Politics
Jeff Brandes: After Amendment 3 — protect counties. Let some cities go.
If Amendment 3 passes, Florida will confront a question almost no one wants to ask: What happens when a city can no longer afford to be a city?
I hate writing this piece. Mayors won’t like it. City Commissioners won’t like it. Residents may hear it as an attack on their hometown. It isn’t. It’s an acknowledgment of the fiscal world Amendment 3 could create.
Florida has confronted this before. On Oct. 22, 2008, the town of Cedar Grove ceased operating as a municipality. Its residents had voted to dissolve it. At 8 a.m. on a Tuesday, its police department was disbanded, and its assets and liabilities ultimately went to Bay County. The county attorney who later chronicled the dissolution wrote that Florida had no template, no outline and no playbook for what came next.
Eighteen years later, we still don’t have much of one.
If Amendment 3 passes, we may need one.
State economists estimate Amendment 3 would reduce local nonschool property tax revenue by about $5 billion in its first year, growing to nearly $12 billion by 2031-32. And the pressure doesn’t end there. The higher homestead exemption is indexed to inflation after 2028, while the costs of providing local services continue to rise. Cities and counties will be squeezed from both directions: less revenue and higher costs.
But the obligations don’t disappear with the revenue. Roads deteriorate. Police officers and firefighters still need to be paid. Pension checks still go out. Debt still comes due.
You can change the revenue available to a city. You cannot vote its obligations out of existence.
That math won’t land evenly. A city with a strong commercial tax base and healthy reserves may adapt. A small, heavily homesteaded city with aging infrastructure and little commercial property may have few options. Some will cut services, raise fees, defer maintenance or turn to Tallahassee. Some will eventually stop making sense as independent governments.
Counties aren’t simply bigger cities. They are the governmental floor beneath everything else. They run courts and jails, administer elections and maintain regional infrastructure. When a municipality disappears, its residents don’t stop needing local government.
The county becomes the backstop.
Florida has more than 400 municipalities, incorporated under wildly different circumstances. There is no economic law requiring each to exist forever.
The danger isn’t that City Hall closes on a Tuesday.
The danger is that it stays open for another decade, raising fees, postponing repairs and delivering a little less every year.
Cities will grasp for every dollar available to survive. That is rational. No Mayor wants to preside over dissolution. But keeping a government alive is not the same as protecting a community.
A city can remain solvent long after it has stopped working well for the people who live there.
Bankruptcy is loud. Decline is silent.
Municipal distress doesn’t stop at the city limits. A city can defer maintenance for years as liabilities grow, reserves disappear, and borrowing becomes more expensive.
Eventually, it turns to the county.
By then, the county may inherit failing roads, aging stormwater systems and years of deferred capital needs. County taxpayers who never lived in that city inherit the bill.
Delay doesn’t protect the county. It compounds the bill.
Florida built more than 400 front doors into municipal government. It never built an orderly backdoor for municipalities that can no longer sustain themselves.
The Legislature should build one before Amendment 3’s fiscal effects fully arrive.
— Make sharing services easy. Let neighboring cities combine fire, dispatch, public works, IT and administration when it saves money and preserves services.
— Modernize Florida’s municipal dissolution laws. Create an orderly process for transferring assets, liabilities, debt, employees and services. Define the county’s role before it inherits a distressed city, not after.
— Fund transitions, not survival. Temporary assistance can help governments merge or transfer responsibilities. Fund the transition. Don’t subsidize the decline.
Disincorporation is not a catastrophe.
A city can disappear without a community disappearing.
The neighborhoods remain. The businesses remain. The people remain. Parents will still gather on a Thursday evening to watch their kids play T-ball at the local field.
What changes is whose name is on the fire truck.
Residents don’t care whose name is on the truck. They care how fast it arrives.
Supporters of Amendment 3 say it will force local government to change. We should take them at their word.
But if Florida forces that change, it has a responsibility to prepare for governments that cannot adapt.
The worst outcome isn’t that a city eventually dissolves. It’s spending a decade in decay, keeping the government alive while the community underneath it deteriorates, then handing the county the bill.
The wreck isn’t the dissolution. The wreck is the decade before it.
Don’t wait for the wreck. Build the exit ramp now.
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Jeff Brandes is a former member of the Florida Senate and president of the Florida Policy Project.
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