August 11, 2026 Town Council Budget Workshop — Agenda Breakdown

How to read the Town's account numbers

What it is. The first working item is a walk-through of the Town's chart of accounts — the numbering system behind every line in the budget. It sounds dry. It is actually the key that lets any resident check the Town's numbers without help.

Every spending account number reads the same way:

The funds are separate pots of money that cannot be freely mixed:

The departments are the middle two segments:

The last four digits say what the money buys. The ones that come up most: 1200 regular wages · 2100 payroll taxes · 2300 health insurance · 3100 professional services · 3200 accounting and auditing · 3400 contractual services · 4000 travel · 4500 insurance · 5210 operating supplies · 5800 contingency · 5900 miscellaneous · anything starting with 6 is capital, meaning equipment, vehicles, or construction.

Money coming in is numbered differently. Revenue accounts have three segments rather than four — the fund plus a revenue source code, as in 001-331-9000 for federal grants — and the packet lists them by description in its revenue tables.

Worth watching. With that key, 001-0521-521-4000 decodes as General Fund, Police Department, Travel & Per Diem — budgeted at $2,000, with $3,590 spent. Every spending account in the sections below can be looked up the same way in the packet.

Accounts already far over their budgets

What it is. With two months left in the fiscal year, a number of accounts have already run well above what was budgeted for them. These are the largest, measured by how many times over budget they already are.

The payment to the CRA is the largest single gap. TIF, or tax increment financing, is the arrangement where a share of the property tax collected inside the CRA district gets passed to the CRA instead of staying with the Town and County. The Town budgeted $230,000 for that payment this year. The packet records $1,789,254 as actually paid.

That figure is not a typo in one place. It appears as a Town expense on page 17 of the packet and again as CRA revenue on page 24 — the same number on both sides of the same transaction.

For scale: the Town's actual payment was $217,971 in FY2023, $219,237 in FY2024, and $218,017 in FY2025. This year's figure is roughly eight times any of those.

The Town's adopted CRA plan describes a payment formula negotiated with Orange County. Section 3.9.4 of the 2025 CRA Plan Update says that formula "caps the total annual increment contribution to $300,000 through 2022, increasing to $350,000 through 2027." The table printed with that section lists $350,000 a year for 2025, 2026 and 2027; the plan's Appendix C lists $350,500 for the same three years, a difference the plan never explains.

Either way, the cap is on the total reaching the CRA, not on the Town's payment by itself. In each of the last four completed years, the CRA's own share of the increment plus the Town's payment came to exactly $350,500 — roughly $132,000 from the CRA's increment and roughly $218,000 from the Town. This year the Town's line alone is $1,789,254.

The plan also says that extending it past its 2027 sunset would require a new formula and an amendment to the interlocal agreement with Orange County. Whether that agreement has been amended is not answerable from this packet. Cheatonville has not seen a document explaining the $1,789,254 figure, and the packet does not contain one.

On the two "miscellaneous" lines. A miscellaneous account is meant to be a small catch-all. The Town's Legislative miscellaneous account was budgeted at $200 and shows $363,600 spent. The CRA's was budgeted at $7,500 and shows $293,160. Whatever those payments were for, they are not miscellaneous at that size, and the packet does not say what they bought.

Worth watching. There are ordinary explanations for large swings like these — a one-time settlement, a year-end accounting correction, a payment recorded to a general account before being sorted to a specific one. None of those explanations appear in this packet. This is the meeting built to walk through exactly these figures.

Money spent against accounts that had no budget

What it is. Beyond accounts that went over budget, a number of accounts had no budget at all and still show money spent against them.

In the General Fund most of these are small: Public Works building maintenance ($13,343), Post Office contractual services ($2,204), a Police miscellaneous line ($4,970). One is not. A JAG police vehicle purchase (001-0521-521-6411) carries no budget this year and $46,998 spent, after a $50,000 budget last year.

In Water & Sewer they are not small at all. Four project accounts — the numbers ending 3102, 3103, 3104 and 3106 — carry $0 in budget and about $932,000 in recorded spending between them. Three of the four are labeled for state revolving fund work, meaning low-interest state loans for water and sewer projects. Across the fund's professional and contractual service accounts, Water & Sewer budgeted roughly $956,000 and has about $2 million recorded against them — nearly half of that in lines carrying no budget at all.

Some of this is likely routine. Councils regularly vote during the year to move money from one account to another as needs change, and state revolving fund projects are often paid out and reimbursed on a schedule that does not line up neatly with a budget line. Those are normal, legitimate mechanics.

The difficulty is that this packet does not show when any money moved. It shows a budget column and an actual column, with nothing in between. A resident reading it cannot tell which of these figures reflects a Council-approved transfer and which does not.

A related pattern: the same work, two different accounts. Several departments barely touched their professional services budget while running well over on contractual services:

That pattern is consistent with work being budgeted under one account and paid from another — a bookkeeping question more than a spending one.

Worth watching. Finance does not follow that pattern. Its contractual services account came in under budget, so there is no offsetting account to explain its $58,718 professional services overage. That one appears to be a real, standalone gap.

Where next year's forecast stops following its own formula

What it is. The workbook includes a forecast column for FY2027 and FY2028. Its own notes set out the method: each account's FY2027 forecast is its FY2026 budget increased by that account's average growth rate, capped at 15%. Spending is never an input. The notes also flag a limitation directly, stating that one-time items follow the same formula and "should be reviewed manually."

On most accounts the formula does exactly that. The Town's TIF payment, budgeted at $230,000, forecasts to $232,136. Exec/Admin professional services, budgeted at $32,312, forecasts to $36,351.

Why it matters. Two of the accounts flagged above do not follow it. Finance professional services was budgeted at $5,000 and spent $63,718. The stated formula would forecast $5,750. The workbook instead shows $65,000 for FY2027, and the same again for FY2028 — close to what was spent, not to what was budgeted. Exec/Admin contractual services is the same shape: $5,000 budgeted, $77,680 spent, and $51,227 forecast for each of the next two years, about ten times its budget.

Worth watching. The contingency account runs the other way. The Town's cushion for unexpected costs is budgeted at $163,433 this year, and the stated formula would carry it forward at roughly $172,000. The workbook forecasts it to $0. Unless that changes before adoption, the Town would enter FY2027 with no contingency line — the year before the additional homestead exemption is forecast to reduce revenue. The packet does not say how any of these figures were set.

Setting the property tax rate for FY 2026-2027

What it is. This item covers the property tax rate — the millage — for the year beginning October 1, 2026. The rate is set through a separate public hearing process later in the fall; this workshop is where the groundwork gets laid.

The pressure the Town is describing. The workbook builds a separate FY2028 forecast column labeled for an additional homestead exemption, with a note that the Town expects roughly $151,000 in lost revenue if it takes effect. The packet heads that column "Homestead Nov Bill," so this is a measure the Town is planning around, not one already in force. A homestead exemption reduces the taxable value of an owner-occupied home, which lowers the bill for the homeowner and the revenue for the Town.

That comes on top of a General Fund that has budgeted a shortfall every year on record: $25,000 in FY2022, $25,000 in FY2023, $18,440 in FY2024, $146,755 in FY2025, and $175,588 in FY2026.

Where there may be room that does not touch services. The largest departments — Police, Fire, Public Works — are also the hardest to cut without residents feeling it. The accounts with the most obvious slack are elsewhere:

• Insurance (001-0512-512-4500) has gone from $196,200 budgeted in FY2024 to $430,417 in FY2026, more than doubling in two years. It is the single largest fast-growing account that could potentially be reduced through competitive bidding rather than service cuts.
• Budget authority sitting unused this year. Exec/Admin professional services has used 18% of its budget; road materials and supplies has used 11% ($4,523 of $40,000). Both accounts have been spent in full in other years, so the useful question is which figure reflects the real need. Right-sizing them does not save cash directly, but it makes the budget an accurate document.

Worth watching. If the additional homestead exemption takes effect, the Town's own forecast puts the loss at about $151,000 — and it would land on top of a gap that already exists. Part of that gap is masked by the $200,000 reserve line described at the top of this page, which has been budgeted as revenue for five straight years with nothing recorded against it.

Also in the packet, worth keeping an eye on

Federal grants. 001-331-9000 is budgeted at $990,000 for FY2026, after four years budgeted at $10,000 or $30,000. Nothing has been received. This may be an awarded grant not yet drawn down, or a placeholder. It is a large enough assumption to be worth a plain question.

Water & Sewer administrative expenses. 400-0536-536-3500 went from $3,500 budgeted last year to $100,000 this year, with $0 spent. Unlike most items on this page, this is budget authority sitting unused rather than money already gone.

A likely typo. 400-0536-536-3410, the Town's Altamonte Springs contractual services account, was budgeted at $2,000 for FY2025 — against $318,512 actually spent that year. The same line was budgeted at $300,000 to $309,000 in every other year on record, and is back to $309,000 for FY2026. Not a spending problem, but the kind of error that makes the rest of the document harder to trust.

Fund 300, capital improvements. Three projects budgeted last year show $0 for FY2026: community policing ($1,000,000), a technology hub ($2,500,000), and East Kennedy streetscape ($3,000,000). Separately, every account in Fund 300 shows $0 in actual spending in every year displayed, including water system hardening ($5,986,105) and affordable housing ($2,000,000).

This packet does not give enough information to say what that means. Capital funds are commonly reported differently from operating funds, and a $0 actual column across an entire fund more likely reflects how this particular report is built than a claim that nothing happened. Whether those three projects were completed, delayed, or dropped is not answerable from this document.