For Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, there is something fundamentally unfair about the concept of property taxes.
“You buy a home, you pay off the mortgage, and yet, you still have to write a check to the government every year — just for the privilege of living on your own private property,” Mr. DeSantis said in a speech last year. “Is the property yours, or are you just renting it from the government?”
In recent weeks, Mr. DeSantis has been at the center of a topsy-turvy drama over the future of property taxes in Florida as he has tried to reduce the burden of soaring tax bills for homeowners. But a proposed constitutional amendment that emerged from those efforts has been met with considerable pushback, most notably from some of his fellow Republicans, including local officials faced with billions in lost revenue that would force them to cut services.
Now, even Mr. DeSantis is backing away from the proposal, which is set to appear on the November ballot. The backlash reflects the real-world budgetary challenges that come with one of the Republican Party’s core beliefs — that taxes should be lower.
Property taxes, which tend to fund local services, have come under particular scrutiny of late, as Republican state lawmakers around the country search for new strategies to address the affordability crisis.
Mike Fasano, the tax collector for Pasco County, Fla., is a lifelong Republican and a DeSantis fan. But if the proposal passes, he says, it will have a “devastating impact on our county, and counties throughout the state.”
He checked off the services in Pasco that could be hit, including “the sheriff’s department, fire-rescue, veterans’ services, senior services, parks and rec, libraries.”
Laws limiting property taxes have passed recently in several Republican-led states, including Texas, Georgia, Nebraska, Alabama, Indiana and Wyoming.
Last month, the Idaho Republican Party made the elimination of the property tax a plank in its platform, stating that it “is an inherently unjust tax that converts privately owned property into government collateral and threatens homeownership.”
The G.O.P. focus on tax relief for homeowners makes political sense, given that they lean Republican and are considerably more likely to vote than renters. But critics worry that cutting property taxes could result in fiscal instability as states look to more volatile sources of revenue, like sales taxes, to plug resulting budget gaps.
That is a main concern in Texas, where voters approved large cuts to school-related property taxes in 2023 and 2025. To backfill the loss, the state has turned to surplus funds. But that has raised questions about the potential effect of an economic downturn — particularly because Texas, which has no state income tax, is more reliant on sales taxes.
To maintain the tax break, Texas may eventually need to increase sales taxes or cut spending, according to a February analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “Both options would disproportionately affect lower-income residents,” the analysis stated.
Such worries are now ricocheting around Florida, which also has no state income tax. Mr. DeSantis has said that the state would provide grants to communities that took a big hit. That money would presumably come from the state’s surplus, much of which comes from sales taxes.
But Mr. DeSantis is focused on the growing tax burden on homeowners, particularly since the pandemic, when Florida had a flood of new residents. Home prices soared, as did the assessments of homes, resulting in rising tax bills. Florida had the highest growth in median annual property tax — 38 percent — between 2019 and 2023, according to the National Association of Realtors.
The result, Mr. DeSantis has said, was a “gusher of revenue” for city and county governments. This year, he decided to tighten the spigot. He called a special session of the G.O.P.-led Legislature, and presented lawmakers with what he has called “the most transformational property tax proposal in American history.”
The Legislature ended up passing the proposed constitutional amendment, which is a more modest version of Mr. DeSantis’s original proposal. Its most important provision concerns the homestead exemption, which is the portion of a home’s assessed value that is exempt from taxation. The proposal would roughly triple the exemption to $150,000 in 2027 for primary residences, then raise it to $250,000 in 2028. From there, the exemption would be adjusted for inflation each year. (The exemption would not apply to school-related taxes.)
Late last month, Mr. DeSantis called the Legislature’s version “good for taxpayers” and said he would vote for it. But he also said he would probably not campaign for it.
“What the Legislature did wasn’t my proposal,” Mr. DeSantis said at a recent news conference. The DeSantis administration did not respond to queries for this article.
The governor’s lukewarm position presents a new obstacle for the plan, which must win at least 60 percent of the vote to be enacted. Even before his decision, Republican officials were speaking out about its potential harm in places like Pasco County, a reliably Republican and booming area north of Tampa.
Jack Mariano, a Republican who chairs Pasco’s board of commissioners, said that two years from now, the amendment could wipe away $200 million from the county’s $2 billion annual budget.
Mr. Mariano acknowledged in an interview that revenues from property taxes had gone up in recent years. But he noted that those funds had helped build up law enforcement and emergency response services to meet the demands of a population that has grown by 20 percent in the last five years. Cuts, he said, would not go over well.
“I don’t think it’s what the people want,” Mr. Mariano said of the governor’s proposal.
Some Pasco cities also expect significant hits to their budgets. Zephyrhills, a city of about 17,000, would eventually lose as much as $3 million yearly, said William C. Poe Jr., the city manager.
Local governments in Zephyrhills and elsewhere may need to choose between reducing services or raising taxes on entities not covered by the homestead exemption, like landlords, who could push the increases to renters.
In New Port Richey, a coastal city of 18,800, the amendment has worried George Romagnoli, a resident who warned at a recent council meeting that it was a “sword of Damocles” hanging over the city.
Mr. Romagnoli, a Republican who works for a nonprofit housing lender, said in an interview that if the amendment passes, local governments might not have the funds that are sometimes required to match federal housing grants.
“They may have to say no to the grant,” he said, “and that’s even more money that the local communities will lose.”
Jeff Brandes, a former Republican state senator who runs the Florida Policy Project, a think tank, worries that the some local governments would need to go hat in hand to state lawmakers to backfill their budget gaps.
“This was a pitch that started off as cutting taxes, but I don’t think it’s that anymore,” Mr. Brandes said in a recent interview. “I think it’s really shifted to control.”
Mr. Brandes is a plaintiff in one of two lawsuits challenging the measure’s language as insufficiently neutral.
Mr. Fasano, the Pasco County tax collector, thinks many residents will see a DeSantis-backed tax cut on the ballot and vote yes.
“But,” he said, “you have a lot of young families who are going to start thinking — I hope they are going to start thinking — ‘How is this going to affect the services that we use in the county?’”
David Ovalle contributed reporting.
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