No On Amendment One
Patricia Hollarn, the Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections, has done her best to summarize Amendment One on the sample ballot, but it’s still a solution in search of a problem. They are just shifting the tax burden, instead of fixing the system.
To make it worse, you will note that the school district taxes are exempt from the the supposed reductions. Those who remember the Reagan years already know what’s going to happen. Tallahassee will now reduce aid to education and the school districts will have to raise their taxes to make up the difference. What you thought you were going to save has just been shifted, not eliminated.
People need to vote no because their taxes are about to be reduced anyway, just as soon as their property gets assessed again. Most of the increase in tax bills was a result of increased assessments from the housing bubble, and now that the bubble has burst, the assessments will go down between 20 and 40%. The local governments already know this is coming, which is why they are against this amendment. They will have to cut services as a result of the new assessments, because you can’t raise taxes in an “economic slowdown”.
2 comments
Y’know, this is stupid. Why should the average property values of a county fluctuating up and down have a damned thing to do with tax revenue? One of the things we tried in Arizona was basically saying, “okay, you have $1B of tax revenue this year, next year you can have $1B + population growth + inflation amount of tax revenue”, and adjust the tax rates accordingly to give that (you can over-ride that amount, but it requires a vote of the people). So my property tax bill stayed the same whether my house was assessed at $80K in 1995 or $180K in 2005 or $120K in 2008 (well, it rose with inflation, but you get the point).
This is the only way that makes sense to deal with these fluctuating property values. People don’t get reamed just because their property values soared during some bubble, and public services don’t get cut to the bone just because property values plummeted after the bubble burst. But because it makes sense, no state other than Arizona seems to do it…
Actually, you have touched the heart of the property tax problem in the state of Florida – there is no rational system.
The values go up and down with the market, but there are exemptions for some groups, so they actual get a different rate than their neighbors, and others don’t have to pay unless the assessment is above a certain level, and others get the whole thing excused, and every county uses a slightly different system with different levels – it’s insane.
We need one uniform system so there are no nasty surprises for property owners or local governments. Arizona sounds like a good place to start, because these people obviously can’t do this on their own; they need a template.