Will parks become pay to play if Florida cuts property taxes?

Tallahassee

As lawmakers work to put a proposal on this year’s ballot to further reduce taxes on homesteaded properties, some are raising concerns about one of the potential fallouts: access to neighborhood parks.

Local parks are often funded through property taxes. If that money goes away, or is significantly reduced, residents might have to pay more to use them.

Rep. Linda Chaney, a St. Pete Beach Republican, said Thursday that she sees an increase in park fees as a realistic outcome of reducing property taxes.

“Your pickleball that’s free now may end up being $35,” Chaney, chairwoman of the House Government Operations Subcommittee, told the Herald/Times. “These are going to be the choices governments have to make if voters pass this.”

Chaney voted for a House bill on Thursday in the State Affairs Committee that would reduce property taxes. But she told the Herald/Times she would rather study affordability overall to “solve as much of the problem as we can without creating more problems.”

“Floridians want the cost of living cut,” Chaney said. “And this is the challenge that the governor has issued for us… to cut the cost of living through property tax.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis has been pushing the Legislature since last year to get a proposal on the ballot in 2026 that would enable Floridians to vote to eliminate or drastically reduce their spending on property taxes. While his office and the Senate haven’t offered any bills on the matter, they’re both committed to getting a constitutional ballot measure before voters. The House is working on eight different proposals that are winding their way through the legislative process, most of which leave taxes that affect schools unchanged. The bills largely reduce property taxes on just homesteaded properties, but at least one also reduces them on non-homesteaded properties.

While the bills range in what they would do, they’re all “highly likely” to negatively impact parks, said Cragin Mosteller, a spokesperson for the Florida Association of Counties, which is against all of the House proposals to cut property taxes.

“No one is going to argue that public safety, fire safety, EMS and even roads are less important than parks,” Mosteller told the Herald/Times. “But parks are why we choose where we live.”

Using data reported to the state, Mosteller’s group did a deep dive into the impact eliminating property taxes would have on local governments, estimating it would cut their budgets on average by 35%.

When she was a state representative last year, Miami Republican Vicki Lopez co-chaired the House’s Select Committee on Property Taxes. She told reporters in May after one of the panel’s meetings that park costs in Miami-Dade could be an issue if voters choose to spend less money on property taxes.

“Now, the voter has to ask themselves: I want to maintain and secure fire and police, but do I want to pay this much money for parks?” Lopez said. “Think about that. Do you want to move to regional parks versus neighborhood parks?”

She added: “Again, decisions the local government has to start making.”

Lopez is now a Miami-Dade County Commissioner and, in that role, could be tasked with working through the dilemma she laid out last year. When reached on Thursday, she said she was unable to comment because she wasn’t feeling well.

Rep. Omar Blanco, a Miami Republican who voted in favor of a House bill to reduce property taxes on Thursday, said he had faith in Lopez and the rest of the commission to figure it out.

“Listen, you know very well that when they don’t cut the grass at the parks, they don’t maintain the parks, communities complain,” Blanco told the Herald/Times. He said that he believed the commission will “make sure that there is money allocated for the parks.”

If local governments can’t maintain their services, they can always increase the percentage they collect on taxable property known as the millage rate, Blanco said.

The Miami-Dade parks department relies on property taxes for about a third of its budget, but far more property taxes go into other agencies. Public safety is the top consumer of property taxes in the county budget, but the proposals in Tallahassee would largely prevent cuts to public safety, as well as schools.

Blanco, a Miami-Dade firefighter captain, said he voted in favor of the House proposal on Thursday because higher property values shouldn’t equate to higher property taxes. And while inflation has been high, leading to higher costs for local governments to purchase and maintain services, that’s “steadied now.”

“Gas has gone down significantly,” Blanco offered as an example of decreasing inflation.

While Republicans argue they do not want to defund public safety, Rep. Lindsay Cross, a St. Petersburg Democrat, told the Herald/Times that she believes defunding parks is related.

“Maybe you’re not maintaining your parks, or your shared spaces as much, which I think could lead to safety concerns, potentially crime,” Cross said. “I think we’ll have a degrading quality of life that will seep into all aspects of local communities.”

Miami Herald staff writer Douglas Hanks contributed to this report.