A new University of North Florida poll found 63% of insured Florida homeowners are more worried about insurance rates than property taxes. Amendment 3 is sold as relief for homeowners, but it would cut the local revenues that pay for emergency response and the public safety infrastructure helping hold those rates in check.
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How? Most of Florida’s local governments draw roughly 30-40% of their general fund receipts from property taxes and spend roughly 30-40% of that fund on public safety. Rating agencies price insurance premiums partially on the services a community can field in an emergency. Those services are rated by response time, suppression capacity and access to related infrastructure. Winter Park has a top-rated fire department, and residents here see the benefit on their insurance bills.
Less visibly, local governments borrow to build emergency systems and other facilities. What they can borrow, and what it costs, depends on their general financial health. Local governments compete in the financial marketplace which creates the rules for borrowing and spending. Stress that capacity by limiting revenue, and a government pays more for equipment and infrastructure, over more years, with that money reallocated from other priorities. Wall Street adds a hidden cost in the guise of diminished credit, narrowing what any community can do long before a single service is cut.
I’m already seeing my local government clients, large and small, quietly building manageable budgets with decreased dollars unevenly distributed across the state. Projects debated publicly and ranked as priorities are being reconsidered, not because the community stopped wanting them, but because no one can plan for the means to assure funding. The cuts are certain. What they will be over time is not.
That’s the chaos already coming from Amendment 3, with virtually no financial strategy to offset the impacts.
Florida has practiced home rule since 1968, when its current constitution was adopted, giving cities and counties substantive control of planning by law. Amendment 3 would shift more control to the state, with the power through general law to limit options further. Property tax is the only tax detailed in Florida’s Constitution, which also prohibits an income tax. Writing this restriction into the constitution places the one revenue source communities control well beyond local reach, offering no alternatives in return but vague references to state grants for beleaguered areas.
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That’s not tax reform. It’s asking 400-plus cities and 67 counties to keep planning for their future while someone else holds the checkbook.
What’s equally concerning is the decision-making process for this proposal. The Legislature acted to place this measure on the ballot in a matter of hours. The county-by-county analysis of what it would cost arrived months later. In my profession, you study a change before you make it. Florida has a Taxation and Budget Reform Commission convening next year that is purpose-built for exactly this work.
Property taxes deserve close examination. They won’t get it from a constitutional amendment written before anyone could run the numbers.
Owen Beitsch has been a practicing professional planner for almost 40 years and has been associated with the planning curriculum at a major Florida university program for almost 30 years. He is an economic consultant and writes here as a private citizen.
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