The Florida House is stitching together a $102.4 million tax relief package that would reduce the state’s business rental tax [BRT] from 5.7 to 5.35 percent and authorize a three-day back-to-school sales tax “holiday” on clothes, school supplies and computers, and seven-day tax “holiday’ on hurricane supplies.

The proposed tax breaks formally debuted Tuesday before the House Ways & Means Committee, which considered “concept language” regarding the tax relief package and a range of other tax-related items that will eventually be folded into the General Appropriations Act, annually filed as House Bill 5001.

Lawmakers approved a $171 million tax package last year that provided the same tax holiday package as well as property-tax breaks for property owners recovering from hurricane and tropical storm damage.

The preliminary tax package, which begins committee reviews next week, is included in the House’s proposed $89.9 billion fiscal year 2020 budget.

The Senate is seeking $90.3 billion in its preliminary spending plan, but its tax relief package is still being assembled from among a raft of proposals, including one to extend the back-to-school tax “holiday” to 14 days.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ $91.3 billion Fiscal Year 2020 spending request includes a $335 million tax cut package that – like the House – includes a three-day back-to-school tax holiday and a one-week tax holiday on hurricane-preparation items, but also includes a $289.7 million reduction in the “required local effort” in school property tax contribution to the Florida Education Finance Program [FEFP].

That is not included in the House’s “concept language” considered by Ways & Means Tuesday, which instead offers a number of “clarifications” that restrict districts’ capacities to increase mill levies and requires districts to share operating discretionary levies “proportionately with charter schools in the district.”

If not, the House plan would require “the amount being withheld” from charter schools to be extracted by the state through the FEFP allocation.

The committee-level introduction of the tax package and other components of what will become HB 5001 is a first step in budget negotiations with the Senate, which could proceed until midnight May 3 when the session is scheduled to conclude.

“Compared to recent years, the composition of the package is fairly simple,” House Ways & Means Chairman Rep. Bryan Avila, R-Miami Springs, said.

Not included in the House’s preliminary tax package is the proposed cut in the communications services tax [CST] from 4.92 to 3.92 percent for general communications services and from 9.07 to 8.07 percent for direct-to-home satellite services in HB 693 sponsored by Rep. Rep. Jason Fischer, R-Jacksonville.

“I’m hopeful it will be included in the tax package,” Fischer said.

Rep. Anna Eskamani, R-Orlando, endorsed Fischer’s proposed CST cuts and offered a few of her own.

“We hear a lot of conversation around the tampon tax and things like that,” Eskamani said. “I’d love to make sure necessities for women and girls and families, including diapers” be included in the tax package.

The proposed BRT reduction from 5.7 percent to 5.35 percent would produce a savings of $47.9 million in 2020, according to the House analysis, but would mushroom to an estimated $99.9 million annually when applied for a full year in 2021.

The BRT, a tax only assessed in Florida and annually lobbied against by business groups, was reduced from 5.8 percent last year.

Under the House’s proposed plan, the three-day sales tax holiday would be August 2-4 and the seven-day disaster-preparedness tax holiday would be May 31-June 6.

In response to queries about scheduling disaster-preparedness tax exemption holidays in the days before approaching storms, Avila said fixing specific dates is the better tact because of the unpredictability of hurricanes and other disasters.

The “concept language” reviewed Monday would also amend rules for non-profit hospitals to qualify for charitable tax exemptions, reduce traffic fines for motorists who attend driver-improvement courses by 9 percent, and delay payments to “fiscally constrained counties” to offset property tax refunds granted to homeowners recovering from hurricane damage from January to June 2020 “to allow for the related state appropriation to be based on actual data, instead of an estimate.”