Brodeur faces tax questions
Senate candidate, wife took two home exemptions
GOP state Senate candidate Jason Brodeur and his wife, Christina Daly Brodeur, each claimed a separate homestead exemption on their homes during the first years of their marriage from 2016 to 2018, taking advantage of a provision that the head of the state property appraisers organization said should only apply to separated or estranged couples.
Brodeur and his attorney said their interpretation of state law was that married couples can take separate exemptions as long as their finances are also completely separate. Seminole Property Appraiser David Johnson, whose office approved the dual exemption for Brodeur’s former Sanford home, agrees with that interpretation.
“Like many families today, our jobs require that we live in different cities,” Brodeur, a former state representative, said in a statement. “Upon the direction of my [property appraiser], I was advised both homes qualified for an exemption.”
But Akin Akinyemi, the property appraiser in Leon County, where a homestead exemption was claimed on a property owned by Brodeur’s wife, disagreed and said couples must be separated to claim two exemptions. He added he would have stepped in to stop it if he had known about it.
Larry Bartlett, Volusia’s appraiser and president of the statewide Florida Association of Property Appraisers, had the same interpretation of the law as Akinyemi. Bartlett said there must be “no contact, no marital relations,” adding that even spending a weekend at the other’s home would be “disqualifying.”
Nick Paprocki, campaign manager for Patricia Sigman, Brodeur’s Democratic opponent in the District 9 state Senate race on Nov. 3, said the situation was “just more proof that Jason Brodeur is a creature of the
culture of corruption in Tallahassee.”
How the exemption works
Homestead exemptions, laid out in Florida’s 1968 Constitution, are designed to prevent tax bills from forcing an individual or family out of the home they live in.
According to the state, a property owner could be eligible to receive an exemption up to $50,000 on their taxes. The exemption for the first $25,000 of a home’s value would apply to all property taxes, including school district taxes.
The second $25,000 of the home’s value is taxable, but an additional exemption on the portion of a home’s value between $50,000 and $75,000 could apply to nonschool taxes.
After their marriage in 2015, Brodeur continued to claim an exemption on a home he owned since 2007 in Sanford, records show, while the property purchased by Daly Brodeur in Leon County in 2008 also continued to claim a homestead exemption.
The dual exemptions ended when in 2019 Brodeur sold his Sanford home and began renting another property in the county, according to public records.
Because of her job at the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, Daly Brodeur’s home address and other identifying information are exempt from public records requests under Florida law, so there are no searchable public records on her property after 2015.
But homestead exemptions and property sale records are not exempt from public records requests. Thus, the Leon County Property Appraiser’s Office confirmed there were homestead exemptions claimed on the property from 2016 to 2018 and that it had not been sold since she purchased it in 2008.
In a letter, an attorney for Daly Brodeur confirmed that the Orlando Sentinel was in possession of her home address and warned the newspaper not to publish it.
The issue of whether married couples can each claim an exemption is based on wording in the Florida Constitution that only one homestead exemption was allowed per “individual or family unit.”
Charlie Crist weighs in
Brodeur spokeswoman Erin Isaac, who said the Brodeurs continue to have separate finances, cited a 2005 advisory legal opinion from then-Attorney General Charlie Crist stating that a property appraiser could grant a married couple two exemptions if they can each establish separate residences “in good faith.”
Isaac also cited a 1977
Florida Department of Revenue rule stating that if a married couple has separate permanent residences and “family units,” both can be granted homestead exemptions.
Johnson confirmed his office approved Brodeur’s continued exemption and examined the couple’s records to make sure they had no financial connection.
But he did acknowledge its rarity. Only 69 married couples in the county are currently taking out two exemptions, he said, and “in some cases, they’re separated and they’re not divorced, but they’ve established separate family units.”
The challenge is that a family unit “has really never been defined in the statute,” Johnson said. “And the criteria that we use in this office is if a married couple [must] prove that they have totally and distinct financial relationships. There’s no commingling of assets. They file separate tax returns. And there are two properties.”
Bartlett, however, cited several court cases to back up his assertion that married couples must be separated or estranged in order to claim two exemptions.
Brklacic v. Parrish, a 2014 Florida District Court of Appeal decision, states that a married couple is considered a family unit “when the marriage is intact, as opposed to the couple being separated or estranged.”
Even if they live in separate residences, the decision states, they are a family unit if they “present themselves as a married couple.”
Another Court of Appeal decision from 2016, Endsley v. Parrish, stated, “The law is well-settled that a harmonious family unit, even if living apart, cannot claim more than one homestead exemption in the State of Florida.”
Those decisions, Bartlett said, essentially mean that “you’ve got to be the equivalent of a stranger, which means no getting together on weekends and stuff like that.”
Akinyemi agreed with Bartlett’s interpretation.
“You cannot still be together,” the Leon appraiser said. “You cannot go to the house to sleep over once every other week and call it ‘separate.’ That’s not considered separate.”
Isaac and Brodeur did not answer a question asking whether Brodeur stayed at his wife’s home when serving in the Florida House until 2018, or whether she stayed at his.
Akinyemi said his office depends on property owners to keep them informed of any changes, such as a husband and wife beginning to claim dual exemptions, because once an exemption is approved the office doesn’t continuously check into whether it stays valid.
“We send everybody a card [as] a reminder,” he said, asking that “’If anything has changed, please fill out this card and send it back to us.’ So other than that, we don’t take any further action. … It wouldn’t be on our radar.”
The penalties for intentional homestead fraud include a tax lien placed
against properties, all back taxes and a “substantial” penalty of 50% of the unpaid taxes for each year.
But if Johnson signed off on a dual exemption, even though the Leon office wasn’t informed, Akinyemi said he would not consider such a case intentional fraud.
He also said going to court to get back taxes in such a situation would be a “judgment call” depending on how “straightforward and winnable” a case would be.
In most such cases, he said, when he learns of a dual exemption, “what I’ve done is to just issue a ‘cease and desist.’ We would say, ‘Hey, just so you know, with all we can find, this should not be the case. You need to pick one and let go of one.”