What Florida’s (Not So) Special Session Means to You & A Fundamentally Significant Disagreement – Top 3 Takeaways – May 12th, 2026
Takeaway #1: Not so special session?
When is a special session not so special? When the session is called to do the work, the legislature is constitutionally required to do. Starting today, the state’s second special legislative session will take place and is scheduled to run effectively throughout the rest of the month (May 29th is the last scheduled day). For the second straight year a special session for legislature to do the only thing they’re constitutionally mandated to do has been required (not coincidentally this is the second straight year that Daniel Perez is Speaker of the House – more on his dynamic in a moment). So today it’s back to Tallahassee for a special legislative session to tackle the state’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year that kicks in on July 1st. Budget talk sounds boring, so you might be wondering what this will actually mean to you? The answer is that it will impact everybody in this state, but not everyone equally. The top areas of impact for the matters in play are these (in order of the size of the impact for Floridians...) 1) Taxes/Fiscal policy 2) Education spending 3) Health & Human Services 4) Public Safety 5) Environmental spending. So, what’s the state of play with all of those things? Usually when it comes to Florida’s tax policies, the questions revolve around what sales tax holidays might we have and how long will they be. That will still be the case this year but with another significant dynamic that will be in play at least conversationally. The potential for property tax rollbacks. This session is not the session that will take up a proposed amendment for voters to consider in November to deliver potential property tax relief...Governor DeSantis has promised calling a subsequent special session to tackle the property tax issue specifically. But what the budget outcome could do is produce clues about what that policy might be and how big of an impact it could have for you immediately. Any potential proposal approved by voters in November would potentially be set to impact in January of next year. That would mean legislators would need to account for the possibility in their budgeting process that will carry the state through June of next year. Education spending, including teacher compensation, is always a big topic, and this year’s priorities include teacher pay raises, funding for Florida’s growing universal school choice program. In the realm of Florida’s health spending is the topic of Medicaid policies and hospital spending, which is the state’s biggest non-education-related expense. Public safety funding priorities include potential raises for law enforcement and enhanced equipment – while environmental priorities will include the continued funding for towards the completion of the Everglades Restoration Project and various water safety and quality concerns across the state. Notably leaders in the state legislature stated their final budget will be a bit smaller than this year’s budget, meaning the final tag will likely be $115 billion or less. What happens over the next 18 or so days will impact all Floridians in varying ways but while we wait to see what that might end up being...
Takeaway #2: The latest on property taxes
While the future of Florida’s homesteaded property taxes has been the hottest topic of conversation for about a year, what the outcome will be is unclear. Governor DeSantis has regularly called for the complete elimination of homesteaded property taxes in Florida. The closest the Florida legislature has moved on the topic was the proposal that passed Florida’s House calling for the phased-in elimination of non-education related homesteaded property taxes. Related...yesterday in what Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez billed as potentially his last speech to the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, his last stop before flying to Tally for the start of today’s special session he covered many different topics from insurance reforms, to business tax reforms, to his relationship with the governor and of course – property taxes. Notably regarding the governor, he referenced DeSantis as being a ‘good’ governor three times and even called him a ‘great’ governor once (that he seemingly realized and revised back to good). He indicated he agreed with the governor on probably 95% of policy. He also proceeded to say that Governor DeSantis doesn’t take his calls, and that’s sad...so yeah there was a little airing of dirty laundry. And when he talked about property taxes...
Takeaway #3 There was a fundamentally significant disagreement
Perez highlighted the fact that Florida’s House passed a proposed property tax amendment that would eliminate non-school property taxes that the Senate chose not to take up. He made it clear that he expects Governor DeSantis to call a special session to take up property taxes but that the governor still hasn’t produced his plan, and it’s impossible for them to consider it and work on it when he hasn’t formally produced it. He also at one point used language that would suggest he could be open to considering an amendment that would call for the elimination of homesteaded property taxes entirely. However almost as quickly he stated something that pointed in a fundamentally different direction. He said one thing he wouldn’t do is trade one type of tax for a different type of tax. He called that “crap”. It worked as an applause line for what seemed to be a majority in attendance...however, in my view the only poo is that line of thinking – it's fundamentally flawed. As my analysis has shown, and subsequent to my analysis, that of the James Madison Institute and Florida TaxWatch, as well... Homesteaded property taxes only makeup approximately 15% of larger county revenues and 30% of smaller county revenues. If local governments simply were to operate at the size they did prior to the pandemic (2019), homesteaded property taxes could be eliminated without any offsets being needed on average. Since 2000, Florida’s population growth has been 116%. During that same time property tax revenue collection has risen by a staggering 370%. In other words, property taxes have risen at greater than 3x the rate of population growth, showing that if local governments can collect higher than needed property taxes, local governments WILL collect higher than needed property taxes and spend every penny. It’s an absolute farce to say that local governments can’t operate effectively without homesteaded property taxes (with the potential exception of a smattering of rural counties that would potentially need additional consideration from the state but that amounts than less than $500 million annually or less than one half of one percent of the state’s annual budget). But that’s aside from the fundamentally significant disagreement. Perez’s argument that potentially trading one type of tax for another is ‘crap’ is crap. Why is it seemingly so hard to agree that we should actually be able to own property? There’s literally no other possession that any of us have where we’re compelled by governments to pay whatever tax it is that they say we have to pay or they’ll come take it away. You wouldn’t stand for it with automobiles. You wouldn’t stand for it for the furniture that’s in your home. You wouldn’t stand for it for absolutely anything...except for the single most important thing which is your home. Because you’ve been conditioned that way. But your home should never have been on permanent loan from every taxing authority in your jurisdiction. There’s no other tax in our society that threatens to take away your property. The only poo taking place in this aspect of the debate is Daniel Perez’s low hanging fruit argument. Again, it’s not needed, however even if I addressed the false premise of Perez’s argument. It would fundamentally be better to trade property taxes of any and all other types of taxes. It’s the most fundamentally un-American one and it’s the only one that literally takes people’s homes. We have a historic opportunity to do the big thing this year, in the final year of a historically great governor who’s not afraid to do the big things. I hope it’s not wasted.