Column

Tax rule: Heads, we win; tails, you lose

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published July 12, 2007

Just want to make sure I grasp this.

When your home's market value goes up, the government raises its taxable value, too.

True, the government can't raise that taxable value by more than 3 percent a year, under Florida's "Save Our Homes" cap.

But that's still an increase.

On the other hand, it turns out that even when your home's value goes down ...

The government still raises your taxable value each year.

That's right.

The market goes up - your taxable value goes up.

The market goes down -your taxable value goes up anyway.

As long as your home's market value is higher than its taxable value under Save Our Homes, the government says that it can (and will) raise that taxable value each year.

Even if the market value has gone down.

As my colleague Alex Leary reported on Wednesday, this situation faces more than 100,000 Tampa Bay area homeowners, and many more across the state.

This is a wonderful demonstration of the way that government thinks.

To you and me, the Save Our Homes rule is kind of a "speed limit" on the government. It's a cap on how much we can be taxed.

But to the government, the Save Our Homes cap represents how much of our money it is entitled to.

Under that way of thinking, Save Our Homes becomes a floor, not a ceiling.

So in 1995, then-Gov. Lawton Chiles and the state Cabinet passed something called the "recapture" rule.

It says the government will raise taxable values by the maximum each year, no matter what has happened to property values.

There are two opposing ways to look at this.

Here's the government's way:

"Look here, you freeloader. You're already getting a tax break under Save Our Homes. But Save Our Homes says we can go up by a certain amount each year, and we are, by gum, gonna do that."

And here's the taxpayers' way of looking at it:

"Look, if my value has gone down, it has gone down. You shouldn't be able to say that only the market value goes down, while you play games with the taxable value."

I like the second way of looking at it better. In fact, I think there is a nice constitutional principle here, a lawsuit waiting to happen.

After all, when the voters of Florida put Save Our Homes into our state Constitution in 1992, they did it precisely to protect themselves against higher taxable values.

The idea that the government could just pass a rule, declaring that it could use Save Our Homes as a club to raise taxable values, was not part of the deal.

* * *

My Tuesday column was about the list of state legislators who filed to attend conventions in Boston and Philadelphia.

A news story about the list had already quoted state Rep. John Legg, R-Port Richey, as saying he will not use tax dollars to take the trip after all. I included Legg's name in my column without pointing out his quote, and am happy to do it now.

Meanwhile, state Rep. Janet Long, D-Seminole, tells me that although her name was on the list, she had already decided not to use tax dollars to go, given the state budget crunch. She notified the House of that on Tuesday.

[Last modified July 12, 2007, 01:22:02]