Editor's note: This story was originally published by The Florida Trib.
BOWLING GREEN, Fla. — On a recent early morning in the small town of Bowling Green, cows grazed in a pasture shrouded in mist and dotted with palm trees, as a group of regulars gathered at the local diner and ruminated on whether the century-old town can survive what may be in store with this year’s elections.
When Floridians go to the polls in November to decide whether to cut themselves a break on property taxes, they may well be deciding to cut the lifeline of one of the state’s endangered species: its small towns.
Florida has more than 400 municipalities, most of which are home to fewer than 15,000 people. For generations, these communities have formed the bedrock of American democracy, pooling their collective resources to build fire stations, field little league baseball teams, and improve the quality of life of their residents. Through local zoning and community organizing, they’ve fought to slow the seemingly endless march of sprawling subdivisions and extractive industries that have drained cypress swamps, chewed up farmlands, and swallowed beaches from the Keys to the Panhandle.
But the government closest to the people is now facing what some have called the greatest attack on local control in Florida in half a century – brought on by what state lawmakers say is wasteful spending by local officials, even as the state shells out a $2 million golden parachute to an interim university president and after it burned more than $1 million a day on the detention facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
If 60% of voters approve the proposed constitutional amendment to raise the floor on taxing Floridians’ primary residences, known as the homestead exemption, to $250,000, it could save individual homeowners hundreds or even thousands of dollars – and effectively erase much of the tax base in communities that have vanishingly few ways to recoup the funds that help keep police on patrol, garbage trucks on the street and water flowing out of the tap.
“I don’t know if we can survive that,” said Marc McKinney, a retired federal worker who moved to Bowling Green from Orlando with his wife, who grew up in the small town.
“We need that money.”
A one stoplight town
Bowling Green is far from the beachfront condos, tech magnates and Russian oligarchs who have helped drive up the state’s sky-high property valuations and the dizzying tax revenues that followed. An hour and a half southeast of Tampa, it is surrounded by the ranch lands, phosphate mines and disappearing citrus groves of rural Hardee County, which is consistently ranked as one of the poorest in Florida. Twenty-five percent of residents live below the poverty line, more than double the state average. More than 77% of voters there chose Donald Trump in 2024.
The town is home to about 2,400 people, roughly 58% of whom are Hispanic, and it has many of the hallmarks of any American town. There’s a diner, a couple of gas stations, three public parks, the drab gray city hall, a few taco stands, a dollar store, and a single stoplight.
Bowling Green is also haunted by tell-tale signs that its best days may be behind it. There’s the shuttered train depot, the abandoned hotel, the elementary school that the county closed a year ago, and many homes with tarped roofs and boarded-up windows. More than half of its children are living in poverty.
The city is one of the few of its size in Florida to still have its own police department, with seven officers. Consistent with municipalities across the state, public safety is one of the largest expenses in the city’s $4.4 million budget. It’s a service the community wants and is willing to pay for, argues Mayor Sam Fite, who earns $4,800 a year in his post. He said his town is a far cry from the rich, coastal communities with flush city budgets – and shouldn’t be punished for the excesses of others.
“This city is not one of the offenders that’s causing this property tax issue,” Fite said.
“Correct the offenders,” he added.
Far from the tourists and the traffic, Fite says Bowling Green provides its residents with the basics: drinking water, wastewater treatment, paved streets, a few public parks, and the use of its sole garbage truck – all expenses that local officials are poring over as the November property tax vote looms.
Despite its remote location, Bowling Green has benefited from increasing home values in recent years, even as the city has reduced its millage rate. It levied more than $555,000 in ad valorem taxes this year, compared to just over $300,000 in 2020.
For many residents, it’s home – the place where people know each other’s stories and each other’s cousins. The place where the same group of guys gathers for breakfast at the same table every morning at Gloria’s Restaurant. The place where their families have put down roots for three or four or even five generations.
For others, it’s the place they can’t afford to leave.
Roseangely Baque sees the community’s needs up close as director of the child development center run by the Redlands Christian Migrant Association on the northside of town. Funded by the federal Head Start program, the center serves kids from infancy up to age 5, and is free to qualifying families living below the federal poverty line, which amounts to an income of $27,320 a year for a family of three.
“I have a family that the dad was deported,” Baque said. “I also have some homeless families.”
Roseangely Baque, program director at the Redlands Christian Migrant Association child development center in Bowling Green, poses for a portrait at the daycare center on Tuesday, June 30, 2026 in Bowling Green, Florida.
Baque and her staff ensure the 61 children in their care receive developmentally appropriate bilingual instruction, plus two meals and a snack each day, and the opportunity to thrive in the center’s brightly colored classrooms and shady playground – so long as there are enough young families in the community to keep the doors open.
China Crespo, who has run a hair salon on Main Street for more than two decades, has watched families in the town come and go, businesses open and close, buildings crumble and fall.
“I really don’t know how these people make it,” Crespo said.
“I don’t know what’s going to become of Bowling Green,” she added. “It’s up in the air right now.”
Who controls the money makes the rules
Across the state, the cost of living has skyrocketed in recent years, ranking as the number one issue for Florida voters in poll after poll. Nearly half of Florida households don’t make enough money to cover their basic needs, according to an analysis by the United Way.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, housing prices soared nationwide, far out-pacing inflation, and many local governments have reaped the windfall – not by raising tax rates, but simply collecting larger revenues on properties whose values shot up. And voters have caught on.
For months, term-limited Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been trumpeting his preferred fix – wiping out property taxes – ahead of what is widely expected to be his second run for president in 2028.
With the high-stakes 2026 midterm elections looming, the Republican-dominated state Legislature took up DeSantis’ call and hustled the property tax proposal through in a special session. Lawmakers didn’t wait for a comprehensive fiscal analysis to see how much the measure would cost, even as mayors and first responders flocked to Tallahassee to urge them to rethink the plan.
“There is no greater tragedy than knowing that a life could’ve been saved by us getting there just a few moments sooner,” said Trip Barrs, board president of the Florida Fire Chiefs’ Association.
“My hope for you is that you won’t ever have to experience the burden that we do when we are unable to meet our community’s needs on their worst day,” he told state lawmakers.
After just two days of deliberation, lawmakers passed the tax measure largely along party lines, with no plan for how to cover the cost of the public services that rely on those local taxes. In doing so, lawmakers proposed that Florida take a sledgehammer to one of the cornerstones of local government. They may not win a popularity contest, but property taxes are a building block of human society, dating back to ancient Egypt. Thousands of years later, local governments continue to count on property taxes, economists say, because they remain the most reliable and stable source of revenue.
If approved by voters, the one-size-fits-all proposal would raise Florida’s homestead exemption from the current $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027 and to $250,000 in 2028, regardless of household income, age of the homeowners, or the median property value in a given locality. Homeowners would still have to pay school taxes, which were carved out of the plan.
Big metros and wealthy suburbs would still be able to collect tax revenue on high-value homes, or, paradoxically, raise millage rates on the remaining homeowners. But in Bowling Green, 98% of homesteaded properties fall below the $250,000 threshold – meaning the measure would effectively eliminate non-school property taxes on homesteads, knocking out a quarter of the town’s total taxable value.
Current county estimates show that just 20 homesteaded properties in Bowling Green would remain on the tax rolls, their owners obliged to pay the full share for the entire town.
Policy analysts at the Tax Foundation have warned Florida’s measure would shift tax burdens in “highly distortionary ways” and that “substantial sales tax increases” would “almost certainly be needed,” leaving the state’s tax code “far less stable and competitive.” Economists expect taxes on businesses and non-homesteaded properties to rise, with higher costs passed down to renters, while increases in sales taxes would disproportionately impact the poor. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has called Florida’s proposal a “mistake.”
One of 20 homes in Bowling Green worth more than the proposed $250,000 homestead exemption is shown on Tuesday, June 30, 2026 in Bowling Green, Florida.
The measure, if passed, is expected to cost cities and counties roughly $5 billion in the first year, more than $8 billion in the second year, and nearly $12 billion a year by 2031, according to an analysis by state economists that was released after lawmakers had already signed off on the plan. New numbers released just this past week show Bowling Green’s budget would lose $128,443 in the first year of implementation while the city of Jacksonville would forgo more than $180 million, a number that would double by 2031-32.
“It’s a power grab,” said Fite, aimed at “getting more centralized government and central control,” in Tallahassee.
The tax proposal comes as DeSantis and state lawmakers have increasingly tightened their grip on local government, dictating what teachers can say in the classroom, which elected state attorneys get to stay in office, which ships must be allowed to call at local ports, and even how cities can paint their crosswalks.
Though no cheerleader for high taxes, Fite fundamentally believes local officials are better equipped to address the needs of their town. If his neighbors don’t like the job he’s doing, they can vote him out.
More than 100 cities across the state would see at least 90% of their homesteaded taxable value taken off the tax rolls, because so many of their properties are assessed at less than $250,000, according to an analysis by the Florida League of Cities.
Beige colored buildings on an empty street
Unlike many larger communities, towns like Bowling Green don’t have a broad commercial base to recoup the lost revenues through higher sales taxes. Raising the millage on the two dozen remaining homesteaded properties hardly seems sustainable. Many others in town can scarcely afford to pay higher fees for government services.
What’s left is streamlining and cutting government operations — or going to Tallahassee to beg for money, in what some fear will pave the way for the dissolution of their community.
“When you can’t support yourself, we all know then you don’t really get to make the rules anymore. In life and in politics,” said Christa Wolfe, a fourth-generation resident of Bowling Green.
‘You gotta figure out a way to fund it’
Of course, there are many in Hardee County and across the state who would love a break on their property taxes and who question the spending of even the smallest governments. And there are those who are perhaps too harried to differentiate between decisions coming down from the feds or Tallahassee and ones being made at city hall.
On a recent morning in Bowling Green, the old-timers who gathered at the local diner served as an informal focus group. Among them were Jimmy Parker, an octogenarian in a cowboy hat whose farming family ran the now-shuttered produce packing house in town, Ron Herron, a retired public school educator and administrator, and Marc McKinney, the retiree whose wife pulled them back to her hometown.
A group of regulars eats breakfast at Gloria’s Restaurant on Tuesday, June 30, 2026 in Bowling Green, Florida.
“Anytime you tell somebody they’re gonna get a little tax break,” Parker said, “they’re gonna vote for it. And they don’t even know what it is.”
Local governments will “figure out a way” to make it work, Parker said, “They always do.”
Herron likes the sound of cutting property taxes – though he sees the value of the public paying for the services they rely on, from paved roads to public schools.
“Do you want to drive on dirt roads?” Herron said, “or do you want to drive on nice roads?”
“But you gotta figure out a way to fund it,” he added.
McKinney questioned why lawmakers didn’t narrow the deduction to benefit people who really need it, such as young families and struggling seniors.
“Going as far as they are, if they really do go that far, I personally don’t think that’s wise,” McKinney said. “That’s an awful big deduction, and that’s an awful big hit,” to the tax base.
The beginning of the end
In a state full of tourists and transients, Christa Wolfe is one of the few Floridians who can say they still live on the family farm.
Wolfe is raising her three kids in the house where she herself grew up, on land first settled by her great-grandparents around the turn of the 20th century. Her kids are now the fifth generation on that land, helping grow tomatoes, corn, and field peas, and playing in the same bends of the creek that their granddad loved when he was little. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
Wolfe’s family could certainly use the extra money the proposal promises, but she doesn’t want it. She wants the public services she helps pay for – funded by local taxes collected by local officials and spent on local priorities.
Christa Wolfe poses for a portrait on her family’s farm on Tuesday, June 30, 2026 in Bowling Green, Florida.
She remembers the days when people dumped their trash around the county or burned it in the yard, for lack of garbage pickup. And she says she made the 911 call last year when a neighbor shot up his wife’s car.
“Within five minutes, there were lights and sirens,” Wolfe recalled.
“What’s gonna happen,” if the city cuts back its police force and response times lag, she asked. “Fifteen minutes later, she’s dead, he’s already gone?”
“We’re going backwards,” she added.
This is how Wolfe sees the property tax rollback playing out: Basic services go downhill first. Local governments lean on Tallahassee for funding. State lawmakers eventually cut them off, or force the kind of development her family has worked hard to keep at bay, the acres of old citrus groves turned into cookie-cutter subdivisions.
“I cannot justify doing away with core services and possibly losing our identity altogether as a rural community just to save myself a couple hundred bucks at the end of the year,” she said.
It may take years, Wolfe said, but in the end, she sees a straight line running from losing control of local property taxes to losing control of her community.
“I do think it’s gonna put an end to the rural communities like this. And I don’t think that’s fair,” she said.
“That’s not what we stayed here for.”
‘I’m not giving up’
Thumbing through the town’s finances in city hall, Mayor Sam Fite said he still believes in what he sees as the core mission of local government: to provide a safe living environment for its people.
“We, at the local level, deal with people’s issues. The potholes, the garbage, the water, the sewer, the barking dog,” Fite said.
It’s a core principle of local democracy: with proximity comes accessibility – and accountability.
And Tallahassee?
“I don’t see them worrying about the dogs getting picked up that bit somebody, or picking up the garbage, or making sure somebody’s toilet flushed,” Fite said.
He worries about his neighbors whose lives may sink further into poverty without the basic services the city provides.
“I am not giving up,” Fite said. “I’m still optimistic. I’ll still say I’m optimistic when we lock the front door,” of city hall for good, he added.
Whatever happens in November, Fite plans on staying put – he already has a burial plot picked out in Bowling Green’s city cemetery, where he intends to spend eternity.
He hopes the town itself will still be alive when the time comes.
Kate Payne is The Tributary’s state government reporter. She’s spent her career in nonprofit newsrooms in Florida and Iowa and her reporting has run the gamut, from interviewing presidential candidates on the campaign trail to middle schoolers in the lunch line. Kate has won awards for her political reporting, sound editing and feature writing and was named 2024 journalist of the year by the Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Kate’s previous newsrooms include the Associated Press and WLRN Public Media in Miami. Her stories and photographs have been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR and PBS, and her reporting on the death penalty has been cited in a filing in the U.S. Supreme Court. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org. The Tributary is a nonprofit newsroom producing high-impact government accountability and investigative journalism in the public interest. Based in Jacksonville, the Florida Trib's mission is to shine a light on systemic problems and solutions, hold those in power accountable, and focus on under covered topics through collaboration with other news organizations and the community.
