By Julia Roberts
In an effort to create a balanced budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, the Ocean Highway and Port Authority voted to cut its salaries and to cancel its membership in the Florida Ports Council.
The moves came after OHPA accountant Pierre LaPorte presented a draft budget for next year that was $25,000 in the red.
The Florida Ports Council (FPC) is a Florida nonprofit corporation that serves as the professional association for Florida’s 16 public seaports and their management. The FPC provides advocacy, leadership and information on seaport-related issues before the legislative and executive branches of state and federal government.
FPC provides administrative support services on matters related to the Florida Seaport Transportation and Economic Development (FSTED) Council and the FSTED Program. In addition, by agreement, FPC provides similar services to the Florida Ports Financing Commission. FSTED is a public entity charged with carrying out the state’s economic development mission through implementation of seaport capital improvement projects at the local level. The council was created within the Department of Transportation and consists of the port directors of the publicly owned seaports and a representative from the Department of Transportation and the Department of Commerce. The FSTED Program was created to finance port transportation projects on a 50-50 matching basis.
Previously, commissioners have discussed pulling out of FPC, which costs $15,500 annually. At the Sept. 10 meeting, Commissioner Scott Moore made a motion to do so. However, Commissioner Miriam Hill, who has served as the Port of Fernandina’s representative to FPC, advocated to retain membership in the organization.
“The Florida Ports Council … serves as the administrative body for FSTED,” Hill said. “FSTED funding is basically FDOT funding directed toward ports and infrastructure. That may seem like FPC is just politick-y, or that bad word, ‘lobbying,’ but it is the legislature that has the purse strings, so, like it or not, the way the money comes to the port is through that function in the legislature allocating funding to ports. Frankly, if we don’t intend to apply for grants, if we don’t care about funding or care about FSTED funding, we shouldn’t be a public board.”
Hill said the port received almost $800,000 in funding through the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion U.S. economic stimulus bill signed into law to aid recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. She said FPC helped lobby for that.
“The reason we are in this situation is because our budget, our expenses swelled, just like every other port in the state of Florida, our overhead swelled during the pandemic, and we got a lot of help from the federal and state government to survive. Now, that help is gone and our administrative costs have to align. The FPC has always been there,” Hill said.
Moore agreed that the port “has been living off that COVID money for the last several years,” and “now it is time to make some tough decisions.”
The commission voted 3-2 to withdraw from FPC, saving OHPA $15,500 in the 2025-26 budget.
During discussion of FPC, Hill told the commission that to cancel membership in FPC rather than cut commissioners’ salaries is “rather self-serving, narrow-sighted and short-sighted.” Hill has lobbied to have those salaries cut during the term of previous commissioners, but it was not approved by those commissions.
Salaries for the five commissioners is $120,000; $24,000 annually for each commissioner. Moore made another money-saving motion: To cut that expense.
“In the spirit of cutting, I move to cut the commissioner salary from $120,000 to $100,000, $4,000 annually for each of the five commissioners,” Moore said.
That motion passed unanimously.
When asked, OHPA attorney Tammi Bach said that while both motions passed, they could be reconsidered before a final budget is approved.
