ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 For the first time in decades, thousands of people in the city of Orlando will have a new person representing them at City Hall.<\/p>\n
Five people are running to replace District 3 Commissioner Robert Stuart, who is retiring after 20 years in office.<\/a><\/p>\n [WATCH: Longtime Orlando commissioner Robert Stuart will not seek reelection]<\/p>\n District 3 includes neighborhoods like Baldwin Park, Audubon Park, Rosemont, and College Park.<\/p>\n News 6 anchor Lisa Bell sat down<\/a> one-on-one with each of the candidates in the non-partisan race: Samuel Chambers, Roger Chapin, Chris Durant, Kimberly Kiss, and Mira Tanna to ask each of them the same set of questions and dig deeper on certain topics as needed.<\/p>\n Election Day is Nov. 4, with early voting from Oct. 27 to Nov. 2.<\/p>\n To find your polling place, head to the Orange County Supervisor of Elections website.<\/a><\/p>\n You can look at the full interviews by clicking on the candidate names below:<\/p>\n Samuel Chambers<\/a> | Roger Chapin<\/a> | Chris Durant<\/a> | Kimberly Kiss<\/a> | Mira Tanna<\/a><\/p>\n One of those questions was about property tax reform. Gov. Ron DeSantis says that they should be cut, if not completely eliminated, and he\u2019s not the only state official talking about it. Here\u2019s each candidate\u2019s response to that proposal.<\/p>\n [WATCH: Meet the candidates for Orlando\u2019s City Council District 3 race]<\/p>\n ROGER CHAPIN <\/p>\n I don\u2019t know what the plan is because local governments rely on property taxes to fund, obviously, the government. And so, when I\u2019m out talking to people, you know, people want wider streets, wider sidewalks. They want stormwater fixed. They want potholes fixed. They want code enforcement. They want police. They want fire. So, I don\u2019t know what the impact is, how they\u2019re going to replace that revenue. People should be very worried about how it\u2019s going to impact local government. That\u2019s not to say that there\u2019s not this affordability issue of property taxes, home values, insurance, but it\u2019s certainly going to be something where you\u2019re going to use a scalpel and not kind of a machete if you\u2019re going to cut around the edges, because you have to be very careful, because local government is closest to the people. So, if they\u2019re going to just do away with property taxes somehow, first of all, it\u2019s going to have to go to a referendum because the governor doesn\u2019t have the power to do that, neither does the legislature. Then you\u2019re giving people the ability to cut their own taxes, so we just need to make sure that we\u2019ve got a plan that is a balanced approach when you cut revenue to replace revenue.<\/p>\n KIMBERLY KISS<\/p>\n I would agree, some reform would be needed. I don\u2019t think it would be helpful to fully eliminate property taxes because this is one of the number one ways that we fund our local police and our local fire department and we know that safety is one of the top concerns of residents in Orlando. After knocking on so many doors, I\u2019ve heard that over and over again. We love our police, we love our firefighters. We want to continue to support them and that\u2019s a really great source of funding for that. At the same time, our property taxes have gone up quite a bit and providing relief, providing in, I would say maybe a voucher or a rebate to certain groups, maybe that\u2019s more for teachers and firefighters and some of our public servants that really need a break in that regard. I think there\u2019s also an opportunity to also encourage more rehabilitation rather than new construction in some of our single-family developments.<\/p>\n [WATCH: UCF professor: DeSantis would like \u2018one last political victory\u2019 on property taxes]<\/p>\n MIRA TANNA<\/p>\n Well, my reaction is that it\u2019s a way for the state government to keep control over local communities. And, you know, obviously, we need our local property taxes for government to function for our schools. And we know that there is wide support for the work that local government does and for our children to have an excellent education. So I think it\u2019s both unpopular and short-sighted.<\/p>\n SAMUEL CHAMBERS<\/p>\n You know, it sounds great on face value that, oh, we\u2019re gonna cut property taxes, your tax burden to the local government is not gonna be as great. Well, let me tell you, most of city revenue, general revenue, comes from property taxes. So, if we don\u2019t have those property taxes, we can\u2019t have things like a fire department, a police department, public works, things like that. So, If it\u2019s not coming from property taxes, the revenue has to come from two other places. It can either come from the state, so now the city will be beholden to state politicians, not the local constituents, or they\u2019ll have to come a sales tax because in Florida we can\u2019t have a personal income tax. That\u2019s in the Constitution of Florida. So, the significance of having a larger sales tax is, look, working-class families, they live paycheck to paycheck. So, their entire paycheck is being applied to that sales tax because essentially every dollar they\u2019re spending is being taxed, essentially. Whereas wealthier individuals, they don\u2019t live paycheck to paycheck, so only a smaller portion of their income is actually being applied to that sales tax. So it\u2019s a regressive form of taxation which will negatively impact working-class communities rather than the wealthier upper classes.<\/p>\n CHRIS DURANT<\/p>\n When you look at the City of Orlando in our budget, you\u2019ll see that we invest more in our police and firefighters and our public safety officers than we collect in property taxes. And also, the majority of the City of Orlando\u2019s general revenue comes from property taxes, so you eliminate that, you eliminate what makes this city safe, you eliminate what makes the city connected and vibrant and I believe it\u2019s a necessity to have a collection of property taxes, so I disagree with the governor in that case. I believe it\u2019s important that we collect property taxes and that we\u2019re working with the residents that live here to make their community safer, and I believe that\u2019s a public good that we are collecting.<\/p>\n Copyright 2025 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ORLANDO, Fla. \u2013 For the first time in decades, thousands of people in the city of Orlando will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[2715,1335,139,141,140,99,6892],"class_list":{"0":"post-6275","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-orlando","8":"tag-elections","9":"tag-orange-county","10":"tag-orlando","11":"tag-orlando-headlines","12":"tag-orlando-news","13":"tag-politics","14":"tag-results-2025"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}