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.
