Amendment 3: It's wrong

Editor’s note: This is the first of two parts on Amendment 3.

This is a great clue of how wrong Amendment 3 is: Look how much wording it takes to explain it.

In today’s world of video doom-scrollers, how many voters under age 50 actually are going to read through that entire ballot language? Even fewer likely will try to think through what the amendment’s consequences will be.

Let’s just get this on the table up front: Vote no on Amendment 3. 

We’ll give it this: It’s a great qualifier for that cliché that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yes, Amendment 3 has good intentions — reducing Florida’s exorbitant property taxes. But this amendment is so wrong in so many ways. 

Likewise, there is a far better way to deal with this issue of property taxes as the equivalent of your renting from the state and the over-spending of local governments. That will be addressed next week.

Exemptions: From good to bad

It’s always good to understand the “why.” Why homestead exemptions — giving property tax breaks to full-time homeowners — came about to begin with. 

They started almost 100 years ago as a good idea. But the good became bad and has worsened over time.

Go back to the Great Depression in 1929 and early 1930s. Thousands of struggling Florida homeowners were unable to pay their property taxes and were on the verge of losing their homes.

State Rep. Dwight Rogers of Fort Lauderdale came up with the brilliant idea in 1933 of giving homeowners a $5,000 exemption on the assessed value of their homes, thus eliminating property taxes altogether for many Floridians and helping them avoid foreclosures and tax liens. Florida voters approved this idea in a constitutional amendment in 1934. 

Ever since, the state’s legislators — always wanting to give voters free stuff to keep themselves elected — have added bigger and more and more exemptions on the books.

In the 1960s, the homestead exemption for full-time homeowners grew to $10,000. In 1980, Florida voters embedded the $25,000 exemption into the state constitution. In 2008, voters added another $50,000 exemption.

But the Big Daddy of homestead tax breaks came in 1992, when Florida voters approved the Save Our Homes amendment. 

That came during a time similar to now when local governments were taking advantage of rising property values. As values went up, so did the assessed values, and thus, so did property tax collections.

While millage rates often stayed steady, rising values translated to higher tax payments and revenues. Politicians touted how they were not increasing millage rates, and thus not increasing taxes (wink, wink), even though their constituents kept paying more. 

Thousands of homesteaded senior homeowners on fixed incomes saw their taxes rise so much year after year that more and more of them couldn’t afford to stay in the homes they had paid off and lived in for decades. That’s when Lee County Property Appraiser Ken Wilkinson introduced the Save Our Homes amendment.

SOH, as it is sometimes labeled, was a huge help. It limited property-tax increases on homestead properties to the lesser of inflation or no more than 3% per year. 

But at the same time, the measure punished nonhomesteaded property owners — businesses, snow birds, renters, new residents. For them, local governments could raise their property taxes as much as 10% a year.

No wonder apartment rents are so high. Likewise, if you’re a homesteaded property owner and think your property taxes have been rising ridiculously, renters, snow birds, new residents and businesses have had it far worse. Even though many of them use fewer services than residential homeowners, they carry a heavier tax burden.

Florida’s nonhomesteaders are subsidizing the state’s full-time, long-time homeowners. Why should that be? 

Why should your snowbird neighbor who occupies a home similar to yours for only three months a year pay 1.5 times more in property taxes than you? 

What’s more, special homestead exemptions have just kept growing — for low-income senior citizens; disabled veterans and first-responders and their spouses; land used for conservation; homes with renewable energy; or homes with  increased wind resistance.

Florida TaxWatch research shows that the state’s homesteaded property is taxed at less than half (47%) of its just value, while nonhomestead property is taxed at 80%. 

OK, most people likely would not complain about the extra exemptions given to military and first-responder families. But how is that 47%-80% ratio justified? 

But now along comes Amendment 3. If you pile on top of the current exemptions the additional homestead exemptions in the proposed amendment, the disparity and subsidies will grow even more.

When one set of properties is favored over another, that merely invokes one of Milton Friedman’s rules of economics and lawmaking: What you give to one, you must take away from another. 

Homesteaders have become a special class, while everyone else pays a disproportionate share.

Spending: Something had to be done

On March 21, 2021, Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act. That turned on the federal printing presses to dole out $1.9 trillion all over the country to local governments to help them recover from COVID.

The money just kept coming. Federal outlays to state and local governments totaled $1.1 trillion more in 2023 and another $1.1 trillion more in 2024.

State and local governments spent it, too. We reported earlier this year how spending in Manatee and Sarasota counties each grew 59% from 2022 to 2025, far outpacing the growth in population and inflation. 

Statewide, property-tax collections from 2016 to 2025 increased 99%, from $29.7 billion to $59.2 billion — more than twice the combined increase in inflation and population growth.

That flood of money into local governments not only came from Washington, it also came from spikes in housing prices after the pandemic. Rising real estate prices contributed to spikes in local taxable values, which boosted property-tax collections — and resulted in higher local government spending.

You know the axiom: Governments spend what they get. 

This gusher of cash and spending caught Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attention in 2025. That’s when he made his famous remark that homesteaded homeowners are merely renting from the state. He called for the elimination of property taxes and challenged the Legislature to put the issue on the 2026 ballot.

DeSantis and Donald Trump’s DOGE also brought attention to the growth in local government spending. That deserved attention, too. 

Yes, something had to be done.

Lawmakers blew it

DeSantis’ call actually annoyed Speaker Danny Perez. Perez bristled that DeSantis never offered a plan on how to eliminate property taxes. 

At the end of the 2025 legislative session, with the Legislature not having crafted an amendment, Perez appointed 25 Republicans and 10 Democrats to a Select Committee on Property Taxes. Its mission: Craft a constitutional amendment for the 2026 ballot.

But imagine trying to corral a committee of 35 legislators, each with multitudes of opinions, to agree on a sensible tax plan that would cut the largest and most important source of operating revenue for 411 municipalities and 67 counties.

The two things on which they all agreed: Local government spending was out of control, and property-taxpayers needed relief. 

After seven months of meetings and countless hours of each members’ research, the committee came to the 2026 legislative session with seven bills in the form of proposed amendments. 

They were all flawed. 

All but one proposed just doing the same as always: increasing homestead exemptions. The Legislature rejected all of them. 

One of the biggest flaws in the process was the constant elephant in the room: How will local governments deal with shocking cuts to the taxes dollars that fund the majority of and most important local services — law enforcement, fire protection, roads, health, parks, libraries, etc.?

Many committee members asked the question. But they left it unaddressed. Essentially, the committee took the position: Too bad, folks, that’s for you to figure out. 

With lawmakers unable to satisfy DeSantis’ promise for a constitutional amendment, the governor bullied them back to Tallahassee. Even though the select committee of 35 was unable to craft a suitable amendment over seven months and lawmakers were unable to do it during the 90-day legislative session, somehow Florida’s 140 lawmakers took only two days to craft and adopt one of the most important constitutional amendments in Florida government history.

But, no surprise, the amendment turned out to be just more of the same — more and greater subsidies and exemptions (now tied to inflation) for Florida’s homesteaded property owners and small favors for everyone else.  

If approved and carried out, Amendment 3 over five years is estimated to reduce local government property tax collections by $45.8 billion (77%) — from $59.2 billion to $13.4 billion. 

And the message from the governor and legislators to local governments was the same: Sorry, you deal with the consequences. 

It doesn’t take much to figure out what those consequences will be. That $45.8 billion in taxes are not going away and back into Floridians’ pockets. Most of that will be shifted to new taxes and fees and, likely, higher millage rates. 

In Florida TaxWatch’s “Save Our Taxpayers” report in January 2026, it said: “Drastically reducing property taxes without adequate controls on local government spending will not only shift the tax burden among property taxpayers … Florida local governments currently have more than $13 billion in untapped local option sales taxes available to them. Dramatic reductions in property taxes would likely be, at least partially, a property tax/sales tax swap.”

What’s more, TaxWatch reports: “... Swapping property taxes for sales taxes would result in significant losses in gross regional product and real disposable personal income.”

Great. Now think ahead if Amendment 3 passes. Imagine the rancor that will arise when city and county administrators are telling their elected commissioners they have a choice: close parks, shut down libraries, cut back on road and city maintenance. Or: raise millage rates and other fees and taxes. We’ve seen how residents revolt when there are proposals to sell parks and shut down libraries.

So when we say Florida’s legislators blew it, that’s not just because of the flawed amendment that would benefit homesteaders at the expense of renters, businesses, snowbirds and new residents. And it’s not just because lawmakers handed the dirty work to local governments.

They blew it because throughout the seven months of committee hearings, through the spring legislative session and the summer special session, never did lawmakers do the obvious: Seriously look around the country and find other states that have better tax systems. Never did they seriously explore other options than exemptions or other ways to address uncontrolled local government spending. 

This was a grand failure. In business, before launching a new initiative or addressing a perplexing issue, business leaders automatically ask: Who is doing it right? Would that work for us?

For that reason alone — not exploring alternatives — Amendment 3 should be rejected. But it also should be rejected because the amendment is flawed in so many other ways. 

Florida lawmakers owe it to taxpayers to do a far better job. On this, they should start over.

We recommend: Vote no on Amendment 3

Next week: What Florida should do instead of Amendment 3.

This opinion originally appeared on sister site YourObserver.com.