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Tallahassee, FL – With just a week and a half until the election, Florida Taxwatch has released an analysis showing the potential for great harm to the state's economic recovery if Amendment 4 passes. Gina Jordan has the numbers.
The likely impact was assessed on a variety of economic factors, including the fiscal positions of municipalities. Robert Weissert is Vice President for Research and General Counsel for Florida Taxwatch.
"Some of the effects that the study found would be a steep decrease in jobs,
losses in personal income, decreased availability of affordable housing and lower tax revenue collections, which may lead to increased fees and other taxes as local governments try to make up for the loss of tax revenues," Weissert said.
The report estimates that Amendment 4 would cost Florida more than a quarter million jobs a year because of the impact on growth. It also suggests a loss of more than $16 billion dollars in personal income over the next six years. The analysis was conducted by Taxwatch's Council of Economic Advisers and researchers from the University of West Florida. The team was led by Dr. Rick Harper.
"To me, as an economist and public policy researcher, the great irony of
Amendment 4 is that passage of Amendment 4 will foster a less open, less transparent, and less predictable planning environment," he said, "by subordinating the professional judgment of planners, subject to approval by elected representatives, to a referenda system of ballot box initiatives."
The proposal comes with an undetermined cost. Harper says that means a lot of uncertainty for developers who may be more apt to take their business elsewhere. He points to another source of increased costs under Amendment 4:
"If we have urban voters who are by their very nature more concentrated,
there's more of them, they're going to vote against, I would predict, increased density in their own neighborhood," Harper said. "That's going to push development out to green field areas in the county where there are not as many rural voters to oppose that particular plan. And in my estimation, Amendment 4 is going to have these unintended consequences that are going to lead to exactly the opposite outcome from what proponents would like to see."
Florida Taxwatch is taking the position that instead of changing the state Constitution, the focus should be on improving existing growth management plans. But the group that got Amendment 4 on ballot is unimpressed. A statement from Florida Hometown Democracy says TaxWatch is far from an independent broker in this campaign, with several of its board members openly fighting against the proposal. In response, Taxwatch's Weissert says his group has been independent and data driven for thirty years, representing only the
taxpayers.