Why a conservative Florida county raised taxes to help children

In the months leading up to the 2020 election, hotelier and philanthropist Julian MacQueen, usually a booster for this Florida Panhandle beach destination, found himself making an unusual pitch to the other business leaders of Pensacola.   

Escambia County, he told them, was failing its children.

In all sorts of metrics of well-being, from abuse and mental health challenges to income inequality and homelessness, young people in their area ranked below those in most other Florida counties. The difference was particularly pronounced for the county’s Black children, 39% of whom lived in poverty, compared with 13% of white children.

Mr. MacQueen acknowledged that these numbers reflected a complex knot of economic, moral, and racial challenges. They were the sort of interconnected problems faced by millions of children across the country – struggles highlighted recently by the U.S. surgeon general’s office, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and other groups. In report after report, these organizations have described how multiple pressures, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have created a mental health crisis for children and families, one that is on regular display in Escambia County.

But Mr. MacQueen saw a way that his hometown could start fixing these problems. The rub, he explained to his business colleagues, was that it involved voters agreeing to increase taxes.

He still laughs thinking about it.  

“Raising taxes in Escambia County is just about the worst thing that you could try,” he says. “It’s just a bad idea.”

That may be an understatement. Escambia County is not just Republican, but overwhelmingly supportive of former President Donald Trump. A Florida county on the edge of Alabama that leans Deep South in both history and politics, it has not traditionally been friendly to new government initiatives, taxes, or even explicit activism around racial disparity. Mr. MacQueen himself has donated to