(The Center Square) – Eight plans to offer property tax relief in Florida have taken a step forward in the state legislature.
All but one are constitutional amendments that would need 60% of voter approval to go into effect. They all cleared the House Select Committee on Property Taxes on Thursday and now move to the State Affairs Committee for consideration.
The Republican-led legislation aims to lower or eliminate most property taxes without affecting funding for law enforcement.
It has drawn opposition from Democrats, local governments that depend on property tax revenue and GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who supports property tax relief but has split with his own party about how to go about it.
Committee members questioned how local governments would handle a deficit in their budgets.
“It has been put on the table that our constituents are looking for us to give them some measure of opportunity because they are in favor of property taxes being eliminated,” said Rep. Paula Stark, R-St. Cloud. “On the other hand, I’ve also had constituents have the conversation with me: ‘How do we do that?’ Well, that is the big question.”
Rep. Michele Rayner, D-St. Petersburg, said she fears the tax burden would fall to businesses through higher commercial property taxes.
“These ideas feel more like political posturing than it actually feels like making real decisions to make Florida more affordable for our people, and those decisions will completely devastate Florida,” said Rayner. “It’s interesting to me. We want to talk about eliminating property taxes but somebody’s going to have to pay for this. And where is that going to go?”
Rep. Monique Miller, a Republican from Palm Bay who authored legislation that would eventually eliminate non-school property taxes for primary residences, said taxpayers should decide how their money should be spent.
“The total non-school homestead amount that we’re talking about is $11.8 billion that would be phased out over 10 years against the total $55.2 billion that we are collecting in property taxes today. The amount of money increased in spending we’ve seen between 2020 and 2024 – the increase was $17.5 billion,” Miller said. “The bottom line is we ran our governments well in 2020. Adjusting for inflation and population growth, we can do it again and you don’t need $17.5 billion of extra spending to be able to do it. We’ve already seen it happen before.”
Rep. Debra Tendrich, D-Lake Worth, said she felt there were too many “what if’s” and other questions with the proposals.
“We are going to have a lot of conversations about spending priorities and that’s exactly what we should be doing every single year,” Miller said.
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DeSantis has said he supports putting property tax relief on the 2026 ballot but disagrees with asking voters to weigh in on multiple choices.
“Placing more than one property tax measure on the ballot represents an attempt to kill anything on property taxes,” he said in an Oct. 22 post on X. “It’s a political game, not a serious attempt to get it done for the people.”
