If you are not familiar with this issue, go to the right column in the "pages" section and find the page on the North Lake County Hospital District for details. Basically, this tax district has existed for 40+ years without transparency, and automatically billed property owners on their tax bills for a 1-mill tax that is split between three hospitals. The recent annual total for the tax collected is about $12-million. There is also a separate South Lake County Hospital District.
There are numerous issues and questions about where the funds are going, especially when they go to two major local hospitals that each are non-profits, but record profits over $12-million each.
Update as of August 24, 2009:
The next Board meeting will be Sept. 10th at the County Commission
offices (round building) in Tavares on Main Street. Board Member Marilyn Bainter
was successful in moving the meeting location to this bigger
facility. This meeting is NOT advertised according to the Board's
CPA because they consider the meeting notice date in taxpayer's "trim
notice" to be sufficient notice. We will post more details here
soon. We also plan to rewrite the information on the separate page in the right column to provide a
fresh overview of the issues.
Last month Marilyn Bainter asked the County Republican Executive Committee (REC) to vote on a resolution to ask the County legislators to completely eliminate the Hospital District tax completely since the District Board had resisted all attempts to modify the existing law to allow setting the millage tax rate BETWEEN 0 and 1 mill, in comparison to the current 1 mill (always passed) or nothing. However, the Hospitals sent numerous supporters to the REC meeting and lobbied the uneducated enough so they didn't understand the issues and voted against the proposed resolution. Today I called both the District's retained attorney and the CPA. The CPA talked to me, but the attorney never returned the call. Maybe tomorrow? vj
