Michael Minton Provides Remarks for Florida Trend Editorial Column

Commentary from Dean Mead’s Michael Minton, tax attorney and chair of the firm’s Agribusiness and Solar Energy teams, was featured in Florida Trend Executive Editor Mark Howard’s October column. “Sausage: Change seems to bring more complexity instead of simplicity” focuses on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, specifically the resulting complications of changes to corporate taxes. Minton provided insight about the tax consequences.

Florida Trend’s Howard first gave some background on Section 118 of the tax code and ramifications to public-private partnerships (P3s), including Florida’s usage of P3s. He explained, “These partnerships — ‘P3s’ — are agreements in which the government leverages its resources by contracting with a private company to build and operate a facility or project that performs a public function, in exchange for a series of payments over a long term.”

Minton commented about the tax increase’s inconsistency with the administration’s stated goals of using public-private partnerships to help meet the nation’s infrastructure needs.

He stated, “I think Congress was trying to balance the loss of revenue from other tax rate reductions and deductions, but everything happened so fast last fall they didn’t realize the unintended consequences of what they were doing with that kind of package. In one breath, they say tax the government’s portion of the contribution, then they say solve the problem with infrastructure with public-private partnerships. There’s certainly some kind of disconnect in those contradictory public policy positions.”

Further remarks by Minton, including feedback from his conversations with government officials, can be found in Howard’s complete column. Please click here to read it in full.