- July 6, 2026
This summer, Tallahassee gave Florida taxpayers a lot to talk about. The Legislature's June special session sent a sweeping property tax constitutional amendment to the November ballot, promising to reshape how homeowners fund local government for a generation. Meanwhile, CFO Blaise Ingoglia's Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight has rolled through county after county, from Palm Beach to Flagler, tallying up hundreds of millions of dollars in what his office calls excessive spending. Add in the federal DOGE effort in Washington, and the message from every level of government is the same: taxpayers are tired of paying more for less, and elected officials had better start showing their work.
Those debates matter, and Volusia County residents should stay engaged in all of them. But there is a quieter, less partisan lever that our city and county commissions can pull right now, one that does not require a constitutional amendment, a statewide audit, or a single dollar of new spending: regulatory reform.
Every business owner in Ormond Beach, DeLand, or Daytona Beach can tell you the same story. It is rarely the tax bill that keeps them up at night. It is the permit that took four months instead of four weeks. It is the third round of site plan revisions for a change no inspector can quite explain. It is the parking minimum written for a 1985 strip mall that makes a walkable downtown building financially impossible to construct today. None of that shows up on a property tax bill, but all of it shows up in higher rents, delayed job creation, and empty storefronts.
This is the part of the affordability conversation that gets the least attention, because it does not come with a press conference or a ballot measure. Regulatory compliance is a hidden tax, paid not to the county but to attorneys, engineers, and expediters, and passed straight through to the tenant, the homebuyer, and the customer. A builder who waits eight months for a permit that should take eight weeks does not absorb that cost. He prices it into every unit he eventually builds. A small business owner who has to hire a consultant just to interpret the sign code passes that cost on in her prices. Multiply that across every project in Volusia County and you have a meaningful, invisible drag on affordability that no tax cut can fully offset.
The good news is that this problem is entirely within local control, and fixing it does not touch a single dollar of local government revenue. A faster permit does not cost the county anything. A simplified zoning code does not require a millage adjustment. A city that reduces the number of discretionary approvals a small business must clear before opening its doors is not giving anything away; it is simply getting out of the way of economic activity that was going to generate sales tax, property tax, and jobs anyway.
Regulatory reform is one of the few tools available to local government that can genuinely grow the pie rather than just arguing over how to slice it. There is a real, practical playbook here, and versions of it have worked in fast-growing communities across the Southeast. Cities can establish guaranteed permit turnaround times, with automatic approval or a fee refund if the deadline is missed. They can create true one-stop-shop permitting so a small business does not have to navigate four departments that do not talk to each other. They can adopt by-right approval for projects that already meet the code, rather than requiring a public hearing for routine matters that inject months of uncertainty into a business plan. They can conduct a regular regulatory audit, the same way Ingoglia's office audits spending, asking which rules on the books are actually protecting public health and safety and which ones simply protect the status quo. And they can build sunset provisions into new ordinances so that regulations expire unless a commission affirmatively renews them, rather than accumulating indefinitely.
Skeptics will worry that deregulation means cutting corners on safety or neighborhood character. It does not have to. The goal is not to eliminate standards; it is to eliminate the delay, duplication, and discretion that add cost without adding safety. A building either meets fire code or it does not. A restaurant either passes health inspection or it does not. Reasonable standards can be enforced quickly and predictably. What Volusia County residents cannot afford is a system where the same builder must satisfy the same standard three separate times because three separate departments will not coordinate.
As our state grapples with the property tax amendment on the November ballot and CFO Ingoglia continues to expose wasteful spending county by county, Volusia's city and county commissions have an opportunity to lead rather than wait. Regulatory reform will not replace the need for spending discipline, and it is not a substitute for the tax relief debate playing out statewide. But it is the rare policy that grows jobs, improves affordability, and strengthens the local economy without costing local government a single dollar of revenue. That should make it the easiest vote our local elected officials cast all year.
Duncan DeMarsh previously served as the vice chairman of the Volusia County Republican Party and a legislative aide. He is currently deployed with the Florida Army National Guard.
