The District Has Two Bank Accounts

On Monday the board adopts a budget that pulls $27.7 million out of the operating fund while a second fund ends the same year holding $964.8 million. It looks like a savings account. It is a melting one: a quarter of its revenue expires in December 2028, and the operating budget is already leaning on it. Here is what is actually in there, what it earns, and what happens when the half-cent runs out. Our fact-check rides at the bottom.

By Amber Cebull · July 28, 2026

I spent a day inside the School District of Lee County's 2026-27 tentative budget, the one the board votes on August 3. Most of it is what you would expect from a document that size. One thing in it I cannot stop looking at.

The general fund, the account that pays teachers and keeps buildings open, is budgeted to spend $27,683,761 more than it takes in next year. That pulls its balance down from $147.0 million to $119.4 million. The capital fund ends that same year holding $964,803,962.

That is roughly eight times the operating cushion. Same district, same budget, same year that 457 people got non-renewal notices.

What is actually in that account

Of the $964.8 million, $385,837,970 is encumbered, which means it is already committed to contracts the district has signed. The remaining $578,965,992 is listed as unappropriated.

Unappropriated is not the same as available, and the district says so itself. The five-year capital plan carries a footnote on exactly that line:

Is not an indication of available funding due to restrictions applicable to various sources of capital funding.

2026-27 Tentative Budget, five-year capital plan

That is a real constraint, not a dodge. Capital money arrives with strings attached to its source. Sales tax dollars are bound to what voters approved in 2018. Impact fees have to go toward growth capacity. Borrowed money is pledged to the projects it was borrowed for.

The account also got much bigger recently, and not because anyone saved harder. The beginning balance jumped $228.1 million in one year, up 30 percent, because the district issued $362,781,729 in Certificates of Participation. That is borrowed money earmarked for school construction. It is also why debt service in this budget climbs 41.8 percent, with interest alone going from $15.3 million to $32.4 million.

Yes, it is earning interest

This was my first question and the answer is right in the book. The capital fund budgets $23,645,000 in investment interest for next year. Across the five-year plan it is $102,861,000.

Set that beside the operating shortfall. Interest on the capital fund runs to about 85 percent of the $27.7 million the general fund is short.

The district is required to invest it. Board Policy 6144, printed in the budget book, says that all funds in excess of the amounts needed to meet current expenses shall be invested to earn the best possible risk adverse yield for the period available.

So the money is not in a shoebox. It is invested, it is earning, and the earnings are budgeted as revenue. That is the responsible thing to be doing with it, and I want to say so before I ask anything harder.

It is not idle. It is spoken for.

The five-year capital plan programs $2,634,368,583 in spending. The biggest pieces:

• $802,824,917 for new school construction, every dollar of it in the East Zone
• $739,441,697 for modernization, life cycle replacement and equity projects
• $452,773,956 for debt service
• $248,022,747 in transfers out, including $117.6 million moved into the operating budget and $80 million for maintenance
• $175,624,079 to charter schools
• $147,305,695 for technology
• $68,187,493 for equipment and buses

And the pile is programmed to come down. The plan shows the carryforward falling from $746.6 million at the end of next year to $310.4 million by 2030-31.

It is not a savings account. It is a melting one.

When I started asking around about this fund, the guess I heard most, and the one I had myself, was that it must be mostly impact fees. The logic is intuitive: developers pay when they build, Southwest Florida is running out of room to build, so the money stops. That is not what the budget says. The real answer is worse.

Here is where next year's $427,535,187 in capital revenue actually comes from:

• Capital property tax millage, $247,380,262, or 57.9 percent
• The half-cent sales tax, $115,986,728, or 27.1 percent
• Impact fees, $28,902,197, or 6.8 percent
• Investment interest, $23,645,000, or 5.5 percent
• State sources, $11,621,000, or 2.7 percent

Impact fees are under seven percent. They are not what holds this fund up. The half-cent sales tax very nearly is, and the half-cent sales tax is going away.

Lee County voters approved it on November 6, 2018, for a ten-year run beginning January 1, 2019. It expires in December 2028. That is not a projection or a worry, it is the terms of the thing voters passed.

The five-year plan already has it written in. Sales tax revenue goes $115,986,728, then $117,146,595, then $59,159,031 for the half year before it lapses, then zero, then zero. Total capital revenue falls 22.3 percent between 2027-28 and 2029-30.

And this fund already spends more than it takes in every single year of the plan. One year of borrowing props up the balance in 2026-27. After that it drains: down $177 million, then $32 million, then $87 million, then $140 million in 2030-31, the first full year with no sales tax at all. That is the $746.6 million falling to $310.4 million, and it is not an accident. It is the plan.

Now put the two accounts back together. The $52,196,466 moving out of capital and into the operating budget next year, the money helping cover teachers and buildings and insurance, comes out of this fund. The five-year plan assumes that transfer keeps running at $46 to $53 million a year, straight through the years the sales tax is gone.

So the honest shape of it is this. The operating budget is being steadied by a capital fund that loses a quarter of its revenue in about three years, while it is also paying off $501 million in principal and building eight schools.

Which brings me to chairs

On July 21 the board voted on up to $4.3 million for furniture. Six schools were named for refresh projects totaling $2,764,271. The district runs 96 schools, not counting charters.

The capital plan funds furniture rotation at $5,000,000 next year. For each of the four years after that, it is $2,000,000.

The six named projects averaged about $460,000 apiece. At $2 million a year that is roughly four schools annually against 96 schools. I am not going to pretend that is a precise figure, because costs vary enormously across the six, from $653,106 at Estero High down to $250,837 at Allen Park Elementary, and no district refreshes every building from scratch on a fixed cycle. But the order of magnitude is not ambiguous, and it is measured in decades rather than years.

That is the context for a teacher standing at the podium that night with photographs of exposed sharp metal edges on aging desks, asking why only six schools made the list.

Two levers, and neither one belongs to the school board

The first is impact fees, and it is more interesting than the percentage suggests. Lee County collects them at 52.5 percent of the adopted rate. The rate and the collection percentage are set by the County Commission, not the school board. At the full adopted rate, the same construction would generate roughly $55 million a year instead of $28.9 million.

That is about $26 million a year in school capacity money the county is choosing not to collect. Two caveats belong with that number. Impact fees can legally only be spent on capacity for growth, not on repairing what already exists, so this would not buy a single desk at an existing school. And the base is shrinking anyway: the budget book cites 598 single-family permits last year, down 32.4 percent year over year.

The second lever is the ballot, and it is the bigger one. The half-cent does not renew itself. Voters have to be asked, and someone has to decide to ask them. The district's own Independent Sales Surtax Oversight Committee has been raising the sunset question in public since at least June 2025, when it reported the tax had generated $643.08 million and the committee chair asked what the plan is if it lapses.

The part I keep turning over

Eight new schools over five years. Six of them list student seats in the plan: 1,000, 1,000, 1,000, 1,260, 1,200 and 1,500. That comes to 6,960 seats.

Enrollment last year fell by 1,650 students, the first decline outside the pandemic in district history. The district's own forecast has it recovering to 103,706 by 2028-29, which is 2,837 more students than last year.

I am not going to pretend that is a gotcha. New schools relieve overcrowded ones, replace portables, and absorb students from campuses slated for rebuild. They follow growth that is genuinely happening in Lehigh, Gateway and Alva while other parts of the county flatten out. The South and West Zones get zero construction dollars in this plan, which tells you the district believes it knows where the children are going to be. A district that stops building during a dip pays for that later, and I would rather they build.

But 6,960 seats against a forecast of 2,837 more students is a large bet, and the operating budget rests on the same optimism. It assumes funded enrollment rises 3.1 percent next year. The book hedges itself on that, in its own words: if the students do not enroll these figures will reduce throughout the year.

There is a door in the wall

The two accounts are separated by law, and that separation is real. It is not absolute. Florida Statute 1011.71 lets districts move capital dollars into the operating budget for a defined list of costs, including maintenance, property and casualty insurance premiums, and software.

The district uses it. Next year's transfer is $52,196,466, up from $45,394,174 this year, and the five-year plan assumes it keeps running at roughly $46 to $53 million a year. The budget describes this as a deliberate strategy, and it is one.

The limit in that statute is a list of eligible expenses, not a dollar cap. So the honest version of my question is not why is the money sitting there. It is this: how much of the eligible spending already inside the general fund could legally be paid from capital instead, and who decided to stop at $52 million?

What I would ask on Monday

• The half-cent sales tax expires in December 2028. What is the plan, and when does a renewal question go in front of voters?
• The five-year plan assumes a $46 to $53 million transfer into operations every year, including the years with no sales tax revenue. What gets cut on the capital side to keep that transfer whole, or does the operating gap simply double?
• Of the $578,965,992 listed as unappropriated capital, how much is restricted by its source, and how much is genuinely uncommitted?
• What is the maximum transfer allowable under Florida Statute 1011.71 given the district's eligible general fund expenses, and why is the budget at $52 million rather than that figure?
• Did the board vote on the size of that transfer, or did it arrive already set inside the proposed budget?
• Furniture rotation drops from $5 million to $2 million a year after this one. At six schools per round, when does the ninety-sixth school come up?

None of this is hidden. Every number I used is printed in a document the district published and posted on its own website, and the arithmetic reconciles to their tables. A budget that discloses its own uncomfortable figures is doing something right. This one discloses that it is exceeding its own borrowing guideline. It did not have to.

A document being public is not the same as a decision being examined. The board adopts this Monday. The binding version comes September 8. The gap between those two dates is the part where anyone can still change something.

The resource: The 2026-27 tentative budget, translated line by line

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