A story · Blueprint Intergovernmental Agency · 2018–2026 Beta
Blueprint is the sales-tax agency that builds Tallahassee and Leon County's big roads, trails and parks. This is what its own documents, its board agendas, and one resident's public-records requests show about where the money went and which neighborhoods were told to wait.
Max Epstein · MAXAI LLC · independent and unpaid · nothing here alleges impropriety or imputes motive
the words that carry the pointquoted from the documenta figureMax’s own words — not a finding
1 · The number
In 2018 the widening was a $39.8 million line in a sales-tax program. The FY2023 budget carried it at $74.2 million; the FY2024 budget, adopted in September 2023, at $98.9 million; the FY2027 workshop item of June 2026 at $164.7 million — four times the original — with Phase 2 construction still ahead. Welaunee Boulevard — in Max’s words, “a road voters never approved” — went from $94.7 million to $134.2 million in the same 2023 cycle and stands at $202.3 million in the FY2027 table.
None of these increases needed a public vote. Blueprint's position is that once a project begins, cost changes need no board approval unless the agency decides the project's scope has changed.
Sources: $39.8M — Tallahassee Reports, 21 Jun 2018 Proxy (the 2018 packet table is not linked). $74.2M → $98.9M and $94.7M → $134.2M — FY2024 budget workshop item, 11 May 2023, Table 7; adopted 26 Sep 2023, Attachment 4. $164.7M and $202.3M — FY2027 budget workshop item, 11 Jun 2026, Attachment 3. Completion 2035 is Commissioner Welch's estimate via WTXL, 7 May 2025; Blueprint's own snapshot says 2030.
2 · The round
The first round came in the FY2024 cycle: six projects above the 2% inflation allowance, $99.6 million in total, financed with $85 million of state infrastructure-bank loans and up to $57 million in bonds, passed 9–2 at the workshop and 8–4 at the hearing. The second round is what Commissioner David O'Keefe put in front of the board in May 2025 — about $225 million across six projects, as reported — and what the FY2027 table of June 2026 now shows line by line: Orange Avenue from $43.7 million to $118.7 million, Woodville Highway from $39.2 million to $74.9 million, Tharpe Street — where children walk to school in the road — from $49.5 million to $62.3 million.
At the 2023 hearing Max had argued that Blueprint's revenue forecast — 3% growth every year, forever, on top of revenue lifted by pandemic stimulus and low interest rates — did not survive a slowdown. Staff's answer was that projections had risen by almost exactly the amount needed.
Sources: FY2024 workshop item, 11 May 2023 (p. 4, Table 7: "$453.24 million … $552.79 million, representing a $99.55 million change"); votes in 24 Aug 2023 and 26 Sep 2023 minutes; FY2024 adopted lines from Attachment 4; FY2027 lines from 11 Jun 2026, Attachment 3. The $225M is O'Keefe's compilation as reported by WTXL, 16 May 2025 Proxy.
3 · The order
Blueprint's program runs Northeast priorities first: Bannerman, Welaunee, the Airport and Northeast gateways. Southside projects — Orange Avenue, Woodville Highway, Tharpe Street, Pensacola Street — are scheduled after. In 2024 the Northeast overruns were approved without updated estimates for what came next. The question asked at that hearing was simple: will there be any money left?
By 2025 the answer was arriving in the form of the Southside increases in the previous section. Pensacola Street's $39 million and North Monroe's $4.4 million were unchanged — for now.
Source: op-ed, 20 May 2025. Sequencing per Blueprint's published program; dates of individual Southside starts are not drawn because they are not fixed in the record.
4 · The request
On 6 June 2023 Max filed a Chapter 119 request for the individual project budgets of the Airport Gateway and Northeast Park projects. The answer, ten days later, pointed him to the capital programme instead: “The CIP from the May 11th IA Budget Workshop contains the current budget for the projects. We do not maintain individual project budgets.” The next day the agency’s attorney put it the same way, “Our CIP is our budget for all projects,” and the position was reaffirmed to elected officials in May 2025.
Contracts, bid advertisements and change orders up to 20% of a project's cost are approved by the County Administrator and the City Manager by memorandum, in a process described as not subject to public-meeting rules because the two never technically meet.
Max forwarded the answer to a commissioner, who asked for the same material. Five weeks after the original request, on 12 July 2023, staff sent all twelve board members a memorandum titled Requested Information on Blueprint Project Cost Estimates, with “a breakdown of project cost estimates by project phase.” The memorandum credits the commissioner’s request. Blueprint calls the product a cost estimate, not a budget, and its stated position two years later was still that it keeps no line-item project budgets.
Max’s own account of it, to WTXL in May 2025, is shorter: “my records requests forced them to generate a budget.” That is his characterisation; the paragraph above is what the correspondence shows.
Sources: Blueprint public-records production of 1 Aug 2023, 85 emails — request 6 Jun 2023; Shelonda Meeks to Max Epstein, 16 Jun 2023; Susan Dawson, 17 Jun 2023; Autumn Calder to the IA Board, 12 Jul 2023 — the emails are attachment 1 of that memo, and the exhibits on the stage are read from it · op-ed, 20 May 2025 · WTXL, 16 May 2025. Proxy the word “forced” is the author’s, not the record’s.
5 · The record
The chronology of the argument is itself public. It starts with a 2021 op-ed on transparency for Frenchtown and Southside CRA projects, runs through the 2022 request that the Segment 4 study area include the forest side of Lake Munson, the 2023 records requests and the "bonkers budget" op-ed, and reaches June 2026, when a County Commissioner refused to back the budget and neighbors called for a forensic audit.
The op-eds and news stories on the stage are all on the Press page.
Sources: Tallahassee Democrat op-eds 2021, 2025; Tallahassee Reports, Oct 2022; WTXL May 2025, June 2026; Blueprint IA minutes; Blueprint’s 12 Jul 2023 board memo.
6 · The fix
None of these is novel. Counties and transit agencies across Florida do both. Bannerman Road and the Southside projects are needed; the process that prices them is what is broken.
Blueprint's budget passes through two public hearings, the first at its Citizens Advisory Committee. That is the place to ask for each of these by name.
Recommendation arc as of September 2026. If you are reading this later, check whether the items on the stage have been adopted before citing them.
Coming soon · The land
Widening a road means taking land along it. How Blueprint is acquiring that land, and on what terms, is the next part of this story, read the same way: from the agency’s own board items.
Coverage so far: WTXL, “Neighbors in NE Tallahassee could lose some land to Bannerman Road project”.