Trumbull touts tax cuts

PANAMA CITY BEACH — State Rep. Jay Trumbull said Wednesday he felt he made progress in his first session as a state legislator to cut taxes and make the state more business friendly.

The philosophy will once again be in the forefront of his thinking in the next round of bills he files next session, he said at a meeting of the Panhandle Federated Republican Women.

During the session, the Panama City Republican introduced a bill that passed that would prohibit county property appraisers from seeking property taxes on housing improvements at U.S. military bases in Florida.

Speaking at the luncheon at the Olive Garden in Panama City, he said the state budget of more than $78 billion included $772 million in tax cuts and full funding for Amendment 1, which is the Florida Water and Land Conservation Initiative.

In the past session, the Legislature this session increased the back to school sales tax holiday from five to 10 days, waived the sales tax for military personnel who purchase a vehicle overseas and reduced taxes on cellphone and cable bills, Trumbull said. Trumbull, who works in the family Culligan water business, said he went to Tallahassee to reverse the trend of increasing regulations on small business owners.

“I went mainly because growing up in our small business I saw what increased regulatory strain does to small companies,” he said.

Trumbull serves on the House Finance and Tax Committee and has been in discussions with the chairman and the staff director about options for lowering taxes more, even analyzing an abolishment of property taxes. But that would mean a loss of $28.5 billion in income to local government and sales taxes would have to be increased as an alternative income source, Trumbull said.

“That is not going to happen,” Trumbull said. “I’ve had a couple of people call me and say that would really hurt their businesses, and I clearly understand that, but that’s what we want to look at. We want to look at really forward-thinking ways to fix things.”

He said he does not support additional sales taxes on services and supports ending the manufacturing sales tax, which sunsets this year.

“That is a significant amount of money that the state receives every year,” Trumbull said. “But we want to make that (sunsets) permanently because in Northwest Florida in particular we need to attract businesses, whether they be manufacturing or high-tech jobs.”

Trumbull said he also supports the permanent sunsetting of sales tax on commercial leases. “We’re going to be phasing that out as well,” Trumbull said.

Trumbull said he would like to see the state come up with an incentive program for businesses that hire people who went to school in Florida.

“Just this week, I was talking to a friend of mine about the epidemic of folks who are from Florida, and we spend money to educate them, and then they go to work in a different state,” he said.

Medicaid expansion

One of the more contentious issues was the proposed expansion of Medicaid, and Trumbull said as he was leaving the luncheon he didn’t think the issue would be debated again at the next session.

At a special session in June, the Florida House soundly rejected an expansion compromise. The Senate was trying to draw down $18 billion federal dollars and give it to hundreds of thousands of Floridians to purchase private health insurance instead of putting them in the regular Medicaid program.

Republicans in the Legislature warned the expansion could put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars and that the Obama administration may back out of its promise to pay the entire bill for the first few years and 90 percent after that.

“It would cost the state a heck of a lot of money,” Trumbull said. “It is not free money” coming from Washington, “because it’s yours and my money we are spending up there anyways. At the end of day, no one is holding (the federal government’s) feet to the fire after three years. It’s not like you can pull people off that expansion.”

Hospital officials throughout the state have expressed concerns about the lost revenue to their facilities with state officials not accepting the federal funds.

“Given the high number of uninsured patients in Florida, we need a funding source to help offset the cost of providing their medical care,” Tammy Newton, a spokeswoman for Bay Medical Center Sacred Heart, said in a prepared statement. “It doesn’t seem that Medicaid expansion is likely at this time, so preservation of lower-income pool funding is more important than ever. If we take further cuts to the lower-income pool program without Medicaid expansion, it would be devastating to our facility. We are hopeful that the Legislature can work out a solution to preserve lower-income pool funds and we are encouraged that our local delegation is exploring that option.”