Floridians Stage Tea Parties Over New Service Tax

In a 1980s version of the Boston Tea Party, protesters dumped tea in Florida harbors Wednesday to launch a drive aimed at repealing a tax on services that was collected for the first time by everyone from lawyers to hair stylists.

Tallahassee lawyer Dexter Douglass said he was not half as riled by the new tax on his services as he was by the new tax on his morning newspaper. When he put down a quarter at a newsstand, the clerk told him to come up with 2 cents more.

“That irritated me a . . . lot more than paying tax on legal fees,” he said. “I cuss the newspapers, but I read three or four of them.”

The tax that took effect Wednesday extended Florida’s 5% sales tax to dozens of previously untaxed services, such as construction, advertising and pest control.

35 at Miami Protest

Lobbyist Bob Levy of Miami donned a tricorn hat and Indian jacket for a gathering of about 35 tax opponents in business suits and shirt sleeves along Miami’s Biscayne Bay.

“The parallels are very clear,” Levy said. “The Boston Tea Party was in opposition to a bad tax. This is a bad tax.”

In Pensacola, about 80 people dumped tea into Pensacola Bay. Other “tea parties” were organized in Jacksonville, Fort Myers and Cape Canaveral.

The protest group, calling itself Sales Taxes Oppressing People, or STOP, needs 343,000 signatures of registered voters to force a vote on a constitutional amendment in 1988. The measure would bar a levy on any services that had not been taxed before June 5, 1986.