Hernando, Pasco avoid Florida TaxWatch budget turkey list

Florida TaxWatch’s annual budget review gave Hernando and Pasco counties a clean result: no local projects were flagged on this year’s Budget Turkey list. That matters because the watchdog’s criticism often follows lawmakers home, where they have to defend whether a project was truly needed or simply slipped through Tallahassee’s process.

The 2026 report identified 621 Budget Turkeys totaling $829.7 million in the FY2026-27 state budget, plus 484 more projects worth $441.1 million that TaxWatch said deserve close review by Gov. Ron DeSantis. The report is aimed at DeSantis’s line-item veto review before the budget takes effect July 1, and TaxWatch said the list is about more than dollars. Its concern is how the money was moved, whether projects bypassed normal scrutiny, and whether lawmakers used the budget to advance hometown spending with limited public review.

That broader pattern is why the absence of a Hernando or Pasco flag should not be read as the end of the story. Florida TaxWatch said lawmakers submitted more than 5,600 member-project requests totaling $12.5 billion, and nearly 2,000 of those projects, worth about $2.7 billion, were ultimately funded. In 2019, member projects totaled about $450 million. The jump shows how much more budget space is now being consumed by local asks, and it raises a basic question for taxpayers in both counties: are surviving projects surviving because they are genuinely high-value, or because they were packaged well enough to avoid TaxWatch scrutiny?

Statewide, the largest category TaxWatch flagged was water projects, with 344 items totaling about $380.4 million. It also flagged 146 local transportation projects totaling about $208.3 million. Among the larger items on the list were $50 million for Hillsborough Community College campus improvements, $20 million for the University of Florida’s Advanced Brain Research and Innovation project, $15 million for Florida International University’s Wall of Wind Hurricane and Storm Surge Simulator, and $8 million for a University of West Florida critical infrastructure project. Those are the kinds of projects lawmakers usually sell as jobs, resilience, research, or campus upgrades, but TaxWatch’s point is that promised outcomes still need public vetting.

Florida TaxWatch has used the Budget Turkey Watch report since 1983 to argue for transparency, accountability and public scrutiny in state budgeting. Jeff Kottkamp said the problem has “proliferated,” and Kurt Wenner said lawmakers asked for more hometown projects than ever before. For Hernando and Pasco, the clean slate is a small win, but it also sets up the next fight over whether being “not flagged” means better budgeting or just better political packaging.