Editor's note: This story is one segment in "Power Play": A series of special reports by the Florida Trident examining the push to reduce or eliminate property taxes in Florida.
Local government officials statewide are wary of plans by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state Legislature to slash or abolish homestead property taxes, but one group of counties is particularly worried.
They are Florida’s “fiscally constrained” counties: 29 mostly rural counties with small populations, few industries and lots of agricultural or conservation land — and therefore small tax bases.
That means those counties depend more heavily on taxes on homestead property, the primary residence of the owner.
That’s the kind of property taxes DeSantis wants to abolish.
DeSantis believes having to pay property taxes on your home means you don’t really own it – you’re “just renting it from the government,” he said in his 2025 State of the State address.
Chris Doolin, a Tallahassee lobbyist who represents an association of small Florida counties, including the fiscally constrained counties, disagrees.
“You have no mortgage on your house with the state or local government,” he said. The taxes “pay for services, which are determined through a budget process.”
“Fiscally constrained counties” are defined in Florida law as those where 1 mill of property tax — $1 tax on every $1,000 worth of property — produces $5 million or less in revenue.
By comparison, 1 mill produced $290 million in Palm Beach County in 2023, according to figures from the Florida Association of Counties (FAC).
In those smaller counties, Doolin said, “The major expense is the sheriff’s office, then the constitutional offices” — elections supervisor, clerk of court, tax collector, property appraiser.
After that, he said, if homestead taxes were abolished, “In some of these counties there would be very little left for roadwork, emergency services, fire protection, libraries, parks” or cultural efforts such as historic preservation and festivals.
Statewide, taxes on homesteads are a bit more than a third of all property taxes — about $19 billion of $55 billion.
But in several of the fiscally constrained counties, homestead taxes are 40 percent or more.
Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park in physically-constrained Wakulla County, Florida.
In Wakulla County, one of the fiscally-constrained counties, slightly more than half its property tax revenue in 2024 came from homesteads.
By comparison, in Miami-Dade County, which has the state’s largest tax base, only 27 percent of the county’s property tax revenue came from homesteads, FAC figures show.
In Miami-Dade, spending on public safety is about one sixth of all county expenditures, while in Wakulla it’s close to a third.
In Jefferson, another fiscally constrained county, public safety is half of all county expenditures.
Florida law limits county tax rates to 10 mills without a referendum.
Eliminating homestead taxes, said Wakulla County Commissioner Ralph Thomas, a Republican, “would not be a matter of just tightening our belt. This won’t be trimming the fat, this will be a dismemberment of vital services that are wanted and needed by our public.”
But several of the fiscally constrained counties — Glades, Holmes, Liberty, Madison and Putnam — are already at or close to that limit.
In Okeechobee County, 35 percent of the land area has conservation easements, which lower property taxes, said county Commissioner Terry Burroughs.
“We have lots of land, but we don’t have a lot of industrial or commercial properties to increase the non-homestead part of it,” Burroughs said.
Okeechobee County Commissioner Terry Burroughs.
.Burroughs noted the counties face substantial expenses as a result of state mandates.
The amounts counties must contribute to Medicaid and to the state retirement system are determined by the Florida Legislature, for example, and have gone up significantly in recent years, he said.
DeSantis has vowed that if homestead taxes are abolished, the state will make up the lost revenue for the fiscally constrained counties.
He said the amount would be negligible in the state’s budget — $117 billion in 2025-26 — calling it “budget dust” in an appearance in October at the Bay County Sheriff’s Office, as reported by Florida Politics.
But former Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes of St. Petersburg questioned that confident prediction, noting that the state Office of Economic and Demographic Research has predicted state budget deficits beginning in 2027.
Brandes said the idea “would have to turn (local governments) into state-dependent entities,” but noted that DeSantis will be out of office by the time the changes take effect. Brandes now runs a non-profit think tank, the Florida Public Policy Project.
DeSantis, meanwhile, hasn’t yet presented a detailed proposal for his goal of abolishing homestead taxes, or for how the state would go about offsetting the losses in the fiscally constrained counties.
“I haven’t seen any details of how that would work,” said Thomas of Wakulla County.
“Are we going to have to go lobby the Legislature for what we need, instead of our citizens lobbying their own local elected officials? I see it as very cumbersome, very difficult.”
He questioned whether legislators, who will see their own home counties’ budgets being cut, will feel generous toward other counties asking for money.
The fiscally constrained counties tend to be Republican-dominated — Wakulla and Okeechobee county commissioners, for example, are all Republicans.
But that didn’t stop county officials from criticizing DeSantis’ proposal.
“We don’t want to be beholden to the Legislature … being forced to go and try to extract money from the state each year,” said Burroughs of Okeechobee.
He said DeSantis’ proposal “is a bad idea because he has no plan as to how to do it.”
“It’s a political idea instead of a proposal with facts and figures behind it,” he said.
Meanwhile, he said, DeSantis’ Florida DOGE effort — an initiative akin to President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency — is “trying to incite the general public with how much waste there is in these counties.”
“This is all political,” Burroughs said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with making things better for our taxpayers.”
About the author: William March has written about politics in the Tampa Bay area for the past 40 years. He has worked for newspapers in his native North Carolina and for the Tampa Tribune, the Tampa Bay Times and the Associated Press in Florida.
The Florida Trident is an investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was created and first published in 2022 by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a non-profit organization that facilitates local investigative reporting across the state. About the author: William March has written about politics in the Tampa Bay area for the past 40 years. He has worked for newspapers in his native North Carolina and for the Tampa Tribune, the Tampa Bay Times and the Associated Press in Florida.
