Florida Republican: Climate Change Will Wreck Property Values, So Let's Cut Taxes Now
It's not like Miami-Dade will need revenue to address climate damage.
As climate change continues to worsen, Florida is expected to be among the states hit hardest by damage from rising seas and more intense hurricanes. Insurers are increasingly refusing to write new policies in Florida or getting out of the market altogether, because even if the state’s elected Republican leaders refuse to acknowledge climate change, actuaries sure as hell do.
In what appears to be a first of its kind proposal, or at least bee in the bonnet, the recently elected Republican property appraiser (that’s the tax assessor’s official title there we guess) for Miami-Dade County has a nifty idea to help deal with climate change in the Sunshine and King Tide State. Tomás Regalado, who served as Miami’s mayor from 2009 to 2017, isn’t about to suggest something all radically lefty like reducing greenhouse emissions or building codes requiring better resilience — hey, not the property appraiser’s job! Instead, he says the county should get ahead of the crisis by giving property owners a great big break on their property taxes thereby starving the county of funds, although of course that’s not how Regalado put it.
At his swearing-in ceremony Monday, Regalado said, “When we look to consider the future value of a property, we should also start considering location, climate change, insurance.”
As we prepare to post this story, we have not seen word of any repercussions coming to Regalado for speaking the banned words. To be fair, it’s still legal to say “climate change” in Florida, just not to use the term in state law, or to take it into account in setting state energy policy. He’s probably fine.
The appraiser’s office sets values for some 930,000 properties annually, so reducing their appraised value in advance of damage from climate change would amount to what the Miami Herald described as a “tax break for homeowners in vulnerable areas across Miami-Dade.”
Regalado presented his approach as a shift from the current practice of basing values on the “highest and best” use of a property, meaning what could be built there under existing zoning rules. He offered no details on how the shift would unfold during the four-year term he won in the November election, replacing fellow Republican Pedro Garcia, who retired.
Amusingly — or ominously, we’ll let you decide — the Herald story neglected to mention that such a move could have a few entirely foreseen side effects like greatly reducing county revenue. To be fair, we are not locals or experts on Florida government, so perhaps Miami-Dade doesn’t actually need money to fund schools, police, jails, infrastructure, or other stuff that county governments do.
To say nothing (which is what the Herald did) of the need to make infrastructure more resilient or to have funding for the rescue crews that will be saving folks’ lives once their less-taxed homes are inundated or blown away.
We kept waiting for that shoe to drop, but it never came up. The Herald even interviewed Regalado for the story, but doesn’t appear to have touched on the tax revenue side of things. But there was this notable stenography:
Asked why current market values wouldn’t already factor in climate change, Regalado said in an interview that he’s not sure that’s the case.
“We hope that it will, but sometimes we get off track,” said Regalado, a longtime radio and television broadcaster. “We have to be proactive.”
A brief video story by the Herald’s “news partner” CBS Miami mostly repeated bits of the Herald story verbatim while showing B-roll footage of nice houses and neighborhoods, plus a jarring first few seconds of video left over from a previous story about a local home invasion and assault.
While it didn’t make a big deal about the matter, the TV story did at least end with a quick note that “Property tax revenues, by the way, are the primary source of revenue for Miami-Dade government, including police and schools.” Better than nothing, we suppose.
We’re definitely going to keep an eye on this sort of thing, because wouldn’t it be a neat trick by Republicans in other red states to slash local government funding without actually passing a tax cut in the state legislature, city council, or county board of supervisors? A really ambitious property appraiser could even look at long-range forecasts and decide that homes and businesses should be assessed at only a fraction of their current value, because in a few decades they’ll be uninsurable.
If he actually manages this, Regalado’s scheme would force budget cuts that nobody in Miami-Dade actually voted for — not voters, not the actual elected officials who set tax rates. Then Republicans would achieve their dream of government small enough to drown in a bathtub, or in a downtown Miami street during a king tide.
Such tricksy people, these elected Republicans!
One might be tempted to think it’s pretty noteworthy that an elected Republican in Florida is saying climate change is real and will have negative effects, but don’t go signing Mr. Regalado up for any climate or energy transition newsletters just yet. It’s entirely likely he’s simply using the special Florida meaning of climate change, in which there’s definitely sea level rise and increasingly wet, rapidly forming hurricanes, but you don’t have to say what’s causing them.
That’s been Ron DeSantis’s entire schtick, of course: He has several times, to his partial credit, guided legislation through the Florida Lege that provides funding to help build up Florida’s infrastructure to deal with sea level rise and flooding. He just refuses to say what might be causing that, because as he put it in 2021 when asked about one such bill,
“What I found is, people, when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways. We’re not doing any left-wing stuff. What we’re doing, though, is just reacting to the fact that, OK, we’re a flood-prone state, we do have storms.”
And it all just happens somehow, so instead of getting all worked up about why, which might have uncomfortable implications for some major donors, let’s just prepare for some of the problems by building roads higher.
And of course, with tax cuts.
[Miami Herald / (reprint at Yahoo)]
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I kinda happen to think that property tax on people’s primary residence is a fairly bullshit way to raise revenue. (Hello progressive income taxation, it’s nice to see your equitable fine ass.)
And I also think the way to deal with funding to address climate change is to tax the shit out of the industries causing it while offering incentives to invest in green energy. Taking the revenue raised to pay for mitigation efforts (hello public transportation, I love you) and reducing the upfront cost to consumers to green up end user energy consumption by paying for part or all (income based sliding scale) of home solar and wind generation. No more of the bullshit tax breaks after the fact for individuals. Most cannot afford the initial outlay.
And yes. I am some kind of socialist.
“The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers. ”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism