Sixty-two percent of Florida has voted on something that I will experience only as a lifestyle rumour.
JACKSONVILLE, Florida – I have been awake since a crow shouted at my window at ten to six, and I would like to enter into the record a short list of grievances before anyone is allowed to ask how I am.
Grievance one: The sticker
I voted. I have the sticker, which now lives on my notebook because my notebook is the only thing I own that will let me put a sticker on it without making a speech. The line was long, friendly and polite, which in this state is the same as being a rare wildlife sighting.
The man in front of me read the entire ballot out loud to his dog, who was not allowed inside and was therefore listening through a window. I am told the dog voted the same way as the man. I find this believable.
Grievance two: The amendments, in plain English
Three questions were put to voters about money, and the rule is that each needed at least 60 percent to pass. According to the News4JAX report on the three amendments, only one cleared that bar.
- Amendment 3 passed with 62 percent. It raises the homestead exemption on non-school property taxes to 150,000 dollars in 2027 and 250,000 dollars in 2028, with later inflation adjustments, and it cuts the annual cap on assessment increases for non-homestead property such as businesses and rentals from 10 percent to 5 percent.
- Amendment 1 failed, at about 41 percent. It would have raised the cap on the state’s Budget Stabilization Fund from 10 percent to 25 percent of general revenue, with annual transfers of up to 750 million dollars.
- Amendment 2 failed too, with about 58 percent in favour, short of the 60 percent bar. It would have exempted some farm equipment and agricultural or agritourism property from property taxes.
I want to be clear that I am not telling you how to feel about any of this. I am telling you that at 58 percent, Amendment 2 got more yes votes than most things in life ever get, and still lost, which is a lesson about thresholds that I will be carrying around for a while.
Grievance three: Jacksonville does the sums
The same report says Jacksonville officials estimate Amendment 3 could cost the city more than 300 million dollars a year. That is a number you say slowly, like a wine.
I had a chat about this with Mrs. Calloway, who lives two streets over, owns her home and has strong opinions in both directions. She says the exemption is a relief after years of seeing her bill climb. She also says the city has to pay for roads and libraries and the man who comes about the drains. Then she gave me a look that said both things can be true, and handed me a lemon from her tree.
I rent, so I am watching this the way you watch a football match involving neither of your teams: with passionate attention and no authority to shout. Landlords in the building have already started saying the phrase “market conditions”, which is a phrase I have learned means “the next letter will be long”.
What strikes me most about the whole business is the arithmetic of patience. A bill that says “homestead” and “assessment” and “non-school” is a bill written to be read slowly, and yet the news cycle wants it digested between a traffic update and the weather. I gave it a full evening, two cups of tea, and a pencil. The pencil won.
Grievance four: The farm bit
Amendment 2 was about farm equipment, and I confess I did not know how many people feel strongly about a tractor until I read the comments. Out of curiosity I clicked through to a farm.FM item reporting that the soybean harvest is 88 percent done while the profit harvest sits at zero. That headline is the cruellest piece of poetry I have read this month, and I did not even have to write it.
It does make the question of what a farmer is allowed to deduct feel less abstract. I do not have a view on the exemption, but I do have a view on 88 percent and zero being in the same sentence.
Grievance five: The other thing on the ballot
Everyone also had a governor to pick. A WFTV guide to the race described Republican Byron Donalds and Democrat David Jolly running to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis, with polls closing at seven in the evening local time. I am not going to tell you which way the building went, because the guide I read was written before the results, and I would rather leave a hole in my diary than fill it with a guess.
I will tell you that the group chat, Notebook Wolves, went silent at ten past seven and then posted four muffin photographs in a row. This is how poets express grief and confidence at the same time.
Closing grievance: The notebook
I have a column to file to Bohiney Magazine about an election day in which a dog heard the entire ballot, and I am rather proud of the lead. If you want a different kind of dispatch, the London news archive at The London Prat has a different flavour to this one, and you can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat beside it.
Tonight’s poem is four lines long and mentions a threshold and a lemon. I will not be showing it to anyone until it stops sounding like a spreadsheet.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/