Rep. Rob Long, D-Delray Beach, has a history of working in local government. He understands how things work and said his experience points to Amendment 3, a large property tax cut, being a bad idea.
“The hit we would take if Amendment 3 passes is not something these cities and counties can simply absorb,” Long said.
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Long spoke to the News Service of Florida about potential effects if the property tax cut measure passes, including what will happen to renters, development and small businesses.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
NSF: You're a state representative, but you also have a history in local government. How has your prior work experience informed you about Amendment 3?
LONG: This will be my 10th year in public office. I started out on a special district, soil and water conservation, and then I started a term on our Delray Beach City Commission, and now I just served my first year in the Florida Legislature. I think it gives me a more nuanced view of what the actual impacts are going to be if this passes. I've had to manage a city budget before, I understand how that budget process works already, so I understand that two-thirds of our general fund goes to police and fire. I understand what the impact of losing a substantial chunk, up to 10-to-25 percent of that budget overnight, looks like and what would have to happen to fill in those gaps. I understand that the hit we would take if Amendment 3 passes is not something these cities and counties can simply absorb. This whole idea of all this wasteful spending that happens, and I'm sure it does happen in certain places, but I firmly believe that most cities, at least the ones in my district and the one that I used to serve on, run a pretty lean budget.
The thing I tell folks anytime I go in and speak to different groups about this is your city commission, your county commission, they already have a transparent budget process. By statute, they have to. You can already go through and see how every line item of that budget is being spent in your city. I remember when I sat on the commission, there were multiple points during the budget approval process that by statute, we had to come in and go over that in public, and every single budget document was available in those agendas that were posted online, and you could get them before, during and after the meeting, and those meetings were viewable via YouTube. I tell people there's already a public accountability there, and if you don't like the way that your city is budgeting, you can vote those people out. You can come in and speak to them about it and challenge it.
What’s the most popular question you're getting from constituents about Amendment 3?
A lot of people are worried about public safety, about defunding police, defunding their fire rescue and emergency response. They are very concerned about that. What's going to happen if they take a hit like this? And my answer is: We don't know. That's the reality here, that we did this whole thing backwards. We did it without any sort of real fiscal analysis because it was vetoed by the governor the year before. We don't have any data, but what we do know is that those costs have to come out of somewhere, and it'll likely be in the form of a fire assessment fee. You can't actually do an assessment for law enforcement, but you're going to have to move money that would be spent on other things to cover that if you want to keep the level of service where it is. You're going to probably end up having assessment fees for parks and recreation, for maintenance, for all kinds of other infrastructure needs, basically just city administration to run your city. What I tell people is that it's really not a tax cut, it's a tax shift because you might be saving money on the front end on your tax bill, but you're going to have assessment fees that you never had before.
How will this affect renters and development?
If I'm a renter, I don't get any tax break because I don't have a homesteaded property. Am I going to end up paying more? And the answer is almost definitely yes, because your landlord is going to get hit with those same assessment fees, and they're not getting that tax cut either, so they're going to pass those fees on down to renters. I get questions from a lot of business chambers and companies, and I just left one of those meetings with a big construction firm. I told them that this is going to impact your workforce because they may not be able to afford to live near your projects anymore. You may have to pay people more, especially your renters, and it's going to slow down projects, including big public capital improvement budgets. It's going to add impact fees, it's going to add all kinds of things that are going to impact your budget. A lot of that tax burden could get shifted to commercial properties as well. We have areas like downtown Delray Beach, where the economic engine for our entire city is our downtown. But it's extremely expensive to have a restaurant or a bar downtown, and there are cities that are going to have to make up revenue somewhere to balance our budget. If we can't get it from our residential homesteaded properties, we're going to have to pull it from our commercial property, so they could end up getting hit with a lot of that tax burden. What happens then? Again, it gets passed on to the tenants. And what happens to those bars and restaurants? It makes it even tougher for them to cling on.
If it’s going to create more of a tax burden for commercial properties and renters, could you comment on why the Florida Realtors have come out and supported Amendment 3?
Because of the assessment cap. There's going to be a 5 percent assessment cap for non-homesteaded properties. Currently, it is now capped at how much that property can increase in value each year, 10 percent, so they are going to save there. But what they're not considering is the fact that these properties are also going to be getting hit with different assessments in these communities.
Can you tell us what you saw during the legislative process of creating this property tax amendment?
That's the other big question people ask me: How the hell did this happen, it seems so reckless? How did it make it to the ballot? There were multiple different versions of this, as I'm sure you know, that floated around during the actual legislative session on both the House side and the Senate side. It sort of started out with eight different versions, and the House ended up passing a version of it that I didn't agree with, but it was more reasonable than what's currently going to be on the ballot. Then the Senate never actually ended up deciding on a version of it at all, and they didn't take up the House version, so nothing passed during the regular session on this. The governor kept very quiet during regular session and then did a special session just specifically for this. We effectively adopted the governor's bill. The only thing that changed is we carved out school district taxes. I give a lot of credit to our incoming speaker, Rep. Sam Garrison, for really fighting for that. That was huge because now pass or fail, we're at least carving out school district taxes for public schools, which is critical.
Now, it's important to keep in mind that there was a study that was supposed to be done last year that passed through both the House and the Senate to get real data on the impact of this, and the governor vetoed it. We went into this without any information, and we had this session, it only lasted for two days, and the bill basically got rammed through without any substantive dialogue about the impacts of this amendment. And I believe it's because the governor was holding my colleagues’ appropriations hostage, more or less. All the Republicans knew coming in they had a lot of money on the line for their districts.
