JetBlue Airways Corp. has been improperly avoiding as much as $800,000 a year in property taxes, according to new Orange County Property Appraiser Amy Mercado.
That’s enough money to pay the salaries of 11 public-school teachers.
At issue are three properties JetBlue leases at Orlando International Airport: An employee training center, a hotel and a maintenance hangar. JetBlue’s properties, Mercado said, appear to have been “inadvertently” left off of Orange County’s property tax rolls for years — and therefore exempt from paying the tax that funds everything from garbage collection to parks to police.
Mercado, who examined JetBlue’s properties after the Orlando Sentinel asked why the company wasn’t paying taxes on them, said she will add the properties to the tax rolls this year.
She also said her office may attempt to collect back taxes from New York-based JetBlue, which lost nearly $1.4 billion last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic but earned more than $2.6 billion in profits over the four years before that.
“We’re still exploring all our options right now,” said Mercado, who defeated previous Orange County Property Appraiser Rick Singh during last fall’s elections.
A spokesman for JetBlue said the company has not been contacted by Mercado’s office and declined to answer specific questions. But he said generally, “JetBlue takes its tax obligations in the state of Florida seriously.”
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