Grover Norquist, the anti-tax fanatic whose Americans for Tax Reform has been influencing presidents since Ronald Reagan, once said in an interview on NPR: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” We witnessed the Florida Legislature’s premeditated drowning of local government this week.
At the Nov. 3 election, you’ll be asked whether you want the homestead tax exemption, currently at $50,000, to increase to $150,000 in January, and to $250,000 the following year. You’ll be asked, in short, whether you want to drown local government in a bathtub. Chances are you’ll say yes, because it’s easy to hoodwink taxpayers on deceptive slogans. It’s not government that will pay the price. It’s you, as you begin to experience shoddier or absent services and end up paying far more to make up the cost than you’re paying now in taxes.
Put it this way: it will cost you more to repair your broken axle from a single neglected pothole than it would to pay your current city tax bill. Your out-of-pocket emergency room bill to treat your kid’s snake bite, resulting from lax code enforcement that allowed your neighbor to turn his yard into a jungle, will cost you more than any money you’ll save in taxes. You’ll be paying thousands more to fix your cracked driveway or load-bearing wall that but for cuts to the Building Department would have been prevented by that extra inspection. The delayed response of an ambulance to Seminole Woods, because the county couldn’t yet afford to put an ambulance at the new city Station 26, may cost you your life. All because you think you’ll save $1,500 in taxes that are still among the lowest in the country.
Will the county still afford its annual grants to the Family Life Center, the only domestic violence shelter in the county? To the Sheltering Tree, the only cold-weather shelter in the county? To Flagler Beach’s lifeguard program? Will Palm Coast be able to afford its cultural grants, those couple of school resource deputies the city and Town Center pay for, those summer programs Parks and Rec is so proud of? Probably not. And that’s just the small stuff, though shedding it from government’s responsibilities makes us all crueler and poorer. There’s also the larger stuff, like a beach-protection program, a serious resurfacing program in Palm Coast, let alone a canal-dredging program. Kiss all those goodbye.
But this is what ideology divorced from reality brings us. The governor and his lieutenants in the legislature have been lying about a homesteaded property tax crisis. You know they’ve been lying because you hardly ever see a single taxpayer complaining about homesteaded taxes in front of any of our local boards. The only time you heard a spate of those complaints was in the post-Covid years when northerners moving in were shocked that their taxes weren’t as low as their homesteaded neighbors’. But that’s on them. They didn’t do their homework. And even with the higher taxes, you know they’re paying far less than they did in New Jersey. In any case they’ve quieted down as their protected values–another way of saying tax subsidies–have kicked in.
The reason is that if you’re homesteaded, your taxes have been going down year after year. Maybe not nominally. But when adjusted for inflation, you’re giving the government about a third less today than you did 10 years ago. That’s my situation. I have a 3,000 square foot house in the P Section that I bought in 2008. I am still paying the very same $2,000 or so today as I was in 2008, even though the value of the house has nearly tripled. Just in inflation-adjusted dollars, I should have been paying $3,000. So I am paying a third less, and local governments are receiving $1,000 less in purchasing power from me.
No one can reasonably argue that the current system, created under that deceptive catchphrase “Save Our Homes,” is fair. It caps homesteaded taxable value increases at 3 percent or the year’s inflation rate, whichever is lowest, shifting the burden to non-homesteaded properties, including renters and businesses. They only get a 10 percent cap, though that would go down to 5 if the proposed amendment is adopted. They’ve been subsidizing the 60 percent of our properties that are homesteaded. It’s that inherently unequal distribution that should be reformed.
If that’s not ridiculous enough, the governor’s claim that I am overtaxed and need relief is just sheer mendacity. He wants to campaign on his quixotic 2028 presidential run as the candidate who eliminated property taxes in a state without income taxes. The Legislature went along without offering a single alternative revenue source because its own sense of social responsibility drowned in that bathtub a long time ago. That leaves you, the voter, as the last stop. And if you think that it’s only the government you’re drowning, remember that you are the government, and it’s only your quality of life, if not your life, that you’ll be drowning.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
Barbara Revels says
I own rental property. All of it is rented well below the market currently. I can’t raise rents as the tenants have no where else to go to. All of the crazy scheme of homeowners taxes will come directly to me and then my tenants. These are your workers, healthcare givers, retired living on $1000 month Total from SS, lawn care workers, wait staff and on it goes. They will all have to move way west into mobile homes and then hope they can get to work. Prices for everything you pay for will go up far beyond your homestead savings. You must educate yourself and others and vote this crazy scheme down. Instead go to the budget hearings and carefully watch where your money goes to local governments.
Merrill Shapiro says
Ron DeSantis’ tepid response to the passage of CS/SJR 2-F: Save our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes was muted because of his displeasure that changes in real estate taxes for public schools were taken out of the bill. Destroying public education looms large as a DeSantis goal. He would rather see private, mostly religious schools thrive at the expense of the kind of education called for in Florida’s Constitution, Article IX, Section 1, Paragraph (a): The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education.
(The comment section needs an editor facility so that italics can be used for clarity!)