Gov. DeSantis goes on road to sell homestead property tax abatement

Gov. Ron DeSantis still hasn’t released his long-teased plan to eliminate some or all of Floridians’ homestead property taxes, but he continues to try to sell Floridians on the effort, even without details.

DeSantis said he intends to “start getting this across the finish line” once a “little cabal of people” decide what the state budget will look like and the Legislature votes on it sometime this month.

Ahead of that final push, DeSantis conducted a roundtable where he offered familiar arguments about how his plan, whatever it ends up being, would offload burdens currently imposed on homeowners to tourists and the like.

“If you’re running for office, if the people that can’t vote for you are the ones that are being taxed and the people that can vote for you are not being taxed, you’re probably going to do pretty good,” DeSantis said in Melbourne.

He also took issue with property tax writ large.

“If we were just starting from scratch, I would not advocate any form of wealth or property tax,” he said.

He took issue with the progressive nature of property tax as well.

“If I own a house that’s $400,000, and you own a house that’s $800,000, are you getting twice as much services as I’m getting? No, of course not. And so, the idea that it’s just basically, like, a fee for service, no. I mean, if you have more property, you’re getting hit harder,” he said.

DeSantis said he doesn’t want new taxes to offset lost revenue, citing a “big surplus” on the state level.

He’s expressed confidence before that local governments can make cuts to roll spending back to levels from previous years, and said Monday that while they want “no limitations,” it’s “doable” by taxing “snowbirds” and people from places like Brazil, who are not eligible for homestead exemption.

As he has before, he said 70% of property taxes do not come out of homesteaded properties, and suggested that core services can be protected and the burden of the cuts could be defrayed by cutting “extraneous expenses.”

He also doesn’t want local governments to “increase valuations on small businesses,” but the mechanism to “make sure that doesn’t happen” is still, like so much of this plan, a mystery.

DeSantis said rural governments would be floated by the state budget for a period of time under this proposal. House Speaker-designate Sam Garrison has already voiced opposition to this, however, and odds are he is not alone.

DeSantis also said he didn’t want every “Tom, Dick and Harry” who “transplants in” from out of state receiving the benefit immediately upon moving to Florida, suggesting new arrivals should have to pay property tax “for a period of time.”

The Legislature will have to vote to put this on the November ballot with 60% support in both the House and the Senate, and the proposal won’t become part of the constitution without 60% of the vote in the General Election.