In Florida Department of Revenue v. City of Gainesville, the Florida Supreme Court addressed the scope of Article VII, Section 3(a), of the Florida Constitution, which exempts from ad valorem taxation municipal property used exclusively by the municipality “for municipal or public purposes.” The Court held that municipal property is constitutionally exempt only where it is used to provide services “essential” to the health, morals, safety, or general welfare of the citizens of the municipality. Applying this gloss to the “municipal purpose” language of the constitutional exemption, the Court concluded that a statute purporting to subject to taxation municipal property owned and used by the City of Gainesville to provide telecommunications services was not facially unconstitutional. The Court, however, did not decide whether the statute would be unconstitutional as applied to Gainesville’s telecommunications property.
In its struggle to craft an appropriate test for the scope of the exemption under Article VII, the Gainesville Court arguably departed from the very principles of constitutional interpretation it expressly embraced. Even so, a careful reading of the opinion reveals that it does not impose a narrow limitation on the scope of the exemption, and lower courts would be mistaken to read it as doing so.