The Jan. 29 property tax amendment may not be getting much of a helping hand from the business lobby after all.
Last month, the Florida Association of Realtors announced it would spend up to $1 million to promote the ballot initiative from the Legislature that would ask homeowners to trade their Save Our Homes tax cap for a beefier homestead exemption.
The Florida Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries of Florida quickly chimed in with statements that they would kick in some support.
But AIF President Barney Bishop now says he didn't bring it up with his board at their meeting last week, and isn't so sure they'll put any money behind the effort championed by Gov. Charlie Crist.
Business groups are still sore they didn't get much out of the bill after facing some of the state's steepest property tax spikes in recent years. They also say the amendment remains a hard sell with voters.
"I have no idea what kind of financial support, if any, they will approve," Bishop said. "Our higher priority is the Hometown Democracy effort."
To that aim, AIF has helped form a new group called Save Our Constitution along with veteran election lawyer John French, former House Speaker John Thrasher and former state GOP chairman Al Cardenas. That group is clearly geared toward undercutting Hometown by getting voters to revoke signatures they've given to the group, thanks to a new signature revocation law.
"If the business community doesn't do anything to thwart (Hometown's) signature gathering process, yes, it will get on the ballot," Bishop said.

After a year of soaring rhetoric that Florida's property tax system is broken, state lawyers are set to argue next week that Save Our Homes serves a valid public purpose and shouldn't be scrapped.
The protection that limits how much taxes can go up on resident homeowners is being challenged by a group of Alabama lawyers in Leon County Circuit Court, where a hearing on the state's motion to dismiss is set for Monday.
Birmingham, Ala., residents Jerome and Joyce Lanning own a second home in the Destin area where their taxes have doubled since 1995 without the cap. They want class-action status to include every snowbird with a second home in Florida, and scared lawmakers enough to get a briefing on the case during their June property tax special session.
They also want the state to block the tax cuts headed for property owners this year on the grounds that everyone will benefit from the heightened burdens of non-homesteaders.
Lawmakers called Save Our Homes "broken" during the session as they placed a referendum on the Jan. 29 ballot that asks homesteaders to trade the cap for a bigger homestead exemption.
Meanwhile, the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission is slated next month to start studying how to change Save Our Homes to help those "trapped" in their homes by the tax break.
But government lawyers have written in court filings that the amendment "does not deny equal treatment to non-residents, nor does it discriminate against them" as it relates to the Fourteenth Amendment's privileges and immunities clause.
Nor does it violate the Commerce Clause because "any slight or incidental burden ... resulting from the Save Our Homes amendment is outweighed by its benefits in promoting the public interest," wrote Greg Stewart, a Tallahassee lawyer representing Okaloosa and Walton counties.

Don't fault the trial lawyers for the mess surrounding Minouche Noel's stalled claims payment.
So says, well, the state's trial lawyer association.
Lawmakers and Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink are trying to force the law firm for the Palm Bay woman to drop its efforts to pocket more of her $8.5 million state settlement than the Legislature mandated last spring.
Attorney Sheldon Schlesinger filed a lien earlier this month to try and get $667,000 more out of the settlement than the $1 million the deal allows.
But "if there is any lesson that can be taken from the resulting controversy," the Florida Justice Association said Monday, "it is that Florida's claims bill process is still terribly broken and needs to be fixed."
Among the group's chief problems: lawyers have to hire lobbyists.
FJA, formerly known as the Florida Trial Lawyers, claims the process is "over burdensome and fundamentally unfair" because people injured by the state must go to court for restitution, then lobby the Legislature and governor to OK the payment.
Noel was left in a wheelchair after a botched surgery on her spine by a state doctor when she was six months old. Her case took more than a decade to wind its way from a Broward County courtroom to the halls of the Capitol, a hit-and-miss process the group says has become "increasingly politicized."
The trial lawyers then implore lawmakers to "take politics and lobbyists out of the process" by handing over the claims process to the courts exclusively.

Gov. Charlie Crist faces an August deadline to pen an accord with the Seminole Tribe of Florida to expand slot machine offerings at its seven casinos.
And one man pledging to support the governor when he cuts a deal is . . . House Speaker Marco Rubio.
The fervently anti-gambling Rubio called out Crist this week in an opinion piece in the evangelical publication Florida Baptist Witness for allowing bills expanding gambling to become law.
But the speaker said this week that Crist's hands are tied on the Seminole expansion since the U.S. Department of Interior gave Florida until late August to negotiate a deal.
"He's got no choice, and that's why I'll support him on that, even though it will expand gambling," Rubio said.
Rubio is girding himself to oppose Miami-Dade's second stab at bringing in Las Vegas-style slot machines.
Broward has already done so, which is why the Seminole Tribe alleges it's also entitled to install what are known in the biz as Class III machines, which rake in more dough.
Overall, Rubio maintains that the gaming industry is having a field day without the certain veto of any gaming expansion Jeb Bush posed.
"For the last seven or eight years, the governor made it pretty clear he would veto anything that expanded gambling," Rubio explained.
"That was his management style. Gov. Crist is anti-gambling. But his attitude is 'If it passes the Legislature, I'm more or less going to respect that.'"
Rubio also pledged again to take a firmer stand against gambling bills in his second year as speaker.
"The gaming industry had its best session in years, and I'm upset about it."

It's obvious Gov. Charlie Crist faces a hard sell among the conservative bedrock of Florida Republicans for his green goals.
House Speaker Marco Rubio has taken the governor to the woodshed this week for his executive orders setting goals to force utilities and auto makers to cut their carbon emissions.
Rubio penned a scathing rebuttal calling the concepts "European-style big government mandates" but seemed to soften his warnings to the governor Thursday.
"I think (Crist's call to reduce carbon emissions) is a great goal. The only question is how do you get there, with a mandate or with incentives that create technological innovations?" he said in an interview.
"If you get there with a mandate, it is going to raise utility rates."
But he also said he didn't think human impact on global warming was "junk science" and that global warming would be a huge issue "for the next 15 sessions" as Florida tries to make itself into "the Silicon Valley of green tech."
"There's no negative to doing this if you do it right," Rubio said. "I lean toward the thought process that there is global warming. But even if global warming wasn't true, there's no harm that comes from cleaning your environment."
Crist said he welcomed the coming debate Thursday morning when he announced Progress Energy was building the nation's largest wood waste energy plant in Liberty County.
Meanwhile, a top deputy to Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Bronson, one of Crist's three compatriots on the Florida Cabinet, distanced the office from the idea backed by Crist to require utilities to create one-fifth their electricity from renewable fuels like wind and solar.
"Generally speaking, Commissioner Bronson prefers reasonable goals for incentives over mandates," said Deputy Commissioner Jay Levenstein.
"We need to insure our ability to produce and deliver this energy is not out paced by our desire to meet this goal."

House Speaker Marco Rubio has finally decided to part ways with the populist governor from his own party, at least when global warming is the issue.
In a stern op-ed published today in Rubio's hometown paper, the West Miami Republican calls Gov. Charlie Crist's aim to impose caps on carbon emissions from Florida tail pipes and smoke stacks "European-style big government mandates."
He predicts the governor's executive orders this month will "fail to achieve their desired result," and "carry actual negative consequences" including higher utility prices.
"Floridians already are paying too much in taxes and insurance. The last thing we need is higher utility bills," he wrote.
Crist hosted a two-day climate change summit in Miami earlier this month where he ordered targets for reducing Florida's greenhouse gas emissions to below 1990-levels over the next four decades.
Utilities have quietly started grumbling, former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey (remember him?) has said Crist must be under the spell of Al Gore and his Hollywood allies, and now Rubio, the conservative standard-bearer for Jeb Bush in the Legislature, is taking his turn.
Read Rubio's full piece here.
Crist said Wednesday he had read the op-ed and was "encouraged" by it.
"I'm glad that he recognizes that this is a big, bold initiative that we need to be focused on."

The Rudy Giuliani team has dusted off former state Sen. Charlie Clary of Destin to try to give the New York City presidential candidate a Redneck Riviera advocate.
Giuliani's campaign announced some new grasstops supporters Tuesday, naming three regional chairs for Miami-Dade County and one for the entire Florida Panhandle.
See the complete list here.
Two other current Republican legislators, Reps. Rich Glorioso of Plant City and Julio Robaina of Miami, were named "communications chairs."
Clary has been retired from public life since term-limits forced him out of office last year.
Among the other chairs rolled out were Orange County Property Appraiser Bill Donegan for Central Florida and Paul Sharff for the West Coast.
In a conference call today, the campaign played up the added importance Florida's early primary could play in deciding nominations next year, teeing off on Barack Obama and John Edwards for saying in Monday's CNN-YouTube debate that they'd sit down and talk with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The two also said they were willing to negotiate face-to-face with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
"I think they absolutely hurt themselves when they said they'd sit down with Castro," Giuliani operative Karen Unger said.
The latest public polling for Florida shows Giuliani and Hillary Clinton leading their respective parties.