Orange County leaders have backed off a proposal they considered placing on the November ballot that would have asked county voters if they’d be willing to approve a new local penny tax to help fund county infrastructure, transportation, and conservation projects.
Mayor Jerry Demings, a Democrat who’s running for Florida governor this year, said during a special meeting on the issue Monday that the timing of the proposal was off, considering the scope of affordability issues affecting the community.
County commissioner Mayra Uribe, who’s running to replace Demings as Orange County mayor this fall, echoed his concerns.
“I just don’t know if the timing is right or the transparency is really at the level to get the buy-in from the public,” she said.
Demings proposed that county commissioners in the future could potentially consider such a proposal for the next election cycle instead — once he’s out of county office, of course.
“God bless the future board, to maybe bring it back in 2028,” he said.
It’s a tough issue. Orange County voters rejected a similar proposal — a penny tax to fund public transportation projects, specifically — in 2022, on the heels of a global pandemic that temporarily shut down the region’s most prominent industry. Just 41.6 percent of voters voted in favor of it then, while 58.3 percent voted against.
Orange County voters two years later, however, overwhelmingly renewed a half-cent tax to help support the local school system in 2024, with 72 percent of voters showing support.
This newer proposal, described as a local government infrastructure surtax, would have similarly (if more broadly) been used to help fund transportation infrastructure, as well as parks, environmental conservation, stormwater and water quality initiatives, and land acquisition for affordable housing projects. Discussion on the issue was roughly a year in the making.
The surtax would have generated an estimated $757 million in revenue annually, with just 11 percent of that coming from local residents. The rest would have been generated by tourists and local businesses. Of the $757 million, $528 million would have been earmarked for the county, with the remaining $227 million (about 30 percent) allocated for cities located in the county, including Orlando, Apopka, Winter Garden, and Winter Park among others.
In practice, the tax would have added one cent to every dollar in sales on taxable consumer goods in Orange County, if approved by voters this fall, although county commissioners were also willing to entertain a half-cent proposal as well. Items such as groceries and medicine are considered nontaxable and would not have been affected.
The tricky part, however, is selling voters on these kinds of proposals and demonstrating how it would benefit taxpayers and their families to support the meager tax and not just burden them as an additional expense. Some people spoke out against the proposed tax during the public testimony portion of the meeting, arguing the county isn’t making good enough use of the money it has already.
“By asking for taxes, I feel that you’re not respecting the working dollar,” said Cynthia Harris, a community activist and repeat candidate for local elected office who was most recently disqualified from the Supervisor of Elections race in 2024 over improper paperwork practices. “Families are stretching their budgets, and I think that government should stretch their dollars as well,” she said. “Remember, just a few years ago, you gave yourself a 25 percent raise.”
A number of other counties in Florida, including redder areas, have similar voter-authorized funding in place, specifically for conservation. According to Pegeen Hanrahan with the Trust for Public Lands — a national nonprofit that works with local governments on these kinds of initiatives — conservation generally is the most popular issue that voters are willing to support when it comes to a tax proposal.
“What we see over time is that when you give the voters the opportunity to weigh in on whether they want to see natural lands, water quality, parks, recreation and so on preserved, they do resoundingly say yes,” Hanrahan told the board of county commissioners Monday.
A survey conducted by the nonprofit of roughly 800 likely voters in Orange County found that a tax used to help protect water quality received the greatest support, while protecting environmentally sensitive lands from over-development closely followed. Of non-conservation issues, the next most popular were using a tax to fund efforts to reduce traffic congestion and for road repairs.
A greater share of survey respondents — 62 percent — supported the half-cent tax idea, according to Hanrahan. Respondents also favored the idea of a tax that would sunset in 10 years, versus another 20-year proposal county leaders were also considering.
Still, the county commission faced a daunting deadline for getting a half-cent or full-cent tax proposal on the 2026 ballot, and there was concern that not enough support for the idea would materialize to make the effort worthwhile. Commissioners would have had to approve ballot language by April 7, according to county staff, then send that to the state’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability by May 7.
Commissioner Kelly Martinez Semrad, one of the newer commissioners elected to the board in 2024, said she would have preferred to find a way to use tourist development tax revenue to fund infrastructure and transportation projects instead. Orange County receives hundreds of millions of dollars in TDT revenue each year — generated through a 6 percent tax on local hotel stays — but under state law, most of that money has be used to fund tourism marketing and other tourist attractions, like sports stadiums.
“Orange County should be lobbying Tallahassee like crazy to better define how we can meet today’s needs on an infrastructure fund that has public money in it, generated by those who don’t live amongst us with this, which is tourists,” Semrad said.
The big tourism lobby, however, has consistently leveraged its political influence in Tallahassee to lobby against proposed changes to state statues that would allow for more flexible uses of TDT revenue. Hotelier Frank Santos, CEO of Rosen Hotels, has pitched an extra tax to help fund transportation projects — while leaving the TDT alone — but that idea hasn’t gained much traction either.
Orlando-area Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democrat, almost got his own proposal across the finish line in state budget talks last year that would have allowed TDT revenue to be used for public transportation and infrastructure. The proposal, however, was pulled from state budget language last minute, and state budget negotiations this year among Senate and House leadership remain ongoing.
Semrad said giving local residents a commitment that county leaders will work with state lawmakers to enact TDT reform would be the “recipe for success” that they would need to get voters on form with any kind of separate local tax proposal.
“I think that if the public sees us treading in that direction, that shows them, OK, not only can we maybe get some relief there, but also that we can generate a collective pot of money in the form of an infrastructure tax.”
Commissioner Nicole Wilson, an advocate for the local infrastructure surtax idea, pushed to move forward with getting it on the ballot this year, even if they downsized to a half-cent proposal. She said that she, unlike others on the dais, wasn’t planning to run for higher office any time soon, and said that with the political will, they wouldn’t have to wait on state legislators in Tallahassee to provide relief in order for the county to generate revenue itself for projects important to the community.
“What is law today is the ability for us to leverage this type of infrastructure surtax and be able to do it earmarked in very specific ways,” she said.
“I think it’s just terrible timing,” Demings said.
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