WHERE IT WILL BE — This vacant space in the Deltona Plaza shopping center, next to DaVita Dialysis, awaits refitting as a branch of the Volusia County Tax Collector’s Office. The new Deltona office for paying taxes and renewing auto registrations and driver’s licenses, as well as buying hunting and fishing licenses, is supposed to open early next year
Volusia County Tax Collector Will Roberts has announced he will open a branch office in Deltona.
The office will be opened “in early 2024” in the Deltona Plaza shopping center, located at 1200 Deltona Blvd., according to a statement issued by the Tax Collector’s Office.
With a population close to topping 100,000, Deltona is the largest city in Volusia County and the second-largest in East Central Florida.
In a statement sent from the agency, Roberts said the Deltona facility will be a sort of one-stop shop for all local and state tax-related matters, permits and licenses.
“Rather than visiting an office for vehicle registrations and another for a driver license transaction, both can be done at the same location,” Roberts was quoted as saying in the email release.
The Tax Collector’s Deltona branch office will occupy 6,840 square feet in Suites 27 and 28 of the shopping center. There will be counters with 12 stations to handle transactions, as well as a lobby for waiting customers.
The cost of setting up the Deltona branch office is $771,524. The contractor is Michael T. Weikel Construction Inc., of DeLand.
Roberts became the county’s first elected tax collector in many years in 2021, following a turn in Florida’s political history.
His election in 2020 followed the passage in 2018 of an amendment of the Florida Constitution requiring counties, including charter counties such as Volusia, to establish certain elected officials known as constitutional officers.
Constitutional officers are actually state officials elected locally. They are not part of the county government hierarchy, but are answerable to the governor. In addition to the tax collector, the sheriff, property appraiser and elections supervisor are constitutional officers.
After Volusia County established a home-rule charter government in 1971, the office of tax collector was lost in the development of the county’s Revenue Department. The Revenue Department was responsible for collecting county-levied taxes, handling titles and registrations of vehicles and boats, issuing business and occupational licenses, and selling hunting and fishing licenses.
When Roberts assumed office, he hired many of the personnel of the former Revenue Department, and he expanded the services to be provided by the Tax Collector’s Office.
Those other additional services included driver’s licenses, birth certificates and concealed-weapons permits.
When the Deltona office opens, it will be the sixth location of the Volusia County Tax Collector’s Office. Besides the agency’s main office in DeLand, there are county tax offices in Orange City, Daytona Beach, South Daytona and New Smyrna Beach. The Tax Collector’s Office now has 102 people on its payroll.
