Tallahassee wants total power to decide who pays taxes in Florida — and who gets a free ride

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Jun 07, 2026

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.

Crown Castle Inc. is one of those Fortune 500 companies that you probably never think about, unless you happen to look down while stepping across one of its manhole covers.

Based in Houston, the company is in the business of communications infrastructure. It owns, operates and leases more than 40,000 cell towers and roughly 90,000 route miles of fiber optic cable across the United States.

The company also has a team of lobbyists on call in Tallahassee. And a few years ago — after Crown Castle presumably grew tired of paying cities and counties to put its equipment in publicly owned right-of-way — those lobbyists had Florida lawmakers pass a state law that essentially exempted the company from local right-of-way fees.

This is a familiar story in Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature. ADT persuaded legislators to cap local government fees on home alarm installations. Uber convinced them to kill city and county taxes on ride-share companies. The farm lobby got lawmakers to carve agricultural property out of special assessments that fund some fire departments.

It happens all the time with major sources of local revenue, too.

Developers and homebuilders have pushed a parade of bills through Tallahassee making it harder for local governments to charge impact fees on new construction. Thanks to the lobbying by companies like Charter Communications, cities and counties have been forbidden from raising taxes on telecom services for the last three years — and they won’t be able to touch those particular taxes for another five years, at least. The Florida Chamber of Commerce is lobbying to eliminate local business taxes entirely.

There’s a reason special interests can use state lawmakers in Tallahassee to cut, distort, and even undo taxes or fees that are ostensibly levied by locally elected city councils and county commissions. It’s because the state Constitution gives the Legislature ultimate authority over all taxes in Florida.

All taxes, that is, except one.

Property taxes are the only tax that politicians in Tallahassee can’t touch, at least not directly. The power to tax land, building and equipment is reserved exclusively to local governments. That’s why property taxes are, by far, the biggest revenue source for cities, counties and towns across Florida.

Article VII, Section 1 of the Florida Constitution.

It’s also why the enormous property tax cut that the Legislature just voted to place on the November ballot is so dangerous.

The proposed constitutional amendment has two main parts. It would dramatically increase a direct tax break for primary homeowners — basically quintupling the state’s “homestead exemption” from $50,000 to $250,000. The amount of the exemption would then continue to grow over time.

But it would also tighten an annual tax cap on all other property owners, so that assessments on second homes and commercial property could grow no more than 5 percent a year — down from 10 percent annually right now.

GOP leaders in the Florida Capitol rushed this plan through Legislature so fast — they passed it in a special session last week that ended barely 24 hours after it began — that state economists haven’t even had a chance to evaluate it yet.

The state House vote on the proposed property tax cut.

But we know that the supersized exemption on homestead property would rip an immediate hole in local government budgets — costing them somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 percent of their current property tax collections. And the 5 percent assessment cap would slowly starve them even further, as it suppresses the taxable value of all other property over time.

This will, inevitably, require cities and counties to scale back some of the services they provide — police, fire, roads, parks, libraries, animal shelters, after-school programs, and so much more. But it will also force them to find different taxes to raise and fees to impose in order to offset at least some of the lost property tax revenue.

After all, there are only so many services a community can cut before it begins to badly degrade the quality of life for local residents.

The Senate vote on the proposed property tax cut.

The problem is that your mayors, city councilors and county commissioners won’t ever have the last word on these alternative taxes and fees. Every time a company or industry decides that it would rather not pay, they can send a few lobbyists to the Florida Capitol — and drop a few hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions on members of the Florida Legislature — to buy themselves a carveout.

This proposed property tax cut would give substantial upfront savings to Florida homeowners, should 60 percent of voters approve it in November.

But it would also give politicians in Tallahassee almost absolute power to decide who pays taxes in Florida going forward — and who gets a free ride.

Seeking Rents + Welcome to Florida in Jacksonville

Before we get to the weekly headlines, a quick reminder that Seeking Rents and Welcome to Florida are teaming up this week for another live podcasting event and meetup in Jacksonville.

We’ll be at Happy Medium Books Café on Friday evening from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm.

The format will be similar to the two live events we hosted last month in St. Petersburg and Winter Park. Craig Pittman, Chadd Charland and I will spend some time discussing the role of independent media, our careers in journalism, and how state government too often works against citizens. An audience question-and-answer session will follow.

Capacity is limited, but we’ve opened some additional slots due to popular demand. Register in advance here. Admission is free.

Hope to see you there!

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

Tallahassee wants total control over local government. If, God forbid, this passes, local governments will need to ask permission, provide justification to hopefully get a "grant" from Tallahassee from the taxes paid by its own local constituents. If the Governor likes the proposal, your local project will get funded. If he doesn't, well then more money for a local project that he feels ought to be taking place somewhere else that some local is willing to carry the ball - for a price, of course.

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