Talk of The Villages Florida - View Single Post - Will Texas beat Florida to the property tax idea?
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Old 08-29-2025, 01:24 PM
OrangeBlossomBaby OrangeBlossomBaby is offline
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We allocated 59 million for the Sumter County Sheriff’s office next year. They hired 11 new personnel. Some of this is redundant if you live in Wildwood or Lady Lake who already have their own police forces already. It’s the redundancy that needs to go away.

When this gets on the ballot, and it will, do you really see a majority saying they want to keep paying property taxes?
All those county police departments are paid for by property taxes. Do away with property taxes, and you have to come up with the money from somewhere else. Tourism taxes are already being paid, you'd have to double those, maybe even triple them. And of course that means fewer people able to afford to dine out, visit, rent hotels or cars in Floridas, go to campgrounds, short-term rent anywhere in the state including AirBnB or Villages Lifestyle Visits, which means less money back into the county coffers, which means less money to pay for all those extra police they need to make up for the loss of the property taxes that did pay for them.

Now, if they want to impose a MODEST income tax - perhaps a 2% tax on gross income over the first $40k or 50k/year, that might work (the first $40/50k wouldn't be subject to that income tax at all, allowing the low and low-middle income folks to keep more of their hard-earned money)