Tallahassee, Fla. — July 7, 2026
On June 29, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s $117.6 billion budget for fiscal year 2026-27 and vetoed roughly $810 million in individual line items. One of them was line item 2054-1: $6 million for the Innovative Service Development (ISD) Grant Program — the state’s only competitive grant program dedicated to launching new door-to-door, on-demand ride services for transportation-disadvantaged Floridians — services heavily used by riders with intellectual and developmental disabilities who cannot drive or use fixed-route buses.
Two days later, on July 1, the new fiscal year began without the program — and the rides began stopping. In our corner of the state, they stopped that same day.
No public explanation accompanied the individual line-item veto — the governor’s budget-signing announcement does not mention the program. What the public record does show, in the state’s own published documents, is a program that was spending what it was given, that drew requests worth nearly twice what it had, and whose next year of awards was still pending before its board. Staff funding options were published in the board’s June 11 meeting materials, eighteen days before the money disappeared.
This article lays out that record, document by document. Our family used one of these funded services for two years, and I’ve written about what the cutoff means in our house separately. Here, the documents can speak for themselves.
What the program was
The ISD Grant Program is run by Florida’s Commission for the Transportation Disadvantaged (CTD), the state agency responsible for people who, in the state’s own language, cannot obtain their own transportation due to disability, age, or income. Per the program’s official description, ISD grants fund door-to-door, on-demand and scheduled transportation projects that increase access to job training, employment, and health care — the trips that fixed-route transit can’t serve and that most adults with I/DD cannot make any other way.
Per the FY 2026-27 General Appropriations Act summary, the Legislature funded the program’s continuation at $6 million within $66.4 million in Transportation Disadvantaged Trust Fund grants: up to $750,000 per single-county project, up to $1.5 million for regional projects, a 10% local match required, and all funds required to go to direct services for transportation-disadvantaged clients.
One clarification, because it matters. The veto did not end door-to-door transportation for disabled Floridians statewide. CTD runs four grant programs, and only ISD was vetoed. The largest of the others, the Trip and Equipment Grant, is the workhorse that pays for the state’s ongoing door-to-door paratransit service, and it was not touched: CTD’s 2024 Annual Performance Report shows roughly $53 million allocated through that grant in FY 2023-24, supporting more than 1.5 million paratransit trips. What ISD uniquely did was fund the launch of new services where none existed. It is the only competitive, statewide grant program dedicated to starting them, and it is the one the Governor cut.
For riders, the cost was a few dollars a trip. For many adults with developmental disabilities — who cannot drive, cannot navigate a bus system, and cannot safely ride with strangers — it was the only transportation to a day program, a job-training site, or a doctor that did not require a parent behind the wheel.
What the state’s own records show
The Commission publishes its meeting packages — annual reports, award approvals, staff recommendations — on its public calendar. Here is the program’s recent history, drawn from those documents:
| Year | Funding | What the record shows | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY 2024-25 | $3 million awarded | $2.73 million expensed — 91%. One project alone — the Wakulla-Leon service, granted to the Wakulla Senior Citizens Council and operated by provider i-Enable — delivered 9,880 trips to 89 riders, primarily individuals with I/DD, and expensed 100% of its $444,854 award. | FY 2024-25 Annual Report, Dec. 8, 2025 meeting package |
| FY 2025-26 | $6 million appropriated | 99.2% committed: $4,179,232 in awards approved June 26, 2025, and $1,770,701 more approved Dec. 8, 2025. The second round was oversubscribed. | June 26 and Dec. 8, 2025 meeting packages |
| FY 2026-27 | $6 million appropriated — then vetoed | The spring cycle drew 24 applications requesting approximately $11.6 million against the $6 million available. Staff found eight of the 24 incomplete and ineligible, and flagged others as continuations that had reached the program’s four-year funding limit or that proposed “service types the Commission has not funded (fixed-route, fixed-scheduled or microtransit service).” The two funding options staff published for the June 11, 2026 meeting would have committed $4,278,984 or $5,520,977 of the $6 million. The Commission tabled the item that day to await the Governor’s signature. Eighteen days later, the appropriation was vetoed. | June 11, 2026 meeting package and meeting recording |
The Commission itself asked to keep the program: then-Interim Executive Director Karen Somerset reported at the September 25, 2025 meeting that the agency had submitted a $4 million legislative budget request to continue ISD funding.
The record also shows a program the Commission was actively tightening, and it is worth being straight about that. The FY 2026-27 ISD program manual sets “a strict maximum project lifetime of four years,” and staff applied that limit in the spring cycle, which is part of why they recommended less than the full $6 million. The Commission has also been working through what should count as “innovation” in a program named for it. Individual grantees have underbilled badly: Bay County was awarded $286,074 in FY 2022-23 and, per the June 11 package, provided no trips and used no funding that year, then was paid $182,540 of a $668,793 award in FY 2023-24. Those are real questions and real problems. They are also questions about how to run a program, not whether to have one, and the same records show demand well past what the program could fund.
Which leaves the question the documents cannot answer. The Commission’s own records show it requesting the program’s continuation and publishing funding options for its June 11 meeting. Eighteen days later the line was vetoed. No explanation for the line-item veto has been published, and what changed is not in the public record. This article will be updated if the governor’s office provides one.
What the Commission did on June 11
When this article first ran, we wrote that whether the Commission voted on the FY 2026-27 staff recommendations was not yet answerable from the public record, and that we would update when the minutes appeared. That was wrong, and we can answer it now. FDOT publishes video of Commission meetings, and the June 11, 2026 recording is on the same public calendar we cite above.
The Commission did not vote on the recommendations. It tabled them, deliberately, to wait for the Governor’s signature on the budget.
Chair Monica Russell said so at the top of the meeting, before public comment, so that anyone who had come for the item would know it was coming: she would ask the Commission to table the Shirley Conroy and Innovative Service Development grant recommendations “to post signature of the budget, just so we know exactly what we are working with.”
When the agenda reached the item, she repeated the reason on the record:
“The next two items are the ones that I am going to respectfully ask to table for now. We do not have a finalized budget at this point, and I want to make sure we understand the full scope of what we have or do not have before we start making these types of decisions.”
A motion followed, and a second, and a voice vote with no opposition. “So these will be tabled,” the chair said, “until we do have a finalized budget.”
Two things follow from that. The staff funding options were never presented or debated on their merits; they were published in the meeting materials and the item was set aside before discussion. And the finalized budget the Commission was waiting for is the one that arrived eighteen days later with the program’s $6 million struck out. The chair also told the room she expected to call an additional meeting once the budget was final, guessing it would be signed by June 30.
Who this touches
The 24 FY 2026-27 applications came from providers whose proposed service areas span more than thirty counties — this is not one town’s problem. The Commission’s published records do not break ISD ridership out by disability type, so we cannot tell you what share of riders program-wide have I/DD. What the records do document in detail is the Wakulla-Leon project, whose riders were primarily individuals with I/DD, and that matches what these services are built to do: reach people whose school-system transportation ended, as it does for every Florida family, when they aged out of public school. For those families the ISD-funded ride was the bridge between school and an adult life that includes work, training, and community — and the fallback, now, is aging parents driving, often by cutting the working hours that fund their child’s lifetime care.
The broader press has covered some of this budget’s disability-related vetoes — Florida Politics noted the Jonathan’s Landing ($750,000) and Connections Autism School ($1 million) vetoes. Searching Florida news outlets and the open web, we found no coverage of the ISD veto itself in the month after it was signed. On July 31, the St. Pete Catalyst reported the first local consequence to make the news: PSTA’s ISD-funded service carrying roughly 200 riders to cancer treatment at Moffitt Cancer Center, ended by the same line item. On Aug. 7, Power Broker News covered the same Pinellas cutoff, citing this article’s account of the Commission’s records. We have not found reporting that connects the veto to its statewide toll. We’ve since compiled the rest ourselves: every disability program Florida cut from this budget.
What happens next
- September 17, 2026: the next scheduled Commission meeting (location TBA — check the CTD calendar; state law requires an opportunity for public comment). The two grant items tabled on June 11 are still unresolved, and the ISD recommendations were written against an appropriation that no longer exists. It is the first scheduled public meeting where the Commission faces a program the Legislature funded and the Governor cut.
- ~Mid-October 2026: state agencies’ FY 2027-28 legislative budget requests become public — the first signal of whether ISD funding will be requested again. (Gov. DeSantis is term-limited out in January 2027, so a new governor will sign the FY 2027-28 budget.)
- December 10, 2026: the Commission’s next meeting, also with public comment.
- 2027 legislative session: the restoration fight, if there is one, happens here — and it’s worth knowing this program has come back from zero before. ISD was created with money from M-CORES, the 2019 toll-road program, and when the Legislature repealed M-CORES in 2021 it also repealed the license-tax proceeds that had fed the grant. The program went unfunded in FY 2021-22 as a result, then was refunded the following year.
If your family is affected, here is exactly who to contact and what to say — including the line-item number that makes your message specific.
We will keep covering this story at each of those dates. If you want the updates without checking back, the newsletter is the easiest way.
Updated and corrected Aug. 5, 2026: An earlier version said staff recommendations would have deployed the full $6 million; the June 11 staff recommendations presented two options, $4.28 million and $5.52 million. The county count for FY 2026-27 applications was corrected from “roughly twenty” to more than thirty. Added the St. Pete Catalyst’s July 31 coverage of the veto’s impact in Pinellas County. Aug. 17: added Power Broker News’s Aug. 7 coverage.
Updated and corrected Aug. 31, 2026: The headline previously called ISD the state’s only door-to-door disability transportation program. It is the only competitive grant program for launching new door-to-door services; the larger Trip and Equipment Grant, which funds ongoing paratransit, was not vetoed, and the article now says so explicitly. We resolved our own open question using the June 11, 2026 meeting recording: the Commission did not vote on the recommendations, it tabled them to await the Governor’s signature, and that section has been rewritten. Karen Somerset’s title was corrected from “Interim Executive Director” to “Director” for 2026 references, per the Commission’s June 11 agenda. Added staff findings that eight of the 24 applications were incomplete and ineligible, that others had reached the four-year funding limit or proposed unfunded service types, and Bay County’s underbilling history. The four-year cap is described as adopted policy rather than an open debate. Ridership by disability type is now attributed to the Wakulla-Leon project rather than the program. Absence-of-coverage claims are now stated as what our searches found. Corrected “iEnable” to “i-Enable,” and noted that the FY 2021-22 lapse followed the repeal of M-CORES.
Sources and documents
- Official 2026 Veto List — line item 2054-1, page 13 ($6,000,000). We have archived a copy.
- Governor’s budget-signing announcement, June 29, 2026; see also WUSF’s veto coverage.
- FY 2026-27 General Appropriations Act summary (Florida Association of Counties).
- CTD meeting packages — Sept. 25, 2025; Dec. 8, 2025; April 8, 2026; June 11, 2026 (primary source for all utilization figures above).
- CTD Business Meeting recording, June 11, 2026 (MyFDOT) — source for the tabling motion and the chair’s quoted remarks.
- ISD program description and FY 2026-27 ISD Grant Program Manual (Florida CTD).
- CTD 2024 Annual Performance Report — Trip and Equipment Grant allocations and paratransit trip totals.
- Florida SB 100 (2021) — repeal of M-CORES and the associated license-tax proceeds.
Disclosure: The author’s family used an ISD-funded service for two years, and the author has written to his state representative, state senator, the governor’s office, and the CTD ombudsman about this veto as a private citizen. This article relies on the public record cited above. Corrections: see our editorial standards.