A recent post looked at the out of control spending of Cape Canaveral. Both parties are busy screaming about how the proposed elimination of homestead property taxes are going to cause police, fire, and schools to be shut down.
That’s a lie.
The problem isn’t police, fire, and schools, although I think we spend too much on those services. Cities and counties are busy spending money like a 16 year old who just found his dad’s credit cards. I want to give another example: Orlando.
In 2015, the city of Orlando has a population of 270,000 and a budget of $1.1 billion. That’s bad enough at $4,200 per resident, but let’s fast forward to 2025. In the year 2025, Orlando’s population had increased by 22% to 330,000, but the budget had increased by 63% to $1.8 billion, or $5,300 per resident.
The median household income in Orlando is $72,336. Median individual income is $43,312. The median property tax bill in Orlando is $3,413, or about 5% of annual household income. Too high.
This is the out of control spending that needs to be brought under control. For years, we have asked cities to control spending, but they have told us there is no room for cuts. Well, I am going to do my best to get this passed and force cities to make the cuts they should have made years ago.
The time of people who vote for a living stealing money from people who work for a living is going to come to an end in Florida if I have anything to say about it.
4 Comments
Ralph · June 29, 2026 at 9:01 am
Are you running for office, or starting a thrift party? I’m thinking that the only cure is to burn it all down and start over. Brevard county here.
oldvet50 · June 29, 2026 at 9:05 am
You do realize that while you may get property taxes under control, they’ll jack up sales tax, road tax, business tax, tax tax, etc., just to get the funds they want (not need). When I was a kid, government workers had pretty good benefits but the lowest pay compared to the private sector. That has flipped. It’s now the opposite. As an example, the only way to get a pension now is to have a government job, or contribute to it yourself. A private company must be profitable to survive – stay within its budget; a government doesn’t have that restriction.
Divemedic · June 29, 2026 at 9:26 am
The tax increases for those taxes are more limited in nature, therefore are more difficult to increase.
Boom Shakka Lakka Lakka · June 29, 2026 at 9:41 am
A few years ago in King County, WA, there was an item on the ballot for a special levy to provide for common radio frequencies across the various fire, police, etc. departments.
Seems the county couldn’t be bothered to spend from their regular budget for this most basic task, but blew their budget on their pet projects, and this frequency alignment was presented as a sort of world-will-end emergency.
Venting follows…
In my previous profession, we’d run into this lack of common frequencies every time we had a multi-ship project.
Several hours would be spent mapping out various workarounds on the UHF “company set” radios.
(channel 4 on ship A is channel 2 on ship B,
while channel 5 on ship A has no counterpart on ship B).
Finally, in a fit of unprecedented common sense, the company sent radio frequency/channel lists and radio programming equipment to all ten or so vessels.
The VHF maritime radios didn’t have this channel alignment problem (channel 16 was always channel 16, etc.)
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