Florida's New Property Tax Proposal: a Trick or a Treat?

Yesterday the Florida legislature finally passed property tax reforms that citizens of this state will vote on in January 2008. If you remember they tried to do this earlier in the summer, but a circuit court pulled those proposals off the ballot.

Now we have a real grab-bag of items and no one (except the politicians) seem to know whether these reforms will offer homeowners and businesses real tax relief if the voters approve them. The main points of what the legislature has done are the following:

• Homeowners who sell their current home and buy another one can transfer up to $500,000 of Save Our Homes assessment discounts, including school taxes, to their new homes.
• The Homestead Exemption will be doubled, but only if your home is worth more than $75,000. However, this exemption will not apply to school taxes, often the largest portion of the tax bill.
• For the next 10 years there will be a 10% assessment cap on non-homesteaded properties. After 10 years voters can elect to extend this cap. This sounds a lot like the 3% Save Our Homes cap to me.
• Businesses will be allowed to exempt up to $25,000 of money spent on office equipment, etc.

The lawmakers made no allowance for first-time home buyers and there is a faction that feels that this oversight could make room for a constitutional challenge of the reforms in the future. Time will tell.

After all the hoopla that has been going on this year over insurance and property tax reforms, I will be very surprised if we do not end up with a "trick" instead of a "treat" next year. I hope that I am wrong.

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