Palm Beach County will keep its tax rate the same for the upcoming 2026 fiscal year — despite some commissioners’ efforts to reduce it and give taxpayers some relief.
During a public hearing on Sept. 9, county commissioners voted 5-2 to keep the rate at 4.5000, with most of the commissioners saying that lowering it could threaten and reduce the quality of essential services. On Tuesday, the county commissioners finalized budgetary approvals during the last public hearing before it goes into effect on Oct. 1.
According to the county property appraiser’s 2025 estimates, taxable property values increased by nearly 8% since 2024. Property taxes are determined using property values and the tax rate.
“Everything else has gone up. When you talk about inflation, the cost of road construction … We talked about a project that was originally $600,000 that went to $800,000. You can’t get water from a rock,” Commissioner Bobby Powell said during a hearing. “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. You can’t go negative and think that we’re going to be able to cover these expenses.”
At various public meetings throughout the last couple of months, Mayor Maria Marino has emphasized that only a chunk of the overall budget actually is taxable.
Of the county’s about $9 billion budget, about $2.1 billion is taxable. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office gets about half of that while the county’s fire rescue gets nearly a quarter.
“That leaves 28% of the taxes that you pay going to service everything that we provide here in the county,” Marino said at the Sept. 9 hearing.
As examples, she cited road upkeep, stormwater infrastructure and trash-pickup service.
“We need to keep our buildings up. We need to expand our buildings. We need to make sure our roadways are in place. We need to make sure that if we have to build more fire stations, we can build those. If we need to build more police substations, we build those too,” she said.
Still, Vice Mayor Sara Baxter suggested the commission adopt a so-called “rollback” rate of 4.2413 during the Sept. 9 hearing, and Commissioner Marci Woodward agreed with that idea. (They are two of three Republicans on the County Commission — the third is Mayor Maria Marino.)
Baxter attempted to make a motion during Tuesday’s hearing to adopt the 4.2413 rate, which Woodward supported. But a substitute motion for adopting the 4.5000 rate was made instead, and the five other commissioners, including Marino, supported that. Baxter and Woodward were the only two commissioners who voted against it.
“As we know recently, DOGE has come in and they’ve said, ‘Hey, we have some serious concerns with how much your budget has gone up,’” Baxter said. “I want us as a county to be able to say to our taxpayers, we can find areas to cut back on so that our taxes for our residents don’t go up. I think it is essential for us to be able to do that.”
After teams from the state Department of Government Efficiency examined records at the Palm Beach County government offices on Aug. 18 and 19, Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia said some of what had been found was “a little eye-popping.”
Ingoglia’s lack of specifics, though, puzzled some commissioners who questioned how they could accurately approve the budget without knowing exactly what DOGE so far deemed as unnecessary spending.
As an example of a potential area to cut back on, Baxter said some nonprofits receive a majority of their funding from the county, which she said she wants to end.
“I do not want us to keep just paying for them,” she said. “They should be able to raise their own money if they’re truly going to be partners.”
Baxter also said she wants the county to stop funding the county’s Homeless Coalition, a nonprofit described on its website as “a catalyst for community collaboration to prevent and end homelessness” across the county.
By trying to scale back the tax rate, Baxter said she wanted to help taxpayers.
“I do believe our residents need a break from their taxes going up every year, and staying at the rollback rate would prevent that from happening,” she said at Tuesday’s hearing. “I can’t express enough how important this would be to the residents that we don’t increase their taxes again for another year.”
Commissioner Joel Flores said he’s willing to lower taxes when possible but isn’t willing to sacrifice public safety, which he fears could happen if taxes were reduced.
“If you go back to the rollback rate, we’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to cut,” Flores said. “Everything is constantly going up. Our employees also deserve a raise, the cost of living continues to go up. We’re trying to maintain a workforce, which is extremely hard when they don’t get paid what the market rate.”
Baxter shot back, saying she would “never in a million years” be in favor of cutting funding for first responders or law enforcement.
“I could think of 100 other places that we could cut first,” she said. “You can’t spend enough money to solve all the problems in Palm Beach County, whether it’s affordable housing, whether it’s homeless, we can go down the list, substance abuse, which all of us have very personal experiences with. You cannot spend enough money to solve those problems.”
“The idea that we can’t prioritize our budget, that’s laughable,” she said.
Commissioner Maria Sachs said the commission should focus more on efficiency rather than on cutting funds.
“We all want to save taxes, and we all want our people not to have to pay more taxes, and I think the discussion is a good one, but let’s start out with a new administrator and a new year for our budget to see how we cannot cut but make it more efficient,” she said.
