Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings began laying the groundwork Wednesday on plans to revive a campaign to raise the sales tax by a penny to bring in more than half a billion dollars annually for roads, rail and other transit needs.
Demings, addressing a room of dozens of business executives hosted by the Orlando Economic Partnership, pitched the sales tax increase as the best method to build and repair roads and fund a transit system to support the explosive growth in the county of about 1.4 million people.
(Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel)
He circled the county over months in 2019 and early 2020 stumping for the tax, which was a hallmark of his first campaign for mayor. But the push was suspended as COVID-19 brought the region’s economy into a recession.
“It’s my desire, my goal, to bring that back,” Demings said, later adding he plans to ask voters to approve it next year. “We’re talking about billions of dollars that could truly do something that would assist us in solving the challenges.”
But landing the proposal in front of voters in 2022 isn’t a sure thing. It needs approval from the Board of County Commissioners to be on the ballot, he said. A campaign would need to be launched by about January to give it a shot at passing, Demings said.
Already, next year is shaping up to be a hotly contested election cycle in Orange County, where Demings is running for a second term as mayor. Statewide, Gov. Ron DeSantis is running for re-election as well, likely to face either U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist or Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried; and his wife, U.S. Rep. Val Demings, is challenging Marco Rubio for his U.S. Senate seat.
“At the end of the day, this is not about me; it’s about our community,” he said. “We’re losing ground, we’re losing time … there’s a sense of urgency that we have to get moving to fix the broken transportation system we all experience every day.”
Currently, consumers pay 6.5 cents per dollar on purchases in Orange County — lower rates than Osceola, Seminole and Lake. In Florida, counties are capped at 8.5 cents.
Demings didn’t precisely layout a spending plan for the money but said it could fund rail systems and bus rapid transit. Existing services like Lynx and SunRail don’t have dedicated funding sources, leaving them underfunded.
Throughout his speech he touched on other funding options, such as raising the gas tax, impact fees or property taxes to fund needs, but he said those would raise a fraction of the dollars the sales tax would. A property tax increase would also disproportionately impact county residents, as it’s only paid by landowners.
Visitors to the county are projected to cover more than half of collected sales tax, he said, citing a study by Visit Orlando.
But sales taxes also take a higher proportion of income from low-income earners than other taxes, making it a regressive tax.
In listening sessions at the time, Demings was met with a laundry list of asks from residents wanting relief from congested roads, while others wanted a mass transit system.
He also fielded gripes from people who opposed the tax hike as well as the county’s controversial decision to give up to $125 million to Universal Orlando to build an extension to Kirkman Road for its new theme park, which happened amid the push for an added penny.
Past sales tax initiatives have been a mixed bag in Central Florida. For example, a hastily planned one in Osceola was crushed by voters in 2019 by a two-to-one margin the same night one in Volusia was voted down. In Hillsborough County, voters defeated a tax increase in 2010 and 2014, before signing off in 2018.
In Orange County, voters downed the last proposal to raise the sales tax by half a penny for transportation needs in 2003.
Demings said his proposal would be different, in that it’d have to sell the benefits of the funding to residents across the sprawling county.
“When we tell the story, everyone must see themselves in the narrative of the story of benefitting somehow,” “It cannot just be about benefitting the people who come in, the tourists, to the convention center area if you’re asking people in other areas of the county to help pay for it.”
rygillespie@orlandosentinel.com
