Public opinion on taxes and fees is pretty clear. On Aug. 30, Herald-Tribune reporter Zach Murdock reported on the 2017 Citizen’s Survey presentation by University of South Florida professor Dr. Susan MacManus:

“There’s not a lot of appetite for new revenue sources of any sort and there’s certainly not a lot of appetite for increasing taxes,” MacManus told the Sarasota County Commission recently.

“If anything, the message is: ‘Keep the taxes as they are (even) if you have to keep services as they are.’ There are a lot of differences of opinion, but you can clearly see that 61 percent don’t want anything that’s going to cost them more money.”