The only Manatee County tax “overspending” I see is caused by what amount to subsidies for new developments. Bringing in more dwelling units, especially units built in places and ways that make car trips necessary for even the smallest grocery run (because no small stores are within walking distance of 90% of the new BlandBoxes), increases not only the need for new roads but puts additional stress on existing ones.

I’m high up enough in the management chain at the company where I work to know how much health insurance costs have increased in the last decade, and I’m smart enough to know that Florida Counties are being hit as hard as private employers by these increases.

And real estate costs for new County-owned facilities needed to keep up with developers’ greed…. err…. I mean, “inevitable growth” …have gone crazy.

Etc.

I notice that the people complaining loudest about Florida property tax increases can afford two homes, and don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about people who are barely hanging onto one home or have no home at all.

I see two long-run solutions to our current property tax problems, both of which are related to our recent Real Estate Madness:

• The market will correct, and hopefully tax assessments will correct along with the market. The idea of $60,000 cracker houses selling for $150,000+ is purely stupid. We have a lot of cheap neighborhoods where people with modest incomes live because they can’t afford better. With Real Estate Madness, the only people who can now afford to buy houses in even our most modest neighborhoods are speculators and slumlords. My hope is that, as the Madness winds down, normal working people will be able to buy houses again, which will lead to better-maintained “workforce” housing and more watchful eyes trying to prevent crime. As a working Manatee County resident who lives in a non-gated community, I greet each drop in average real estate sales prices with a resounding cheer. I don’t want to own a million-dollar home surrounded by illegal aliens shoved 10-to-a-room in slumlord housing. I want to live in a neighborhood full of working homeowners. And it is going to take another 20% drop in real estate prices (essentially a rollback to pre-2002 levels) to make this happen.
• The “highest and best use” property tax assessment fiction must be eliminated. For one thing, who decided that the “highest and best use” of property near our waterfront is to litter it with view-blocking condom(inium)s? To me, the “highest and best use” of most waterfront property is as parkland, complete with food stands and little market stalls run by low-income residents who want to go into business for themselves. Redefining “highest and best use” would eliminate most of the insane tax load on modest commercial properties. Dollars are not the only measure of a property’s overall value. Sometimes that property’s value in a community sense must be considered. To my wife, a convenient hairdresser is more important — literally a higher and better use — than a condom development. I personally think one of the best possible uses for a piece of property is an automotive junkyard, especially one with a good stock of mid-90s Jeep Cherokee parts. I also think a nice, low-key bar with live music is lots better use of property (especially near me) than an office building full of lawyers and other parasites. But no one ever asks me to define the highest and best use for local properties. Perhaps they should, eh?

In the end, we must have some sort of property tax reform. But we need to be very careful how we do it. I’m sure all the cocaine-snorting trust-funders in Palm Beach and Miami Beach are ecstatic over the idea of paying no property taxes at all in return for higher sales taxes. The Republicans at the national level are already detaxing their (unearned) incomes. Now Florida Republicans are trying to remove their one remaining major tax burden.

Republican role model Leona Helmsley once said, “Only the little people pay taxes.”

That attitude must stop. Our country cannot tolerate it. We must accept the fact that taxes are part of the price we pay for civilization, and that when we let our richest and greediest citizens get away with paying less overall tax as a percentage of their incomes and wealth than the rest of us, we are setting ourselves up for major societal upheavals at some point in the future.

We need to stop the fiction that we can run government without income, and that decreasing taxes for our greediest citizens is in any way good for our society. Indeed, given the likely future consequences of our current tax policies, perhaps we should start thinking about impeaching elected office holders who believe Leona Helmsley’s famous line was a guide to America’s future instead of a rant by a criminal madwoman who — quite rightly — ended up in jail for the crime of (hold your breath) tax evasion.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 10:25 am and is filed under Bradenton/local, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.