In November, Florida voters will decide the future of homestead property taxes. Florida voters, by and large, have never opened a municipal budget. Democracy is funny that way.
Governor DeSantis announced Wednesday that he is calling a special session beginning Monday to place a constitutional amendment on the November ballot to eliminate homestead property taxes for most Florida homeowners. To reach the ballot it needs sixty percent of both legislative chambers. To pass it needs sixty percent of voters. The number is the same at every stage. The level of preparation required to cast that vote is not specified anywhere in the process.
Both sides are ready.
The pro side has done the math on their own tax bill and arrived at a number they don’t like. This is the extent of the analysis. The check goes out every year, the number has gone up, and the opportunity to make it stop is on the ballot. That is a complete sentence for most people. The philosophical argument, that you shouldn’t have to keep paying annually for something you already own, is real and not unreasonable. It also fits on a bumper sticker, which is roughly the format in which most voters prefer their fiscal policy.
The against side has done no additional research but has heard that schools and fire departments might lose funding, which is genuinely alarming if true, and is partially true in a way that requires about four sentences to explain accurately. Four sentences is two more than most people are willing to read about tax policy. So instead they will tell you the schools are at risk and the fire trucks are at risk and everything is at risk, which lands clean and skips entirely over the part where ad valorem taxes, the portion that actually funds most of those things, are not what’s being eliminated. That detail is in the proposal. The proposal is public. It has been public since Wednesday. The outrage, however, does not require the proposal.
Nobody in this debate has looked at their city budget. This is not an insult. City budgets are dense, specific, and available on websites that were clearly designed to discourage people from looking at them. But the city budget is where you find out what your property taxes actually fund in your specific municipality, which is the only number that matters in this conversation, and which is different in every city, and which neither side is discussing because neither side has seen it.
What both sides have is a feeling. The pro side feels overtaxed. The against side feels afraid. Both feelings are legitimate. Neither one is a fiscal analysis. In November, both feelings will be cast as votes on a constitutional amendment, and the result will be treated as the informed will of the people.
The people. Who have never been to a commission meeting. Who cannot define ad valorem. Who are confident anyway, because confidence in Florida is not contingent on preparation. That has been well established in these posts.
The special session begins Monday. November is coming. You have time to read the proposal, look up your city budget, and understand what the amendment actually eliminates versus what it doesn’t.
You won’t, though. Neither will your neighbor.
But the vote counts the same either way.
