America's Talking - DeSantis Offers Plan to Eliminate Property Taxes for Poor, Rural Counties

Episode Date: June 15, 2025

(The Center Square) – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants the state to take over some funding of government services for rural, thinly-populated fiscally constrained counties and allow them to eliminate their property taxes. DeSantis made the statement at an economic development announcement in Crawfordville on Monday. His estimate of how much this would cost Florida taxpayers would be about $300 million per year, a drop in the bucket of the nearly $50 billion in general fund spending that is part of a tentative budget deal by lawmakers.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxFull story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/florida/article_02bc5827-0aca-4bda-a991-5fbf6333225a.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to American Focus. I'm Aliana Kernodal. Today we're talking about the possibility of a limiting property taxes for some counties in Florida. Joining me to tell us more about this is the Center Square's regional editor, Steve Wilson. Steve, Governor DeSantis talked about this earlier this week. Can you lay out for us what his idea is? Well, this is part of an ongoing process in the last term of Governor DeSantis being in office. that he wants to leave Floridians with lower property tax rates. Because as you well know, property taxes are assessed about a dollar per $1,000 of assessed value. Now, if we've got a real estate market like Florida, where values are going up, your tax bill is going to go up every single year.

Does it mean that you could sell your house for that? Maybe, maybe not. But the assessment means you're going to be paying more. So what he wants to do is cut into that because he says that basically, let's say hypothetically, you're a retired couple, which there's a lot of those in Florida. You've paid off your house. You're basically paying the government rent. You don't really own your house because what happens if you don't pay your property tax bill?

They can come in, seize your property, auction it off. He wants to eliminate that. He wants to make it to where if they do levy property taxes, they're actually affordable and there's limits on the amount of assessments every year. But what he's talking about here that I wrote about is he's talking about making it to where these poor, they call them fiscally distressed counties. Because Florida is a very different economic beast than most states. You've got the coasts where you've got just tons of money.

I mean, they are just, they have tax dollars. just falling out of their pockets because you've just got so much wealth. Then when you go into the interior of the state where you have a lot of agricultural interests, you have some small towns, they just don't have the tax funding. So what the state of Florida does is they appropriate money for these fiscally distressed counties. And I mean, I used to live in one when I was working in Florida from 2004 to 2006. So what they do is they supplement these budgets. Well, he's talking about completely making it to where they don't have to levy a property tax at all.

And the amazing thing is it would cost about $300 million a year to do this. He's done the math on it. I've looked at the figures. They're about right because you figure if you're in a county that has 10,000 people, how big a fire department and sheriff's department do you really need? You don't really need much. So how would this impact these fiscally constrained counties if they had this opportunity? Well, for starters, the county commissions wouldn't have to worry about dealing with property tax, collecting it, assessing it.

So you could cut some people right there because they've got to have a tax assessor's office. Secondly, I think that those counties would be, would be magnanimity. for like retirees, people on a fixed income because, hey, if you want to own your home and not have to worry about paying property tax every year, you go get you a homestead in a fiscally constrained county and there you go. So I think it would be good economically for them. But like I said, this is the first part of a move. What they want, what he wants lawmakers to do is to craft a constitutional amendment, put it on the November 26 ballot, and it would require 60% of voters to approve it that would provide some property tax reforms, make it harder for them to raise your property taxes,

county commission, cities. Also, you're looking at assessments. Limit how much your assessment can go up every year because they've got some Floridians, especially like on the coast, where their property values are going up 10, 15% a year, and that's just not sustainable. If you're on a fixed income, you can't afford to be writing an ever bigger check every year because your income is not really going to change too much. And you mentioned how much this would cost. It's minuscule compared to the budget of the state as a whole. But am I remembering right that Florida doesn't have an income tax? Do they rely mostly on sales and tax? Is that where most of this money is coming from?

Yeah. And see, the thing is, Florida, one of their big drivers of tax revenue is their sales tax. And who pays sales tax? Everybody. It's a consumption tax. And who does it hit the hardest? It's going to hit tourists, snowbirds. You'll have people, the snowbirds will come down from the north, like the northeast, the Midwest,

even Canada. They'll come down for the winter. and guess what? They'll pay sales tax because they'll, they come down to party, they want to eat out. My wife's aunt and uncle lived in Kate Coral, which is in southwest Florida, and they said that the chances of you getting a table in a restaurant

during the winter was nigh impossible. You were looking at an hour to two hour waits at every seafood restaurant. So obviously, that's a great way for Florida to raise money, and it's great for Floridians because it's taking a lot of the onus on them to support essential services. They're putting it on people who are visiting, which I think makes sense. And the thing you mentioned about the state's budget, you're talking a state with $50 billion in revenues. $300 million, as DeSantis said,

is a drop in the book. Well, and taking some of that and bringing it to those financially distressed counties where they're not necessarily feeling the effects of the tourism. That's kind of a way to bring some of that prosperity that comes from the tourism in other parts of the state. It is because, like, for example, I used to cover sports teams in a place called Hardy County, and the main town there is Wachula. Wachula is the home of Ben Allbritten, who is the Senate president. But it is not a tourist town.

It is a beautiful little southern town. People are nice. It's a great place to visit, but it's not going to have the people going to Disney World of the beaches. So they're not going to have the sales tax revenue that, say, Fort Lauderdale or West Palm is going to have. Well, Steve, thank you for your insights on this story. You can follow this story and more at thecentersquare.com.