Council Weighs Options After Finance Committee Votes Down Tax Hike

Abel Harding

Jacksonville's nineteen city council members will now take up Mayor John Peyton's proposal for a 12% increase in the city's millage rate after the Council's Finance Committee voted 6-0 against the proposal.  Bill Bishop, one of the Committee's members, said that rejecting the Mayor's proposal would force the city to get serious about exploring inefficiences within city government.

“We won’t be able to raise the millage without going through a lot of hoops, a lot of serious, extensive analysis of where we can cut,” Bishop said. “If we have to ultimately raise the tax rate, we’ll be able to tell people this is what we did and this is what we are going to need to be able to run the city.”  If the Council is unable to identify cuts, it would cost the city an additional $200,000 to have to revisit the issue.  That's a risk Councilman Bishop says he is willing to take.

The full council will consider the millage increase proposal on July 28.

What has remained unmentioned throughout this entire process, despite the complaints of the Mayor and numerous members of the Council in regards to the millage cuts forced by the Legislature's passage of statutory tax cuts in the 2007 special session, is that this year is the last year the council could vote to override the cuts for Duval County.  In fact, it is quite surprising that the Council didn't do that last year after Amendment 1 failed to pass in Duval County---the only major county that it failed in---by a nearly 6-point margin.  It's beginning to look like the failure of the Mayor to seize on the unpopularity of Amendment 1 by asking Council to override the statutory tax cuts passed by the legislature was a major political miscalculation.

For their part, the  Mayor and Council's continued finger-pointing at Tallahassee is getting increasingly tiresome.  While the moves by the legislature resulted in millions of lost revenue for city coffers, the City had the express authority to change that last year.  They still have it this year.  Apparently, however, it's easier to point fingers at an overreaching state government than make a decision to assert the authority of the Jacksonville City Council in setting the city's future millage rates.

Tags: Amendment 1, Bill Bishop, City Council, Duval County, Finance Committee, John Peyton, Local Politics, Millage Rate, Millage Rate Increase

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 5:28 AM and is filed under Local Politics, State Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.