Hours after the Florida House passed its property tax proposal, a plan that calls for the elimination of all homesteaded property taxes except for those collected to support schools, Senate President Ben Albritton remained noncommittal about what he would or would not support.
“The property tax issue as a whole is not simple math,” he told CBS Miami’s Jim DeFede in an interview for Facing South Florida. “It is trigonometry at a minimum. So, it is a very, very challenging topic to try to find what is fair across the board.”
Any change to the property tax system would have to be approved by voters in November, and it seemed unlikely the House plan was going to be approved by the Senate.
Governor Ron DeSantis has also dismissed the House plan, saying he wanted to wait and take up the issue in a few weeks during a separate special session of the legislature.
House leaders, led by House Speaker Danny Perez, have expressed frustration that neither DeSantis nor Albritton has actually put forward a proposal on property taxes, even though DeSantis has been talking about reducing or eliminating property taxes for more than a year.
In many ways, it appeared the House plan, which passed along party lines, with Republicans voting in favor of it, and Democrats voting against it, was never intended to make it to the ballot. Instead, it appeared intended to call the governor’s bluff on the issue and challenge the Senate to do something.
But Albritton refuses to put forward his own plan.
In his interview with CBS Miami, Albritton did say one idea he did like in the House proposal was the idea of slowly phasing in the property tax cuts over several years as a way of giving cities and counties, which stand to lose tens of millions of dollars, “to give the local communities a chance to adapt” to the eventual hit.
Democrats, however, argue that no matter how it is phased in, eliminating all homesteaded property taxes would force local communities to dramatically cut many core services, including police and fire.
Watch more from the interview below:
