A new tax break for Trump appointees
Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.
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This is Seeking Rents, a newsletter and podcast devoted to producing original journalism — and lifting up the work of others — about Florida politics, with an emphasis on the ways that big businesses and other special interests influence public policy in the state. Seeking Rents is produced by veteran investigative journalist Jason Garcia, and it is free to all. But please consider a voluntary paid subscription, if you can afford one, to help support our work. And check out our video channel, too.
Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.
Update (Monday, March 1): House Speaker Danny Perez (R-Miami) — whose chamber first proposed this tax break — was just nominated by Donald Trump to be Ambassador to Brazil.
A few lucky appointees of President Donald Trump just got a potentially lucrative gift from Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature.
The perk is tucked inside Florida’s latest “tax package,” a collection of tax breaks and fiscal policy changes that state lawmakers approved last week alongside the new state budget. It would allow a Florida resident who is appointed to a diplomatic or intelligence post in the federal government to rent out their home while they are stationed out of state without losing a suite of tax benefits that are supposed to be reserved solely for someone’s primary home.
They could, for instance, continue claiming a homestead exemption on the property even as they rent it to someone else, which generally reduces the taxable value of the property by $50,000.
More importantly, they could also maintain any tax savings they have accumulated under the “Save Our Homes” property tax cap, which prevents assessments on homestead properties from rising more than 3 percent a year. The Save Our Homes cap can deeply suppress the taxable value of a home over time, often shaving thousands of dollars a year off a homeowner’s annual property tax bill — sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars on very high-end homes.
Under Florida law, a homeowner is supposed to lose their homestead benefits if they choose to turn their home into a rental property. The only exception had been for members of the U.S. military who get deployed out of state.
But now there will be a carveout for political appointees in a presidential administration, too.
Obviously, this could only apply to a very small circle of people — among them, potentially, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and at least seven Floridians currently serving as ambassadors in the Trump administration.
The best-known of those ambassadors are probably Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former Fox News TV host, ex-wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and ex-fiancé of Donald Trump Jr.; Callista Gingrich, the wife of former Republican U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich who bought a $3 million home in Naples in 2021; and Mike Waltz, the former GOP member of Congress who accidently texted secret war plans to the editor of The Atlantic during a brief stint as President Trump’s National Security Adviser.
Trump made Guilfoyle his emissary to Greece and Gingrich his representative in Switzerland. Waltz is now the administration’s United Nations ambassador in New York.
But the list of Floridians-turned-Trump ambassadors also includes a pair of major campaign contributors in Peter Lamelas (Argentina), the founder of a chain of urgent-care clinics, and Benjamin Leon Jr. (Spain), who started a healthcare company treating Medicare recipients. It includes two Trump golfing buddies in John Arrigo (Portugal), a West Palm Beach car dealer, and Michel Issa (Lebanon), a banker and investor. And it includes Kevin Cabrera (Panama), a former Trump campaign aide who later won election to the Miami-Dade County Commission.
Most of them still seem to be claiming homesteads in Florida, according to a quick check of county property records — although it’s not clear who among them is, or wants to begin, renting their homes.
Trump also picked Orlando personal injury and political megadonor Dan Newlin to be his ambassador to Colombia. But Newlin’s nomination was returned by the U.S. Senate without a vote and Trump has yet to renominate him.
State Rep. Wyman Duggan, a Republican from Jacksonville who chairs the tax-writing committee in the Florida House of Representatives, said last week that this tax break isn’t meant for any one of these people. It’s meant for all of them.
“It’s not for any particular person,” Duggan said on the House floor, shortly before the tax package passed by an 88-11 vote in the House and a 29-6 vote in the Senate.
“But obviously this administration has seen fit to staff up, certainly their ambassadorial and other diplomatic ranks, with many Florida citizens, Florida residents,” Duggan added. “And so if they have homestead and they rent their property while they are deployed abroad on public service, they will keep that homestead exemption.”
This is the kind of tax break that typically skates by with minimal scrutiny in Tallahassee — a tax break in which the individual savings are substantial for the few people who qualify but the statewide costs are a pittance in the context of a nearly $115 billion budget.
State analysts who evaluated the proposal earlier this year loosely estimated that it could cost somewhere between $20,000 and $100,000 a year in lost property tax revenue, based on the assumption that between five and 10 people would qualify for it in any given year.
Contrast that little bit of lost revenue with the $750,000 in taxpayer money that Florida lawmakers decided to give to an education-and-propaganda company connected to Trump Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — or the $2.75 million of taxpayer money they are going to spend turning Palm Beach International Airport into yet another public shrine to Trump himself.
*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.
Ron DeSantis wants to campaign on the taxpayer’s dime again
DeSantis wants to spend $5.5 million promoting Florida property tax amendment (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
See also: Hidden consultants and hurried payments: Records reveal details of DeSantis’ campaign against abortion and marijuana amendments (Seeking Rents)
See also: What does DeSantis’ property tax exemption say? Even experts aren’t sure (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
Big story brewing
Florida on track to flunk Everglades pollution rules (Florida Trib)
See also: Politicians cited his research to discredit Gulf whale protections. He says that’s wrong (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
The ghost of Theodore Hayes
How an Ambitious Energy Giant Wielded Political Power in Florida (New York Times) ($)
See also: A GOP dirty tricks operation, exposed (Popular Information)
See also: Duke Energy trying to skirt new Florida data center law, consumer advocate says (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
See also: Defense AI data center eyeing Escambia. FloridaWest says nothing to fear (Pensacola News Journal) ($)
Billionaires at the trough
Bucs want $667m in renovation money from Tampa, could set up battle with Rays for tax dollars (Field of Schemes)
See also: DeSantis says state will support Hillsborough College rebuild in Rays stadium deal (WUSF)
See also: Bucs seek $1 billion Raymond James Stadium renovation with sun shade (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
See also: The ‘union avoidance’ industry is worth $1.7 billion. Florida union busters are cashing in. (Orlando Weekly)
How much of the repair costs will Jeff Bezos foist on Florida taxpayers?
Blue Origin faces months of delays after rocket explosion damages launch pad (Reuters) ($)
Perspectives
Florida AG calls surrogacy slavery — really, it’s a backdoor fetal personhood test (Miami Herald) ($)
Florida tax dollars wasted on Charlie Kirk settlement and clown show CFO (Orlando Sentinel) ($)
Sunshine Law Hacks, Foundation Finances, Campus Spoils and the Shadow Lobby (Higher Ed Heist)
Midnight Massacre of Manatee Higher Education (The Manatee Muse)
Red snapper fish fight highlights Florida governor’s disdain for science (Florida Phoenix)
Florida Average Joe can’t win in DeSantis property tax play (Treasure Coast Newspapers) ($)
One of the outrages reported in Seeking Rents that has stuck in my craw:
Little things mean a lot if you are incarcerated in a Florida prison. Dee has vetoed three years running a bill that passed the Legislature to authorize a free, 15-minute long-distance phone call monthly for inmates who behaved well. This is the sort of positive reinforcement that has worked pretty well with my 5th-grade grandson who has ADHD -- it helps focus his mind. And, since the money to pay for the calls would come from the inmate trust fund, why would Dee veto this bill three years in a row? (Apparently a similar bill this year was not even considered due to Dee's past truculence.)
I raised this issue on the Neighborhood online forum this past week and probably half of the responses were like Dee: Loss of liberty is not sufficient, we need to ignore the 8th Amendment and punish inmates in other ways. And, then, there was a gross inability to grasp the idea that the Legislature itself had created the trust fund, which consists of NO public money.
A small thing in the greater scheme of life for me to obsess about, no doubt, but such cruelty seems to be a large part of the American character today. We no longer root for the underdog, but instead line up to punch down on them.
I learned a couple of things from today's column. First I learned that US military personnel have been getting some breaks on property they own in Florida. Then I learned that the Trump administration wants to extend these benefits to political-appointee ambassadors.
I was a career U.S. Foreign Service Officer (FSO) for nearly 30 years and for 10 of those years I owned property in Florida, where I'd grown up and to which I planned to retire. Many states extend to Foreign Service personnel the same courtesies they extend to military personnel. Evidently, Florida doesn't.
It would be (yet another) slap in the face of Foreign Service officers to extend to political appointees a benefit that isn't given to career officers. Imagine, if you will, a career FSO who served in difficult and/or dangerous posts as, say, an Ambassador being denied a benefit granted to political appointees serving in Athens, Bern, or NYC. Where is the justice in that?