Clarence Howard

Clarence Howard writes The Howard Ledger, the Orlando Citizen’s conservative column. He is the paper’s proprietor-editor by trade and temperament: a publisher and photographer who has made payroll in a tourist town, sat through more county budget workshops than he can count, and learned to read a public ledger the way other men read a box score. He writes like it: number first, promise second, politics last.

Where he stands

  • Tourist taxes: the Tourist Development Tax fence is a feature, not a loophole. Visitors pay it voluntarily, residents don’t, and that bargain built the convention center and the venues. Dedicated means dedicated.
  • Growth: growth should pay its own impact fees — and subsidies or tax giveaways to billion-dollar attractions are wrong from the right, not just the left.
  • Housing: supply, permitting speed and zoning by-right. Not rent control, and not raiding dedicated funds.
  • Transit: pay for what riders demonstrably use; no open-ended rail subsidies without ridership gates.
  • Schools: parental choice, vocational tracks, money following students — and OCPS budgets read line by line.
  • Government: no new local tax without a referendum. Term limits, sunshine, and deep suspicion of task forces that exist to spend.

Latest columns

The complete archive is on his author page.

Back to the Opinion desk — where G. L. Dyer and Margaret Shepherd are usually disagreeing with him.