Politics
Jeff Brandes: Where Amendment 3 gets weird
Every constitutional amendment solves one problem. The best ones anticipate the next ten.
Amendment 3 promises meaningful property tax relief. It may deliver exactly that. But constitutional amendments don’t simply change tax bills. They change incentives. When incentives change, governments, businesses, developers, and homeowners adapt.
None of these questions are predictions. Some may never happen. Others may already be quietly beginning. Their purpose is simpler: before Florida permanently rewrites its Constitution, we should think through the second- and third-order consequences.
Because constitutions don’t just change policy.
They change behavior.
- Does government actually get smaller, or does it simply rearrange itself?
If local governments lose billions in ad valorem revenue, do they reduce spending, or do they increasingly rely on fire assessments, stormwater fees, utility charges, Community Development Districts, Municipal Service Benefit Units, and other non-ad valorem financing?
Government rarely disappears. It rearranges itself.
- Do property taxes simply change names?
If property taxes fall but assessments and mandatory fees rise, have Floridians reduced the cost of government, or simply changed how they pay for it?
The tax bill may get smaller. The receipt may get longer.
- Could some long-term homeowners actually pay more?
Many long-term homeowners already benefit from Save Our Homes protections that keep their taxable values well below market value. If local governments rely more on flat assessments and fees that aren’t reduced by homestead exemptions, some of the homeowners with the greatest tax protections today could unexpectedly pay more tomorrow.
- Do HOA fees become the new property tax?
If local governments stop accepting private roads, parks, stormwater systems, and other infrastructure because they can’t afford decades of maintenance, those costs don’t disappear.
They move from City Hall to the homeowners’ association.
Instead of paying one property tax bill each year, homeowners may end up paying monthly HOA fees.
- Does Florida start zoning by revenue? Costco or cul-de-sac?
Communities have traditionally judged development by planning principles.
Tomorrow they may ask a different question:
Which produces the stronger city balance sheet: a Costco or a cul-de-sac?
If fiscal yield becomes another planning criterion, commercial projects may become more attractive than neighborhoods, and luxury homes more attractive than starter homes.
When the math changes, planning priorities change with it.
- Could starter homes become harder to build?
Florida has a starter home shortage.
But starter homes often generate less long-term property tax revenue while requiring the same roads, parks, police protection, fire service, and infrastructure as larger homes.
Could a constitutional amendment designed to help homeowners inadvertently make it harder for the next generation to become homeowners?
- Does growth become a liability?
For decades, growth has been viewed as a fiscal asset.
What happens if every new neighborhood brings more long-term costs than long-term revenue?
Communities may stop asking, How do we accommodate growth? and start asking, Can we afford it?
- What happens to the city nobody wants?
Imagine a small city overwhelmed by rising infrastructure costs, pension obligations, debt, deferred maintenance, and shrinking property tax revenue.
Residents decide that dissolving the city is the least bad option.
But what if the county doesn’t want it?
Taking over the city means inheriting its roads, utilities, parks, pension obligations, debt, and deferred maintenance.
Florida law guarantees every resident a government.
It doesn’t answer what happens when no government wants to inherit the bill.
- Does infrastructure become the hot potato?
For generations, developers built roads, parks, stormwater systems, and other infrastructure with the expectation that local government would eventually own and maintain them.
What happens if local governments increasingly decide they don’t want the liability?
Roads, parks, and stormwater systems stay private.
The infrastructure doesn’t disappear.
The responsibility simply shifts to homeowners associations, Community Development Districts, and private entities that ultimately bill residents directly.
- What happens when inflation keeps widening the gap?
The homestead exemption grows automatically with inflation.
So do police salaries, fire equipment, asphalt, concrete, insurance, and infrastructure costs.
Inflation works on both sides of the equation. It shields more property from taxation while making the government more expensive every year.
If the gap widens a little in 2027, what does Florida look like in 2037?
- Who ultimately picks up the tab?
When one part of the tax base shrinks, someone else eventually pays.
Does more of the burden shift to businesses, tourists, future homebuyers, utility customers, and renters?
More than one-third of Floridians rent. They rely on the same police officers, firefighters, roads, parks, drainage systems, and libraries, but receive none of the expanded homestead exemption.
Property tax relief doesn’t eliminate the cost of government. It changes who pays.
- Does anyone actually “defund the police?”
Probably not.
The change is likely to be much quieter.
A growing city determines it needs eight additional police officers to keep pace with population growth.
The budget funds two.
The same thing happens with firefighters, engineers, building inspectors, planners, and public works crews.
Nobody votes to cut public safety.
Government simply stops keeping pace with the people it serves.
- Could your insurance premium rise because your property taxes fell?
This may be the strangest consequence of all.
A significant portion of a community’s ISO Public Protection Classification is based on the fire department itself: staffing, training, equipment, and station location. Insurers use that classification when pricing homeowners insurance.
If fiscal pressure leads to fewer firefighters, delayed hiring, aging equipment, or fewer stations, could higher insurance premiums offset some of the property tax savings?
In a state where homeowners’ insurance is already one of the sharpest edges of the affordability crisis, has anyone modeled whether degraded fire protection could cost homeowners more than the tax cut saves?
Has anyone modeled it at all?
- What happens to aging infrastructure?
Roads, bridges, water systems, seawalls, sidewalks, and public buildings don’t stop aging because voters changed the Constitution.
Deferred maintenance is politically easy.
Replacing a failed bridge isn’t.
And if investors begin viewing local revenues as less predictable, borrowing costs could rise as well, making every future infrastructure project more expensive before the first shovel ever hits the ground.
- Does Tallahassee become City Hall?
If local governments develop structural deficits, pressure will build for the Legislature to create a state trust fund to replace lost local revenue.
But trust funds don’t create money.
They require taxes somewhere else.
Once Tallahassee starts writing the checks, it inevitably starts writing the rules.
Cities and counties could be required to meet minimum millage rates, maintenance standards, or state funding formulas to qualify.
Then comes the annual fight.
Who gets how much?
Every funding formula creates winners and losers.
Once billions of dollars ride on that formula, every city doubles down on lobbyists.
- Is local government still local?
Florida has spent decades debating home rule.
But if cities and counties increasingly depend on Tallahassee for funding, formulas, and budget decisions, does local government slowly become another arm of state government?
You don’t have to abolish local control to weaken it.
You simply control the checkbook.
- Is rural Florida the state’s next natural resource?
As communities search for new revenue, do projects they once resisted suddenly become fiscal lifelines?
Data centers.
Logistics hubs.
Nuclear power generation.
Communities that once fought these projects may soon compete for them because they generate enormous tax bases while demanding relatively modest local services.
Yesterday’s unwanted land use may become tomorrow’s budget savior.
- Does local government become the Spirit Airlines model?
The advertised price gets everyone’s attention.
The fees are where the real story begins. Local government a la carte
Instead of one annual property tax bill, Floridians may increasingly pay through HOA dues, fire assessments, stormwater fees, utility charges, transportation assessments, Community Development Districts, and special districts.
The tax bill gets smaller.
The receipt gets longer.
- What happens if the five-year residency provision is struck down?
Amendment 3 gives full exemption to Floridians who establish residency before January 1, 2027, while requiring later arrivals to wait five years.
The U.S. Constitution does not permit states to create second-class citizens or probationary Floridians.
If a court strikes down the five-year provision while leaving the rest of Amendment 3 intact, every fiscal estimate changes.
The projected cost changes.
The impact on cities and counties changes.
The burden on state taxpayers changes.
The math changes, and all the current projections are wrong.
What’s the plan if one of the amendment’s central assumptions disappears after voters have already approved it?
- What does Florida look like in twenty years?
Most tax cuts have a fixed cost.
This one does not.
Because the exemption is permanently indexed to inflation in the Constitution, its fiscal impact grows automatically every year without another vote.
If the math shifts in 2029, how different does Florida look in 2037?
Or in 2047?
None of these questions prove Amendment 3 is right. None prove it’s wrong.
They point to something more important.
Every public policy change incentives, and incentives change behavior. Developers adapt. Businesses adapt. Homeowners adapt. Local governments adapt. Over time, those individual decisions reshape the system itself.
That’s not ideology.
It’s economics.
The first-order effect of Amendment 3 is easy to see: some property taxes go down. The harder question is what happens after twenty years of governments, businesses, developers, and homeowners responding rationally to a new set of incentives. Those changes won’t happen overnight, and they won’t be felt equally across Florida.
But they will accumulate.
Constitutional amendments deserve a higher standard than ordinary legislation because they are extraordinarily difficult to reverse. They shouldn’t simply solve today’s problem. They should still make sense after twenty years of changing incentives, markets, demographics, and economic conditions.
Amendment 3 almost certainly lowers some property taxes.
The more important question is what Florida becomes after everyone spends the next twenty years responding rationally to the new rules it creates.
Constitutions don’t merely change laws.
They change the incentives that shape the future.
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Jeff Brandes is a former Florida state Senator and founder and president of the Florida Policy Project, a nonprofit organization focused on developing data-driven solutions to Florida’s most pressing policy challenges.
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