By Billy McCullers
Lake Okeechobee News reader
I read David Hall’s letter to the editor concerning Amendment 3, and I found myself agreeing with more of it than someone might expect.
We should think about tomorrow. We should care what Okeechobee looks like 20 years from now. We should care about our roads, our first responders, our parks, our libraries, and the community our children will inherit.
I have children of my own. I understand the instinct behind asking what we are leaving them.
Where I part ways with Mr. Hall is in the premise that seems to quietly develop throughout his letter… that protecting the financial position of local government today is somehow synonymous with protecting our children tomorrow. I am not convinced those are the same thing.
There is another side of that equation, and it is much more personal.
Before tomorrow’s taxpayer exists, today’s family has to make it there.
Families in Okeechobee are dealing with the cost of groceries, insurance, electricity, housing, vehicles, and practically everything else required to maintain a household. Small businesses are dealing with many of those same pressures multiplied several times over. People who once felt comfortably middle class are looking at household expenses very differently than they did just a few years ago.
Against that reality, allowing a homeowner to keep more of his or her own money is not necessarily taking something away from the future.
It may be helping preserve it.
Mr. Hall asks us to picture the child who will someday inherit Okeechobee. I would ask us to picture that child’s parents today.
They are paying the mortgage. They are buying the groceries. They are paying the insurance. They are keeping the lights on. They are paying for school clothes, sports, medical bills, and car repairs. They are trying to put something away for an emergency. Some are doing well. Some are barely hanging on.
Keeping those families financially healthy matters to the future of this community too.
There is a legitimate societal interest in roads, parks, emergency services, and public facilities. I don’t dispute that for a second.
But there is an equally legitimate, and I would argue even more fundamental, societal interest in keeping families financially stable and keeping people out of poverty.
Every dollar transferred from a household to government has an opportunity cost on both sides.
Government can certainly do something valuable with that dollar. It can help pave a road, operate a library, support law enforcement, or provide any number of legitimate public services.
But the family can do something valuable with it too.
That dollar can pay a power bill. It can buy groceries. It can help pay homeowners insurance. It can be spent at a local business. It can become savings. It can help an elderly person remain in a home that has been paid for, for decades.
It doesn’t simply disappear because government doesn’t collect it.
That is where I think the Amendment 3 conversation sometimes becomes unnecessarily distorted.
Government revenue is discussed almost as though it naturally belongs to the collective first, and allowing the homeowner to retain more of it represents a loss.
Government has legitimate needs, but government is funded by people. The people are not funded by government.
That doesn’t mean taxes are inherently bad. It means the burden of demonstrating the need for taxation should remain with the government collecting it, particularly when families themselves are experiencing increasing financial pressure.
There is also an important factual distinction in Mr. Hall’s examples.
Okeechobee County does not fund every service he mentions exclusively through homestead property taxes. County government has multiple revenue streams. Fire Rescue and EMS have separate assessments. Growth-related infrastructure has its own funding mechanisms, including the impact fees Okeechobee County recently adopted for transportation, Fire Rescue and EMS, law enforcement, libraries, parks, public facilities, and other needs.
Impact fees cannot pay routine operating expenses, and I don’t suggest that they can. Amendment 3 will affect county revenue. Pretending otherwise would be no more helpful than pretending every dollar of reduced property taxation comes directly out of an ambulance.
That is exactly why I would rather see numbers than imagery.
Tell us how much Okeechobee County expects to lose.
Tell us which funds are affected.
Tell us which services depend upon those funds.
Tell us what alternative revenues support those services.
Tell us what could be reduced, delayed or reprioritized before essential services are affected.
Then let the voters weigh the benefit against the cost.
That seems much more useful than asking us to look at a child, an ambulance, a fire station or a Little League field and imagine what might happen twenty years from now.
There is another piece of context worth mentioning.
Mr. Hall writes as Director of Special Programs for Our Village Okeechobee. Our Village publicly identifies Okeechobee County and the Board of County Commissioners among its community partners. The County’s September 24 agenda also included a $15,000 grant agreement with Our Village for the current fiscal year.
I don’t mention that to suggest anything improper.
Organizations that provide community services routinely partner with government, and receiving public funding does not invalidate anyone’s opinion.
But when the subject is whether government should retain a particular source of revenue, I think relationships between the author’s organization and that government are relevant context. Readers can decide for themselves what significance, if any, they attach to it.
Mostly, though, I keep coming back to the premise of Mr. Hall’s letter.
What will we leave our children?
But I think another question sits right beside it.
What condition will their families be in when tomorrow finally gets here?
A community is not simply its government. It isn’t the courthouse, the fire station, the library or the amount of money sitting in a county budget.
A community is people. It is families. It is the elderly couple trying to stay in the home they worked their entire lives to own. It is the young couple wondering whether they can afford to buy their first house here. It is the small business owner making payroll. It is the single mother staring at the grocery bill. It is parents trying to give their children opportunities while watching the cost of nearly everything around them increase.
Those people are Okeechobee too.
And when we talk about sacrificing today for tomorrow, we should remember something very simple…
Tomorrow is built by the people who survive today.
We need a balance between maintaining the community we share and preserving the financial health of the individual families who make that community possible.
I don’t claim to know exactly where that balance lies for every household or every county service. That is precisely why we vote.
But I am uncomfortable beginning the discussion from the assumption that whatever government does not collect today is something our children have lost tomorrow.
Sometimes leaving something to our children means building something for them.
Sometimes it means maintaining what we already have.
it means simply leaving more in the hands of the families raising them.
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