Clueless? Join the crowd
If you can make any gestalt sense out of the proposed property tax
reform constitutional amendment that appears on the January 29 ballot,
you're doing better than most journalists and editorial writers around the
state.
News reports over the past few months have indicated that
the monkeys with typewriters in Tallahassee that churned this mess out
during the 2007 legislative sessions are equally clueless when trying to
explain their verbose creation. This gives writers an advantage here over
elected officials: journalists can usually understand what they themselves
have written, even if nobody else can.
The proposed amendment does give the option of Homestead
Exemption portability, i.e., the idea that the tax saving Homestead
Exemption benefit that you have built up over the years by living in the
same place can be transferred (in part) to the next home that you buy and
move into. But even that portability comes with a few requisite (and scary) tag-along
rider phrases
that are so confusing as to make even the lawmakers who wrote this thing
scratch their heads when it comes to explaining some of the possible
unintended consequences.
Tryon, Martin agree... and the world did not end
Big indicators that you are not alone in your confusion (and disdain for a
potential law that could foster such confusion) came most recently from two
unlikely sources: a pro-development editorial department head for the Sarasota
Herald-Tribune and a recently elected control-growth public official.
Tom Tryon of the Herald-Trib, a normally
pro-development writer, skewered the proposed constitutional amendment in no
uncertain terms due to the uncertain terms in the ballot proposal, this in
a column published on January 13. The newly elected Mayor of Venice, Ed
Martin (elected on a control growth platform) gave a link to Tryon's
editorial
on Martin's blog, giving Tryon's editorial a thumbs up.
These are two very intelligent men who usually agree
on... nothing.
The pair are far from alone in blasting at this
proposed amendment: news and editorial writers from around the state have
echoed the exact same fears about this proposed law with occasional
additional flashes of insight into Murphy's Law and the concept of
unintended consequences:
Property tax amendment sows different seeds
-- Naples News, 01/13/08
Florida property tax proposal is
not the tax relief we were promised
-- Orlando Sun-Sentinal, 01/16/08
Florida mayors take a stand against property tax amendment
-- WINKnews.com, 01/11/08
Property tax amendment could raise rates
-- Tampa Tribune, 01/10/08
Property tax relief may bring other pains
-- Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 01/16/08
What seems to be particularly upsetting to writers around the
state is the bizarre calendar formula that defines when and how the
so-called benefits of this law would kick into effect, a mess so
self-contradictory that Tallahassee lawmakers have yet to explain their
legislative intent in any remotely intelligent way. That means one thing --
if we pass this baby into law, it'll be tied up in the courts for years to
come until either the Florida Supreme Court makes some kind of sense out of
it or it ends up getting repealed by a subsequent constitutional amendment.
Unexpected ways
As other editorial writers have noted repeatedly, we can save ourselves the
grief of going through part of that mess by voting no. Oh, we'll still have
to craft yet another proposed constitutional amendment on property tax
reform, but we'll have to do that no matter how the vote on this sucker
turns out.
In the meantime, of course, you will be screwed if
this passes into law because... well, that's what clueless lawmakers and
badly written laws do to voters and taxpayers. They screw you, sometimes
quite unintentionally, usually in
unexpected ways. Worse: they often defend their mistakes to their deaths,
making reform doubly difficult.
This law is, by all accounts, full of (ahem)
unexpected ways.
Venice Florida! dot com urges you to vote NO on the
proposed property tax reform amendment.
