As the Jacksonville City Council Finance Committee enters the final two days of deliberations on Mayor Donna Deegan’s proposed $2.02 billion city budget for 2025-26, it has cut spending on a number of Deegan’s priority items.
By the end of the Aug. 15 session, the committee’s cuts of proposed funding included:
• $6.25 million in homelessness prevention initiatives.
• $2.18 million for a telehealth program.
• $1.94 million for a Meals on Wheels expansion.
• $300,000 in the mayor’s budget for personnel.
• $237,000 for the State of Jax online database, which Deegan had introduced days earlier.
Those reductions and others total more than $33 million, or $20 million more than cuts needed for a one-eighth of a mill rollback in property taxes that was adopted by the committee at the outset