Orange County voters say no to transportation sales tax, yes to rent control

Orange County voters rejected a penny-per-dollar sales-tax increase intended to transform transportation options.

Advocates who had declined to discuss a “Plan B” for funding billions in transportation projects may now have to draft one.

With nearly all of Orange County’s precincts counted, the no votes totaled 58.5% of the ballots.

“My friends, I am sad to report that the one-penny sales surtax for transportation did not garner enough votes for passage,” Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said in a statement distributed to reporters. “Despite this outcome, Orange County is and will always be a great place to live, work and play.”

The mayor also thanked “everyone who worked so hard to get the measure on the ballot and those who hit the campaign trail.” He was at the Rosen Centre Hotel, which was hosting a watch party for his spouse, Val Demings, who lost her bid for U.S. Senate.

Jerry Demings had hoped voters would green-light the sales tax, which he viewed as crucial to build a transformational transportation network.

He and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who co-chaired the push to pass the tax, built a diverse coalition of support, including business entities, labor unions, the League of Women Voters of Orange County and nonprofits. Transit, housing and climate activists also backed the tax.

But Brian Henley, who led the opposition group Ax the Tax, said the surtax was doomed by “horrifically horrible timing.”

He said inflation, higher interest rates and fear of a national recession trumped everything.

“You can array the best political alliances, the chambers of commerce, unions, the whole nine yards, but at the end of the day, when you’re trying to raise taxes in a recession, you’re going up against a headwind,” Henley said. “Voters are anxious about their money.”

The Orlando Economic Partnership, an economic and community development organization known as OEP, donated $125,000 and provided consulting services valued at nearly $200,000 in the campaign’s final days, according to records for Move Orange County Forward.

The political action committee headed by Demings raised more than $1.5 million to fund the campaign.

He had hoped the tax would help end long, frustrating, sometimes dangerous travel by improving roads, providing more reliable and efficient transit options and spurring the construction of affordable housing closer to transportation hubs, all of which require public money.

The proposed increase would have bumped the county sales tax from a region-low of 6.5% to 7.5% .

It would have raised an estimated $600 million a year and about $12 billion over the 20-year life of the tax.

In March, Orange County commissioners were provided with a binder filled with 1,153 pages of proposed projects, reports, projections and consultant analyses to help persuade them the county needs the sales-tax increase to fix transportation deficits.

Nineteen years ago, Orange County voters rejected a half-cent increase to the sales tax for transportation needs.

The initiative in 2003, dubbed Mobility 2020, would have helped pay for $8.7 billion in transit improvements over 20 years.

About 54% of county voters said no.

Understanding the challenge, Demings stumped for his proposed increase at hundreds of public gatherings.

During many of those forums, the mayor asked his audience to signify by a show of hands if they believed the county has a traffic problem. Nearly every hand in every crowd shot up. Then he would ask his audience how many of them were willing to pay for it.

Many hands fell.

Rent control

County voters overwhelmingly endorsed a hotly disputed rent stabilization measure with nearly 60% of voters saying yes.

“I think it’s a cry for help, honestly,” said Bishop David Maldonado, a Pentecostal pastor whose parishioners campaigned alongside members of labor union UNITE HERE which represents some Disney workers and with social-justice organization Florida Rising.

The ordinance aimed at limiting rent increases to 9.8% over the next year can’t become law unless the county wins an appeal.

Orange County Commissioner Emily Bonilla, who proposed the rent cap which appeared on the ballot as a “rent stabilization ordinance” that needed voter approval, took a whack at landlord groups, who spent more than $1 million trying to persuade voters to say no.

“The people voted in their best interests and for rent stabilization and didn’t fall for the lies and manipulation of the corporations who have been controlling the system with the money they take from everyday hardworking people,” she said in a text to the Orlando Sentinel. “The people voted to simply keep a roof over their heads.”

She called the landlord groups’ unsuccessful campaign “a perfect example of how the corporations make money off of people with huge obsessive profits and call it inflation, and then take that money and spend it on campaign mailers and commercials to try to make the people vote how they want.”

Bonilla said the county should do “everything we can to help the people with affordable housing and in the courts.”

Following a 2-1 directive from an appellate panel, Circuit Judge Jeff Ashton ordered election officials not to certify results of the vote on the ordinance, which stayed on the ballot despite a Fifth District Court of Appeal ruling declaring the ballot summary to be misleading.

Ashton had considered the measure to be on shaky legal ground in September when he ruled it could stay on the ballot.

“There is public good in the democratic process and in allowing the public to exercise their right to express their opinion on this issue, even if that is all it will ever be, an opinion,” Ashton wrote in a nine-page order rejecting a landlord group’s request for an injunction.

State law requires voter approval and an electorate’s decision is valid only after the results are certified.

The Florida Realtors and Florida Apartment Association sued in Circuit Court in August hoping to prevent voters from approving a proposed ordinance to impose a one-year, 9.8% cap on rent hikes for potentially 104,000 apartments in Orange County.

Chip Tatum, spokesperson for the Florida Apartment Association, shrugged off Bonilla’s jabs.

“The election results do not change the fact that this flawed and unconstitutional rent control measure was invalidated by the court,” he said in a text. “With the election behind us, we look forward to working alongside Orange County leaders on real solutions that will stimulate the construction of housing that is desperately needed.”

shudak@orlandosentinel.com

Complete election coverage can be found at OrlandoSentinel.com/election.