Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, calm and deliberate, flipped the white poster board.

In gigantic font, an eye-popping number appeared: $278,951,562.

That’s the number by which Hillsborough County’s budget had become inflated over the last five years, Ingoglia said at a September news conference in Brandon. Ingoglia and the man who appointed him, Gov. Ron DeSantis, are making the case that runaway local spending is in part to blame for the state’s escalating property taxes.

“The taxpayers of this county should be outraged,” said Ingoglia, who’s running for election in 2026.

The number struck county officials like a thunderbolt. Weeks prior, staffers had been called into a conference room to meet with the state’s Department of Government Efficiency auditors. County officials handed over eight terabytes of information about government spending. They were told a written report was forthcoming.

Officials weren’t expecting a swift, brutal judgment to be rendered by a public official before that report.

Is Hillsborough actually overspending by more than a quarter-billion dollars? In theory, it should be a simple question to answer. But a Tampa Bay Times analysis of the budget found that it’s not so easy to come to a conclusion about Hillsborough’s spending.

Here’s what we do and don’t know about Hillsborough’s budget.

The state has made a lofty claim about overspending

Ingoglia has traveled the state saying he’s found more than $1 billion in unnecessary combined spending from budgets in the city of Jacksonville, as well as Hillsborough, Orange, Alachua, Seminole and Broward counties.

By “waste,” Ingoglia says he means spending beyond what would be expected given rising population, inflation and run-of-the-mill government inefficiency.

Ingoglia’s team arrived at Hillsborough’s figure by starting with the county’s 2019-2020 general fund. That’s the pool of money that comes mostly from property taxes. Next, the team looked five years ahead, adjusting the budget to reflect inflation and population growth each year. It also added in buffers to account for what Ingoglia described as typical government inefficiency.

A spokesperson for Ingoglia’s office said his team used the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index to measure inflation. Officials used an average of population estimates provided by the U.S. Census and data from the University of Florida’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research. It then added a 5% buffer, then another 10% buffer to account for government inefficiency.

Even with buffers, Hillsborough’s budget eclipsed the state’s projections by nearly $279 million, Ingoglia said. His spokesperson did not make the calculations available.

The state’s calculations couldn’t be verified

The assumptions used by the state matter a great deal, said Justin Marlowe, a research professor at the University of Chicago who studies local government budgets. With figures in the billions, different population or census estimates could throw off projections by millions of dollars.

The Times tried to replicate the state’s work — and got different results.

The Times found that Hillsborough’s budget was about $360 million larger in fiscal year 2025 than if the county had maintained spending levels from half a decade prior — even after adjusting for population growth and inflation.

But that figure falls to about $60 million after including the buffers Ingoglia said he factored in — a far cry from the state’s $279 million claim.

Marlowe also attempted to run the calculations and got yet a different answer, nothing close to $279 million in overspending.

That’s not to say Ingoglia’s methods were wrong. But the different numbers show how subjective Ingoglia’s exercise is, Marlowe said. “Waste” is in the eye of the beholder.

“The spending that is in a local budget is a reflection of its local priorities,” Marlowe said. “The state is free to disagree with that, but that’s not to say that the process has broken down, and that there’s out-of-control, wasteful spending.”

Police, fire and reserves accounted for most of Hillsborough’s spending increases

In the weeks since Ingoglia’s news conference, Hillsborough officials have pushed back, gently, on the state’s claims of rampant waste. Earlier this month, Tom Fesler, the county’s chief financial administrator, briefed an oversight committee on Hillsborough’s last half decade of spending.

Since fiscal year 2020, Hillsborough’s general funds have grown by 60% — from about $1.5 billion to about $2.4 billion last fiscal year, Fesler said. But more than half of that increase was spent on police, fire or growing the county’s budget reserves, he said.

County officials say the Sheriff’s Office and Fire Rescue got even more money than is apparent from budget line items. For example, the fire department saw several fire stations built in the last five years, spending that might be identified as capital improvements, not Fire Rescue.

Spending jumped in other areas, too. Code enforcement spending grew 85% between 2020 and 2025, records show. The tax collector saw its budget grow nearly 50%.

But even year-to-year budget comparisons can get tricky. “Code enforcement” is listed as a line item in both 2020 and 2025, but the department added responsibilities. By 2025, a portion of the county’s animal control work had been brought under its umbrella, Fesler said.

Local observers say there’s waste

Marlowe said questionable government spending often comes in the form of grants to nonprofits.

In Hillsborough, a few such grants have come under scrutiny.

The County Commission, which is run by a majority of Republicans sympathetic to the state’s effort to root out waste, has its own DOGE Liaison Committee. It’s chaired by Jake Hoffman, executive director of the Tampa Bay Young Republicans.

Earlier this year, the committee got access to the same exhaustive contract data that Hillsborough gave the state as part of its inquiry, Hoffman said. In poring over the numbers, Hoffman said he’s found more than $200 million in what he called questionable contracts in the county budget.

For example, Hoffman listed about $900,000 in film subsidies and another half a million the county pays the Straz Center for lighting as expenditures the county could do without.

At a meeting in September, county officials justified some spending the committee flagged, Hoffman said, but not all. County officials noted some of the spending highlighted by Hoffman did not come from the general revenue fund.

Hoffman said his committee’s line-by-line analysis is likely to be more reliable than Ingoglia’s estimate.

“I don’t know if you need to do it based off a calculation,” Hoffman said. “I think it needs to be done based on the exercise that we’re already going through, which is going in line by line and asking, ‘Is this what we need to be spending money on?’”

In theory, the state is doing that analysis. Confirmation will come once Ingoglia’s team releases its DOGE report, which could happen any day.