Florida For All’s Political Director Amina Spahić testified in opposition to property tax cut proposals that will defund hospitals, fire fighters, and disaster relief during the House State Affairs Committee on December 2, 2025. Four of the seven constitutional amendments proposed by Republican leadership of the Florida House (HJR 201, HJR 205 , HJR 209, HJR 211) are now headed to the Ways and Means committee on December 10, 2025 and one stop away from the House floor. HJR 2021 alone would slash local government revenue by $18 billion per year after its first year.
Transcript | Florida For All’s Political Director Amina Spahić at 12/2/25 House State Affairs Committee Meeting
My name is Amina with Florida For All, and I drove over four hours to appear in this committee today and maybe learn something.
However, I’m walking away a little more confused.
I haven’t heard an implementation plan. There have been talks about possibly privatizing fire departments. We might be subsidizing billionaires, retirements, along those lines. I think these are all things that should have been flushed out, and I would like to see implementations before we vote on something like this and push it through, and then have taxpayers stuck with a bill in some other form, because the governor and the CFO are are trying to campaign on attacking local governments.
So I have a problem with that, and I appreciate all the local governments and representatives that have come here today to speak for taxpayers, because it’s a deep concern, especially when we talk about vulnerable communities and vulnerable people. Those are not the people that you’re including.
I don’t know how we can, for example, include a retired billionaire who will not be paying taxes in with the same crowd as somebody on Meals on Wheels. So this is something that I think definitely needs to be looked at, because at the end of the day, the rich are just going to get richer, as has been historically the case in this state.
So if we’re going to go down that track, I would like to know accountability measures, if anything, because if we’re stuck with the money that needs to go to schools, to fire departments, to police, then who is going to be responsible for doing that to taxpayers?
It’s not going to be the people that are going to be out of office when this gets implemented. So as the public is listening to this and do the math that doesn’t seem to me, mathing anywhere(…) the education campaign that keeps being talked about, I think it needs to start here, and it needs to start amongst us, to collectively speak for tax taxpayers and not just the privileged taxpayers.
Thank you.