How & where to vote.

No, this is not a property tax. It is a half-cent sales tax added to every dollar you spend at Brevard stores, gas stations, and restaurants. You never write a check for it — it comes off the receipt, half a cent at a time.

An illustrative Brevard household covers on the order of $200–$300 a year of it, out of purchases they were already making. Your actual contribution depends on how much you spend on taxable goods and services; groceries and prescription medicines are generally exempt. See the calculator on the ballot page for the methodology (household median income, taxable-goods share, and half-cent rate) and to enter your own numbers. Your Brevard County property tax is completely separate and is not affected by this ballot measure in any way.

Visitors contribute to this tax when they make taxable purchases in Brevard. The County says a significant amount of collections comes from out-of-county visitors, but it does not publish an official percentage. Cocoa Beach alone hosts about 2 million visitors a year against a resident population under 12,000. Every one of those visitors pays the same half-cent every time they buy a coffee, rent a jet ski, or fill up a rental car. This is one of the only mechanisms Brevard has to convert Florida tourism directly into lagoon restoration funding. The exact percentage is being verified against the current program planning documents.

Brevard's total sales tax rate is 7%. Half a cent of that (the "SOIRL half-cent") is the piece that funds lagoon restoration. Groceries and prescriptions are exempt.

No. It is a renewal of the existing half-cent tax voters approved in 2016 with 62% support. Same tax, extended for another ten years. Nothing new, nothing bigger.

The existing half-cent tax expires December 31, 2026; the renewal is decided on November 3, 2026. A NO vote would end the local revenue stream after that expiration. Existing contracts and legally available balances would be handled under applicable county rules; projects without other funding could be delayed, reduced, or cancelled.

But "stops" understates the damage. Civil infrastructure of this scale — septic-to-sewer conversions, wastewater plant upgrades, muck dredging, stormwater retrofits — takes one to two years just in permitting before construction can begin. State DEP permits. Water management district permits. Army Corps of Engineers permits for dredging. Federal environmental reviews. Then another 6–12 months to competitively bid the work, evaluate contractors, negotiate terms, and lock in a builder.

If the tax stops in 2027 and a future election tries to restart it, the program does not just "pick up next year." All that in-flight design and permitting work gets shelved. Permits expire. Environmental review windows close. Contractor bids expire — and once a contractor is off a project, they redeploy their crews to their next job. They are not sitting around waiting for the county to figure it out. When the county comes back to them, the whole procurement has to start over. New bids. New evaluations. New pricing (usually higher). New scheduling.

The realistic setback is more than one year — because permitting cycles, contractor re-procurement, and design compliance windows all restart from the beginning of a new program. Every year of that gap is a year of continued nitrogen loading, another algae bloom season, another chance for the fragile seagrass recovery to reverse. A specific number of years cannot be published here without case-by-case project data; it is described qualitatively rather than projected. Ecosystems do not wait for procurement cycles.

Anyone who has built one of these projects knows how civil infrastructure actually works. Vote as if you know it too.

The County states that a significant amount of collections comes from out-of-county visitors, but it does not publish an official percentage. It is a sales tax — anyone who buys anything in Brevard contributes. Tourists help fund the lagoon they came to see. The exact percentage is being verified against the current program planning documents.

Both. Two calm hurricane seasons helped. Recovery has occurred alongside sustained nutrient-reduction work; establishing exactly how much any single program contributed requires basin-by-basin analysis. NOAA and Harbor Branch scientists call the recovery "encouraging but fragile." Continued nitrogen source reduction is why there is a viable seed bank left to regrow from.

All sales taxes have regressive elements. Florida's exempts groceries and prescriptions, which softens that. The County states that a significant amount of collections comes from out-of-county visitors; no official percentage is published. And the benefits — flood protection, cleaner water, protected property values, restored fisheries — accrue broadly, including to lower-income neighborhoods that otherwise carry disproportionate environmental burden. An honest tradeoff; on balance the tax does more good than harm.

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