Gamble pushed for relief from tax increase for property owners.
Gamble
LIVE OAK — A tax break is coming to some Suwannee County landowners.
Or, at least, no tax hike is coming.
After threatening a lawsuit during Suwannee County’s legislative delegation hearing in September, Property Appraiser Ricky Gamble — along with counterparts Shawna Beach from Taylor County and Wayne McCray from Lafayette County — lobbied the Florida Department of Revenue successfully Friday to back off a change in interpreting the “Save our Homes” homestead exemption.
That change, Gamble said in September, would have meant a likely increase of $300 or more for some landowners, around 1,500. That’s the highest amount of landowners affected in the state.
Gamble said Wednesday that after a meeting of 45 minutes to an hour, the state agreed Friday to continue marking the exemption as a test edit, but not make it mandatory, at least for the upcoming year.
“We’re so glad that we were able to work it out the way we did,” Gamble said.
Under the “Save our Homes” homestead exemption, which was adopted and implemented in 1994, the Department of Revenue determined that the homestead would only apply to the house and one acre of land that it sat on and not allow up to 160 acres of a farm for the homestead exemption as is described in the Florida Constitution.
The rest of the farm would only qualify for the ag exemption.
After a pushback from property appraisers in the early 1990s, the Department of Revenue allowed counties to determine how they wanted to apply it. About half the state, including Suwannee County, have provided a homestead carryover to the rest of the property.
“In many small counties, a homestead wasn’t enough value to capture the complete exemption,” Gamble explained last month, particularly if the farm house was an older home or, in some cases, a single-wide mobile home.
So instead of getting the entire $25,000 exemption, Suwannee County taxpayers would see reduced amounts, leading to the tax increase of $300 or more.
“They didn’t necessarily say that they were wrong or we were right,” Gamble said. “They just agreed we would continue on like we’ve been doing business.”
Prior to the state’s decision Friday not to enforce the change in interpretation, Suwannee County’s tax roll could have been denied if Gamble didn’t comply with the change, which he said last month he wasn’t going to do.
Gamble said he appreciated the teamwork showed by the area’s property appraisers in pushing for the change back to the current system.
“They have backed me and supported me on this,” he added. “It was a group effort.
“These small north Florida counties have property appraisers that recognize the fact we have to stick together to be heard in Tallahassee. And that’s a good thing that all these small county property appraisers are willing to stick together and fight together.”