Miami-Dade Assessor: Climate Change Will Wreck Property Values, So Let's Cut Taxes Now

Ed. - Links (many!) at original post.

As climate change continues to worsen, Florida is expected to be among the states hit hardest by damage from rising seas and more intense hurricanes. Insurers are increasingly refusing to write new policies in Florida or getting out of the market altogether, because even if the state’s elected Republican leaders refuse to acknowledge climate change, actuaries sure as hell do.

In what appears to be a first of its kind proposal, or at least bee in the bonnet, the recently elected Republican property appraiser (that’s the tax assessor’s official title there we guess) for Miami-Dade County has a nifty idea to help deal with climate change in the Sunshine and King Tide State. Tomás Regalado, who served as Miami’s mayor from 2009 to 2017, isn’t about to suggest something all radically lefty like reducing greenhouse emissions or building codes requiring better resilience — hey, not the property appraiser’s job! Instead, he says the county should get ahead of the crisis by giving property owners a great big break on their property taxes thereby starving the county of funds, although of course that’s not how Regalado put it.

At his swearing-in ceremony Monday, Regalado said, “When we look to consider the future value of a property, we should also start considering location, climate change, insurance.” As we prepare to post this story, we have not seen word of any repercussions coming to Regalado for speaking the banned words. To be fair, it’s still legal to say “climate change” in Florida, just not to use the term in state law, or to take it into account in setting state energy policy. He’s probably fine. The appraiser’s office sets values for some 930,000 properties annually, so reducing their appraised value in advance of damage from climate change would amount to what the Miami Herald described as a “tax break for homeowners in vulnerable areas across Miami-Dade.”

EDIT

Amusingly — or ominously, we’ll let you decide — the Herald story neglected to mention that such a move could have a few entirely foreseen side effects like greatly reducing county revenue. To be fair, we are not locals or experts on Florida government, so perhaps Miami-Dade doesn’t actually need money to fund schools, police, jails, infrastructure, or other stuff that county governments do. To say nothing (which is what the Herald did) of the need to make infrastructure more resilient or to have funding for the rescue crews that will be saving folks’ lives once their less-taxed homes are inundated or blown away. We kept waiting for that shoe to drop, but it never came up. The Herald even interviewed Regalado for the story, but doesn’t appear to have touched on the tax revenue side of things. But there was this notable stenography: Asked why current market values wouldn’t already factor in climate change, Regalado said in an interview that he’s not sure that’s the case. “We hope that it will, but sometimes we get off track,” said Regalado, a longtime radio and television broadcaster. “We have to be proactive.”

EDIT

https://www.wonkette.com/p/florida-republican-climate-change