Don’t trust DeSantis to manage our money /Editorial

Misleading numbers and secretive spending aren’t mere glitches in this administration. They are prominent features. But none of it is as destructive as his plan for eventually doing away with homestead property taxes. It’s no coincidence that he gave lawmakers a week to parse the math and three days to approve it.

In two days, the Legislature largely went along with a plan for dramatically slashing taxes on a homeowner’s primary residence, a primary source to run all 67 counties, 411 cities and more than 2,000 single-purpose special taxing districts.

Florida would exempt homesteaded properties up to $150,000 of assessed value starting next January. The exemption rises to $250,000 a year later. The revenue loss to Broward County alone would be $334 million in Year Two, a loss of 18.5% of property tax revenue.

The proposed constitutional amendment will appear on the November ballot, giving voters the final say.

The math doesn’t add up

Don’t expect the governor or lawmakers who signed off on his political calculations to explain why it doesn’t add up.

DeSantis’ pledge that homestead tax exemptions will eventually rise to $500,000 is nowhere in the proposed amendment language.

Lawmakers who co-sponsored the amendment can’t agree on whether it could eventually end all property taxes.

Citing Florida’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research, investment bank UBS crunched the rosy numbers and concluded that promised benefits are off.

For one thing, state data showed that only about 28% of Florida homeowners have homes valued at up to $250,000. But the governor claimed that raising homestead exemptions to $250,000 would eliminate property taxes for 60% of homeowners.

Basic services in jeopardy

Broward homeowners could save an estimated $2,146 the first year if the amendment passes. But the county and its 31 cities could lose $624 million.

Because the amendment dictates how counties and cities can spend what’s left, it’s doubtful the remaining property tax money could be used to keep libraries running, parks maintained or animal shelters open. Veterans’ centers, summer camps, boat launches and garbage pickup could all be impacted.

According to DeSantis’ calculations, service cutbacks will be offset by the benefit of lowered taxes.

But homeowners won’t just lose services.

“Public services get baked into the value of a home,” Realtor.com senior economist Joel Berner told Bloomberg News. “If you don’t have those things, your home isn’t worth the same amount.”

Is it any wonder that Florida Realtors, an influential statewide voice for the real estate industry, is strangely silent on this super-sized homestead exemption?

Just ‘tax the rich’

Pressed about projected shortfalls, DeSantis shrugged. Tax the rich, he suggested, singling out Palm Beach, a “gold mine” awash in millionaires.

“That should be your tax base,” DeSantis said, offering up Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago to help offset local losses.

Even if that worked for Palm Beach County, there are no similar millionaire clusters in poor counties to pick up the slack. Small towns could go bankrupt. Smaller, rural counties could be forced to merge.

Criticizing DeSantis for distorting and ignoring key numbers in search of a political win is not overreach.

He has a history of misleading the public on money in general and constitutional amendments in particular.

This is the governor whose administration rigged state economic data on the impact of 2024’s proposed constitutional amendment on abortion. Separately, the administration swiped $35 million allocated to needy children and drug prevention to pay for efforts to kill that amendment and another legalizing marijuana.

Of that $35 million, nearly $10 million in Medicaid settlement money was funneled through the first lady’s favored charity, Hope Florida, to anti-amendment efforts.

Florida’s most wasteful governor

He’s the same governor who exploited a state slush fund, squandering $460 million on a made-for-TV immigrant detention center, including $92 million for port-a-potty services, a half million dollars for private jet flights, and meals at 55 restaurants.

He approved the $83 million state purchase of a four-acre spit of land owned by a campaign contributor. When the press questioned his soaring state-paid travel expenses, he signed a bill sealing his travel records.

DeSantis has never come clean about the huge annual budget surpluses he touts. That’s because those surpluses were propped up by COVID-era relief funds when Joe Biden was president.

DeSantis knows perfectly well the money behind the surpluses is dwindling, putting Florida on track for a $6.9 billion budget deficit within three years.

If the property tax Amendment 3 passes, a tsunami of red ink and unavoidable state belt-tightening will come just as every county and city are also starved of revenue.

By then, the term-limited DeSantis will be long gone, leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com