Remarks by John Dellagloria

General Counsel
Community Development Agency
City of Palm Bay, Fla.

              
Impact of Tax Cut Provisions on Municipalities

The recent tax constitutional provision that passed and the upcoming one are going to devastate the municipalities and the counties, specifically in Florida. Government, unlike most of the people here, has to run a balanced budget and they can’t use credit cards to pay for fire protection or police protection, and garbage pickup and municipalities are going to have to raise fees in almost every sector. They are going to have to raise fees for code enforcement, they are going to have to raise fees for water and sewer and these things really affect the little person. So I’d rather talk about the residential homeowner who cannot afford to either buy homes or pay their mortgages, because they can only spend a dollar once, and if they have to spend it on increased municipal fees, then it’s not so surprising that they don’t have money to pay their mortgages.

Impact Fees and Education Cuts

In North Miami, where I was the city attorney, the city is now contemplating an impact fee ordinance which would raise the cost of building a single family home by $12,000 per home. That is an impossible situation. While all of these fees are going up, people are voting to lower property taxes. We also need to look at the people who are voting to lower property taxes, and again, my next remark is not going to be something that is widely appreciated here, but it is the rich who are voting to lower their property taxes, because it is the rich who pay the property taxes. And legislature recently decided to help poor people even more by making sure that 55 percent of cuts in the Florida budget will reflect cuts in education. There will be smaller classes, less construction, and some of the other cuts of course, are going to affect child-care, people who need social services, and by decreasing their budget they have to spend more money on other things than paying their mortgages.

For me, I think the appropriate cliché is we kind of missed the elephant in the room. I think what’s affecting most people who may not be on our panel here, but certainly live in the real world, can only be cured by our government no longer engaging in what I consider to be class warfare. That’s where I stand on it, and I think that the residential crisis is not going to go away for a very, very long time because of the way that we have been treating the underprivileged in the country.