Property Tax Reform Shelved Until June

Those clamoring for Florida mortgage help may be getting it, in the form of numerous programs designed to help delinquent borrowers and provide more affordable housing.

But citizens desiring property tax reform in Florida must wait until summer after lawmakers said Wednesday they would not be able to finalize details during the legislative session.

“There is no blame,” said House Speaker Marco Rubio, R-West Miami. “We’re going home to work on this, but we’re coming back.”

According to the Palm Beach Post, lawmakers said privately they had agreed Tuesday to cut taxes between $20 billion and $25 billion over five years - about double what the Senate proposed and half of the House offer.

The House also agreed not to pursue a sales tax increase, but other details were unsettled.

Despite that progress, Senate President Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, and Rubio halted debate in their respective chambers before noon to announce that lawmakers would have to return for a special session June 12.

They decided it was best to return for a 10-day session after realizing the difficulty of accurately analyzing a complicated package of tax changes, then drafting a bill and a constitutional amendment without any mistakes before the regular session ends Friday.

“We do not have the luxury of coming back here and doing a glitch bill,” Pruitt said. “The issue is too important to our state and to our taxpayers to give them a product they would not be proud of.”

Having to fix an error on an amendment scheduled for a special election not only would be hugely embarrassing but could have doomed the effort for the leaders’ desired time frame of having the property tax cuts go into effect this year.

“At the end of the day, crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s and putting the details in there is just as important as coming up with the concept,” Pruitt said.

It was unclear whether the framework lawmakers reached Tuesday would be the starting point of the special session. But what is perfectly clear is that residents hampered by increasingly high Florida home mortgage loan, property tax and insurance payments will be disappointed.

Ideas under discussion included:

• A rollback of city and county tax collections.
• Save Our Homes portability, which would let homeowners move accrued benefits from the assessment cap to a new homestead.
• A new assessment cap for commercial real estate and second home buyers.
• A multi-tiered homestead exemption that varies with the value of the home and would ultimately phase out the Save Our Homes cap.
• An accelerated tax break for first-time home buyers.

If Pruitt and Rubio can package ideas in a way to win support from three-fourths of the members in each chamber, a special election could be held no sooner than 91 days after presenting the ballot question to the secretary of state, under the constitution.

The measure then would need 60 percent approval from voters unless it involved a tax increase, in which case it would need 67 percent.

The required 91-day period means the earliest a special election could be held after the special session is mid-September. That will be just weeks before the September 30 deadline that local governments, under state law, must have their budgets approved for the coming year.

Continue reading in the Palm Beach Post …