MIAMI — The window for Florida lawmakers to meaningfully debate cutting property taxes gets smaller with each passing day.

Monday marks day 21 of 60 in the legislative session, and there is still no policy discussion between the two legislative chambers on Republicans’ best effort to make Florida more affordable ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

And while Gov. Ron DeSantis has been calling for a repeal of property taxes for roughly a year, he has yet to produce any proposals. DeSantis has indicated he wants to deal with the matter in a special session that would convene after the regular session wraps on March 13. Already he has called one in April for congressional redistricting. His position appears to have delayed the overall conversation.

“I think there’s some value in teeing something up that voters see,” DeSantis said on Jan. 7. “You get into a regular session, you know, it’s 60 days. There’s things flying all over the place…It’s hard for me to keep track of.”

Senate President Ben Albritton, who was out last week due to health reasons, is paying attention to what DeSantis, his ally, wants out of property tax reform, and when he wants to address it.

“I’m certainly open to addressing property tax relief at a later time. Major revisions to our property tax structure are a big deal,” Albritton wrote to his Senate colleagues on Jan. 7 in response to DeSantis’ statements earlier that day. “We owe it to Floridians to devote the time necessary to get this right. The substance is more important than the timing.”

Even though Albritton may delay taking up the matter until after the regular session convenes, there are still at least seven ballot proposals put forward by two different senators, though none of them have been heard. Senate Finance and Tax Committee staff are evaluating different ideas at Albritton’s direction, but he’s unlikely to back any proposal before he decides to debate the topic.

Unlike his Republican counterparts, Miami House Speaker Daniel Perez has wanted to debate the issue since last May when he stood up a select committee on cutting property taxes in response to the governor’s call for action. The House bills are in large part a result of that committee’s work. Perez has shepherded complicated legislation through a special session in the past, and has since said he disfavors the method for important legislation because it inhibits “meaningful conversations that lead to the development of good and better ideas.”

“In my district, people talk about property taxes often, and I feel like I wouldn’t be doing my job if all of a sudden I just stopped having the conversation because the Senate chooses to not send over a proposal, or the governor chooses not to define how he plans to abolish property taxes,” Perez told reporters on Jan. 15. “We owe it to our constituents to have the tough conversation.”

A chairman whose committee reviewed many of the seven different House ballot proposals said on Jan. 27 that his Senate counterparts still hadn’t come to the negotiating table.

“We have been persistently asking the Senate: Do you have any specifics?” Rep. Wyman Duggan, a Jacksonville Republican who runs the House Ways and Means Committee, said. “They know what ours are. I can tell you that we regularly remind them that we don’t know what theirs are.”

The bigger question is whether any policy favored by the Legislature will gain 60% support among voters in November. In the last decade, two modest proposals to further reduce taxes on primary residences both failed with about 58% support. But the governor didn’t personally campaign on those amendments and use—as one Republican lawmaker put it this month—his “big microphone.”

State economists estimate one of the more conservative proposals in the House would collectively decrease budgets of local governments annually by hundreds of millions of dollars. But the impact in some cases would be much more dramatic: in the tens of billions of dollars, according to economist projections. Because the bills do not offer to make up for lost revenue by raising taxes elsewhere—such as through the sales tax—the initiatives threaten to upend community services from public safety to neighborhood park access, lawmakers and advocates have said during House debates last month. They would cut funding to independent districts for healthcare and water management.

An estimate by state economists shows a bill to phase out property taxes over 10 years for homesteaded properties—homes people claim as their primary residence—would decrease revenue for local governments by at least $14.7 billion annually starting in 2027. But it would also save homeowners on average about $2,500 a year in Pinellas County and $3,500 a year in Miami-Dade, Republican Palm Bay Rep. Monique Miller, the bill sponsor, told her colleagues during the House panel discussion.

DeSantis has touted eliminating property taxes altogether for people’s primary residence, saying Floridians shouldn’t pay the government forever to live in homes they already own. But that isn’t realistic without harming funding for schools, the Herald/Times reported last year. The House proposals don’t go that far, and largely keep funding for schools intact, while also preventing local governments from decreasing funding to law enforcement. And they further push the burden to pay for community services onto homes people do not claim as their primary residence as most proposals do not address taxes on those properties, affecting renters as well as small businesses, according to a Florida League of Cities study.

Republican leaders are committed to getting a single proposal in front of voters. But the final product could contain several of the ideas being floated by individual lawmakers now.

The Legislature must approve the proposed ballot amendment with a three-fifths vote. At that point, the proposed constitutional amendment would be immune to the governor’s veto pen, and would appear in front of voters. There are other bills lawmakers are debating that would affect property taxes, but do not contain changes significant enough to merit a change to the constitution, which governs the tax.

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