A Bit Outside

This space has long been a champion of the Concerned Citizens of Franklin County, a group with an agenda largely revolving around reducing the local tax burden and accountability in government.
Two things that local government too often shrugs aside, as if somehow elected officials have forgotten a fundamental precept - they are the public's servants.
The most recent advertising campaign, primarily directed at what the group believes is properties that have been improperly appraised by the county, however, seems a tad wide of the mark on several fronts.
The idea, the advertisements suggest, is a balanced ground for assessments and that certain properties do not reflect this balanced landscape and thus provides a spotlight on inefficiency and inequity in government.
They want everybody to pay their fair share of property taxes is essentially the underlying message of the ads.
Much of the information may be correct, but it is certainly hard to fathom how Doris Pendleton, the Franklin County Property Appraiser, is more at fault than the statewide system of property appraisal.
Ms. Pendleton is operating within the guidelines of that system and if she were not, as we have seen in recent years, the state comes calling with a barrel full of questions she had better be prepared to answer.
The problem is not so much Ms. Pendleton's efforts, but the system itself, which is like trying to fell an elephant with a BB gun.
To call Florida's property tax system broken is akin to labeling the Apalachicola Bay a body of water.
The system has long been broken and state lawmakers have long tried to suggest fixes and failed.
Put 160 lawmakers in a room - and those House-Senate conferences on the budget and property tax reform grow bigger with each whiff - and the end result is 160 competing agendas and few suggestions for reform.
That's one reason that Amendment 1, passed in January by voters, was never a panacea or anything more than a band-aid to the tax problem in Florida.
Amendment 1 was simply the best the Florida Legislature could come up with and still slap a label of property tax reform across the top. Remember that old axiom about putting lipstick on a pig.
And what Amendment 1 did, among other aspects of the measure, was provide residents with an unrealistic concept of the relief they could expect while completely ignoring the fundamental problem - which is the system itself.
This is a mass appraisal system that is based entirely on the market sales. Nice theory, maybe, but this year's appraisals are a reflection of last year's market, a snapshot of sorts of what the market looked like on Jan. 1.
As anybody following real estate in recent years can attest, a Jan. 1 snapshot almost starts to fade by Jan. 3, let alone the middle of July.
It is no more current, effectively, than a 1970 edition of the Times newspaper.
Two other aspects of this effort are worth mentioning.
The ads are slightly undermined by the fact that one of the most prominent members of the CCFC is a candidate for Property Appraiser, raising the kind of conflict that the CCFC has been about stamping out since its inception.
The other matter is more direct - the problem isn't so much Ms. Pendleton's office or the broken property tax system in the state, but the spending side of the ledger.
The CCFC argues it seeks to have everybody pay their fair share of taxes, but the reality is that the tax burden is already too high due to the county's collection of all those back-door tax increases evolving from a molten real estate market.
This has become more and more an exercise in counties in the region in recent years.
There was little public discussion about property appraisals while the market was red hot and counties were filling their coffers from the golden goose.
But now that the goose has gone into hibernation for a time, now that fiscally times are tight, county commissioners point the blame at property appraisals to deflect their own gorging on public dollars.
The thought of rolling back spending or rolling back property taxes to, say, 2001 levels, before the market filled county coffers, isn't even broached, though the county population has remained fairly steady and putting a finger on any increase in services is elusive.
For everybody to pay their fair share of taxes the county has to get its spending act together.
The CCFC has done a wonderful job of pointing out some of the local inequities in the property appraisal system.
But the real strike zone is the county's property tax spending - among the top five per capita in the state.
Shaming the county into actually addressing that issue, through the illustration of ways in which public dollars, people's dollars that are better kept in their pockets, are spent - that would represent a home run.