dollars as the prior year,” leaving out new construction, and says county-wide tax increases “are measured from the roll-back rate.” For FY 2027 that rate was 3.7942 mills. The commission kept 3.8308. Slide to a property's taxable value to see what the difference means for one bill.
Tax receipt
FY 2027 · Okaloosa County
County rates only, from the FY 2027 budget book, p. 18. A full bill also carries school board, city, water-management and fire-district rates and any non-ad valorem assessments.
Actual spending · audited
What it actually cost
A budget is a plan; the annual financial report records what was spent. Each column is one year's expenses for the county's governmental and business-type activities, on the full-accrual basis the auditors use. Select a column.
Tax revenue by source
Beds, sales and land
Property tax is still the largest county tax. It fell 29% from 2007 to 2013 as the housing bust took values down, and did not get back to its 2007 level until 2018. Beside it, the tourist development tax on short-term stays grew nearly tenfold, from $4.3 million to $42.9 million, and a local infrastructure sales surtax began in 2019.
Principal property taxpayers
From malls to cables
The ten largest property taxpayers on the 2007, 2016 and 2025 rolls. In 2007 the list was a phone company, the power company, a shopping mall, Walmart, the hospital and local real estate. In 2016 it held two resort companies and Destin Commons. By 2025 most of those had dropped off, replaced by fiber networks and two solar projects. Only the power company, the gas pipeline and Choctawhatchee Electric are on all three lists. The top ten held 1.66% of all taxable value in 2007, 3.12% in 2016 and 1.63% in 2025.
Operating indicators, 2007–2025
The county by the numbers
Source trail
Budget books · annual financial reports · auditsHow these figures were drawn
Budget totals, property valuations, tax rates and expected property taxes for FY 2012–FY 2027 are the "Property Value – Last Ten Years" tables of the FY 2021 approved budget summary (PDF p. 13; the summary has no printed page numbers) and the FY 2027 approved budget book (p. 21); their four shared years agree. Expected taxes there are figured at 95% to 96.5% of the levy, as the books note. The split of the county-wide levy among funds is from the same books (FY 2021 summary PDF p. 11; FY 2027 p. 19). Fund totals are the FY 2027 book's "Summary of Balances, Revenues and Expenditures" (p. 32). Function and spending-type comparisons take each year from that year's own book (p. 54 and p. 58 of the FY 2025, FY 2026 and FY 2027 books); every column sums to its printed total.
Actual expenses, tax revenues, taxable values, principal taxpayers, staffing and operating indicators come from the statistical sections of the FY 2016 (pp. 143–169) and FY 2025 (pp. 176–209) annual financial reports, which the Clerk of Court and Comptroller prepares. Where the two overlap the later report is used; it restates FY 2016 tax revenue slightly. Expenses are in thousands of dollars as printed. Fuel taxes combine the 9th-cent, local-option and second local-option fuel taxes; "communications & business taxes" combine the communications services tax and local business tax. In FY 2010 and FY 2021–FY 2023 the reports show inspections expenses jumping and emergency medical services expenses falling by similar amounts, so the two are shown together here; the conference center, a business-type activity until 2013, is grouped with tourism.
The two annual reports label their millage tables differently: the FY 2016 report by fiscal year, the FY 2025 report by tax-roll year, one year earlier. Checked against the adopted budget books, rates here are by fiscal year. Taxable values are by tax-roll year in both reports; a roll's value is what the next fiscal year's tax is levied on.
Commission votes are read from the minutes of the Board of County Commissioners preserved in the Crypt's Okaloosa County Board of County Commissioners collection, using each record's machine-extracted text. Two formats are parsed: the county's IQM2 action minutes (RESULT, MOVER, SECONDER, AYES, NAYS) and the Clerk's narrative minutes ("Mr. Harris made motion, seconded by Mr. Boyles … 5 yeas"). Meeting dates are read from the minutes themselves, because several records are filed under a different meeting's date; minutes that appear in more than one record are counted once; Tourist Development Council minutes filed in the collection are left out; and records labelled "Minutes" that are in fact agendas contribute nothing. Every split vote's names agree with its printed tally except one. Topics are assigned by keyword and are approximate. The minutes that yield votes run from May 2010 to December 2013, so later votes, including the FY 2018 rate increase, are not covered.
Values were transcribed from the sources and checked against their printed totals; check them against the documents before reuse. Budgets include reserves and cash carried forward, so a budget total is larger than what the county expects to spend.