Rubio: No "Use Value" for Florida Businesses This Year

The St.Petersburg Times reports today that Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio thinks a preliminary plan to offer special assessment rules to certain Florida businesses is not going anywhere in this year's special session.

The idea, which Rubio apparently supports, is that at least some businesses ("modest businesses" and "mom and pop hotels" are mentioned in the article) should be assessed, for property tax purposes, not based on their market value but based on their current use.

This isn't an unprecedented idea. Pretty much every state does it for farms, assessing agricultural property based on its value for farming purposes rather than its (usually greater) value as a site for new condos. But the practice has attracted widespread criticism in Florida and around the nation for benefiting folks who clearly aren't farmers and clearly aren't financially needy-- and I can't think of any state that also grants this tax break to non-agricultural businesses.

If this practice can be abused by would-be farmers, at least there's a good intuitive reason for offering it to them: if every farmer in developing areas was forced to sell their property due to high property taxes, you'd get a much faster pace of development in formerly green areas. (Of course, the question of whether a general tax break for ag property is the best way of restraining development is an open one.)

But it's much harder to make the case for similar tax breaks for businesses, especially in an already-urban environment. How important is it to keep, say, a used-car dealer in the same place after a neighboring suddenly becomes a high-rent area?

And this "reform" idea ignores the larger question of why businesses are paying more property taxes to begin with-- which, of course, is because the state is granting unaffordable and poorly targeted tax breaks to homeowners while giving virtually nothing to businesses. If this summer's special session on property taxes results in major cutbacks in property taxes for everyone, the need for applying "use value" to businesses-- or enacting some better-thought-out form of business property tax cuts-- could diminish overnight.