The 60-day Florida Legislature’s session ended on Friday without putting forth a property tax relief proposal for inclusion on November’s election ballot.
The Orlando Sentinel reports the legislature also failed to approve a budget, which will require lawmakers to return after the Passover and Easter recess for special sessions to finish approving a budget. Under state law, a budget must be approved by June 30.
Senate President Ben Albritton said a special session on property taxes will be held, but he did not say when that would be scheduled. Gov. Ron DeSantis advocated for lawmakers to enact property tax relief over a year ago, initially seeking a complete elimination of these taxes, but he has yet to call for a special session.
Don’t hold your breath!
How will the state’s expenses be paid if property taxes are eliminated? A high sales tax? NY style income tax?
I left NY because of taxes and came to Florida. Should I now consider going to Texas?
Better check out the Texas Real Property Taxes. They are much higher than Florida.
Services have to be paid for by residents, and states have to collect money in some way. Not saying it’s perfect or even fair and likely have inefficiencies and waste (or grift too).
I knew many people who fled California complaining about taxes. They went to Oregon and Washington, only to find out that those states collect different taxes, so they ended up paying MORE taxes than in California and decided to come back to Cali.
California’s taxes are about in the middle compared to other states if you consider all the various unique state taxes. But, Cali has unique issues, like earthquakes, fires, droughts, cyclical floods and is the most populated state at nearly 40 million, so that means more costs to cram all those people into cities and build and maintain extensive transportation routes.
The droughts, fires and floods in California are mostly a self-inflicted problem because developers (and farmers) removed about 91% of California’s once vast and distributed wetlands and then built and farmed inside areas that used to be wetlands, including building & farming inside river channels, lakebeds, and known historic floodplains. Then people are super shocked when water runs downhill to those historic river channels and lakebeds. It is so stupid, but this happens in many places.
Dams are extremely expensive (about 5 to 10 Billion each). It is way cheaper to just allow the rivers, creeks, lakes, and floodplains to be the natural and FREE water capture that nature and gravity had figured out (cuz that’s how physics works), well, until Euro-Americans arrived with their “dominate and subdue the earth” mentality, which never works for long and costs taxpayers a ton of money every year.
Thank you the details.
Property taxes are needed to pay for services we need and want—-fireman, police etc.
Perhaps the Legislature should suggest a higher cap on yearly taxes (6% instead of 3%) for residents. Also let’s not “soak” the part timers and keep their increase capped at around 7%. we need part timers as much as we need full timers.
The plan, as I understand it, is to exempt school real property tax levies from the legislation which is roughly a third of the overall tax levy. That leaves about two-thirds to be paid by non-Homesteaded properties, e.g. 2nd homes, commercial properties and vacant land. It is notably not a complete elimination of Homesteaded real property taxes. I have not read a discussion about what happens to the present Save Our Homes Cap, for which every Homesteaded owner benefits.