We are often implored to look local after graduation to find employment. Gainesville has an entrepreneurial culture and is trying to become a center for start-ups, especially in the tech industry. Unfortunately, the policies of the local government will be sure to stunt Gainesville's growth for the foreseeable future. Gainesville is obsessed with collecting large tax revenues, regulating everything and taking profits from brick-and-mortar businesses to give to imaginary ones.
Alachua County has the highest property tax rate in the state of Florida. For fiscal year 2010-11, Alachua County's millage rate was 23.73 mills. The people who get hit the worst from this are students. While most of us don't own any property, our landlords must pay the full property tax rate to the city and county governments, which gets passed straight on to us in the form of higher rent.
On top of gutting us with taxes, the city wants to test alternative energy sources to see if they work or not, so it hits students with some of the highest utility bills in the state of Florida. I had a utility bill of about $500 one month just for my small rental house. That's more than my family pays for an old, two-story wooden house in the Florida Panhandle. The new biofuel plant that's being built by Gainesville Regional Utilities will add hundreds of dollars to the utility bills of Gainesville's families each year. I cringe when GRU asks me to donate to a fund that helps poor people to keep the lights on. The "progressives" in local government are doing much more to keep them in the dark than I am when GRU charges above-market rates for electricity and water.
Another black eye on Gainesville's business climate is the city ordinances that seem to be lengthier than "War and Peace." I remember when my church was trying to build on University Avenue. It seemed like there were more employees in the city construction code department than projects going on in the whole region. City employees mandated what color the bricks would be, what kind of lettering would be on the building and what the walkway around the building would look like. These additional regulatory burdens added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the project's cost.
Now Gainesville is at it again. The city is attempting to set up Innovation Square in downtown Gainesville by providing start-ups with access to below-market rent along with other support services. This is wrong because the city is picking favorites, much like the federal government is. Gainesville is taxing successful businesses that create jobs and subsidizing embryonic entities that will have very high failure rates. While these start-ups are critical to our economy, it is the job of financial institutions and venture capitalists to pick winners, not local government officials.
As a case in point about Gainesville's ineptitude, a huge tree was leaning on our house and coming close to crushing it. We tried to get a tree company out to remove it, but they were stopped because Gainesville requires a permit to take out trees of a certain diameter, even if they are in danger of causing damage to life and property and are split down the middle. The city forces a hard close on the bars, doesn't attempt to add parking anywhere and has some of the worst roads I've seen, perhaps because it prioritizes the RTS bus service over everything else. These restrictions are senseless.
Gainesville has enormous potential if it would stop getting in its own way. It needs to lower property tax rates, stop trying to pick winners and losers and loosen up to allow more personal freedom.
If it does these things, it will attract economic growth and businesses that are currently scared away by the anti-corporate mentality of Gainesville. Contrary to popular belief, not everything in life needs an ordinance and an accompanying tax to go with it.
Travis Hornsby is a statistics and economics senior at UF. His column appears on Mondays.
