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A Cutting Decision

THE SUNCOAST NEWS

Published: February 12, 2008

In the run-up the Jan. 29 vote on Amendment No. 1, officials of local governments and public school districts around the state were issuing dire warnings. Tax revenue would plunge; services would be slashed; criminals would run the streets; children would go uneducated. The amendment, of course, was the plan the Legislature and Gov. Charlie Crist came up with in response to last year's howls of protest from property-owning Floridians about rising ad valorem tax bills.

Prior to Jan. 29, the predictions of doom seemed to be working. Most public opinion polls suggested Amendment No. 1 would barely garner a majority for approval, well short of the 60 percent needed to write its provisions into the state constitution.

As anyone who hasn't been in a parallel dimension since Jan. 29 knows, Amendment No. 1 passed with a solid 64 percent of the vote. There is a standard explanation for why pre-election polls end up being wrong: The sample of people the pollsters talked to didn't closely mirror the sort of folks who actually cast ballots. In this case, fewer of the people who told pollsters they were against Amendment No. 1 might have voted, compared to the people who were for it. Perhaps Tuesday's potentially meaningless Democratic presidential primary helped suppress the anti-amendment turnout.

We've been hard on Crist. He ran for governor in 2006 pledging to govern in the manner of his predecessor, Jeb Bush, but veered from that course almost immediately after taking the oath of office. That said, Crist put a lot of his political prestige at stake by leading the pro-Amendment No. 1 campaign. He was a big winner on Jan. 29.

Floridians have spoken, and public bodies that lose tax revenue as a result of the amendment need to make the necessary budget cuts. If private businesses have to making tough spending choices when income is down, there is no reason the public sector can't do the same.

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