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Originally Posted by kappy
At the July 13, 2021 BOCC budget workshop, the proposed budget for the County showed a rolled-back rate of 3%. However, the budget did not include any revenue for the anticipated $229.5M increase in sales tax from Senate Bill 50. This law requires out-of-state retailers with no physical presence in Florida, to collect Florida sales tax. The Sumter County revenue from this $229.5M could be 2 million or more. Why wasn’t that included in the budget? Today’s Daily Sun front page headlines under Florida News reads, “Online Retailers, Seminole Tribe Contribute To Revenue Boost.”
Another item not considered is the estimated $25M for Sumter County from the American Rescue Plan Act. Although the U. S. Treasury has not completed its rules for the uses of the funding, they should include one time purchases of fire trucks and equipment and some other expenditures included in the budget. Yet no receipts are included in the budget proposal.
Additionally, the budget proposal does not include all the additional revenues received in impact fees this year to date. If all these items were included in the final budget, I believe that the rolled-back rate would be 10% or more. That rate would begin to offset the outrageous 25% tax increase imposed upon all County residents in 2019 and show that the three new Commissioners are keeping their campaign promise to roll back the increase that was due to the development below Rt. 44.
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The failure of the county commissioners extends beyond impact fees. The Villages developer sells roughly 200 new homes a month. Using basic data from the tax rates web page this results in approximately $1500 on a home valued at 184K. The median home price in The Villages is 318K that translates to $2600 per year for each home. The average number of new homes sold each year is slightly over 200 per month. This works out to be over 6 million dollars per year in new tax revenue. This compounded over the years since the tax increase now is effectively 18 million a year in new revenue from just new homes sales. Each new home owner pays a bond to the county for the infrastructure to build the homes in an area. We haven't added revenue from new commercial property. Instead of focusing on the impact fee issue (
even though the commissioners can increase impact fees beyond the limits in the law by meeting criteria) we should be pressing the commissioners on how they are using the new revenue.