The statewide property tax amendment is on the November ballot.
Twenty-eight years ago, I woke up in a treatment facility, broken by cocaine and alcohol, after seven failed attempts at recovery over nine years. What finally worked wasn’t a slogan or a promise. It was a treatment bed, a counselor who refused to give up on me, and a program that existed because someone, somewhere, decided recovery services were worth paying for. That’s the debt I carry into every vote I’ve cast in 18 years in the Florida Legislature, and it’s why I can’t stay quiet about Amendment 3.
Amendment 3 is a massive cut to the property tax revenue that cities and counties use to pay for local services — and it leaves working families, seniors, and the most vulnerable among us to make up the difference.
I represented parts of the St. Petersburg, Tampa and surrounding region for almost two decades, communities where the wounds of addiction, untreated mental illness, and generational poverty run deep. I’ve spent my career trying to make sure the people carrying those wounds have somewhere to turn: sponsoring Senate Bill 1620, the state’s landmark mental health and substance use law; pushing for peer recovery support, community-based treatment, and crisis response funding; and supporting the University of South Florida in building a research center dedicated to understanding why some of us make it back and some don’t. None of that survives on good intentions alone. It survives largely on local budgets — the same budgets Amendment 3 would blow a hole through.
When the state cuts property tax revenue this deeply, local governments don’t get a pass on their obligations. They get a choice: raise money somewhere else or cut something. Florida’s sheriffs, firefighters, and police officers have already warned that these cuts will strain the very emergency response systems that show up first when someone overdoses or a mental health crisis turns into a 911 call. And when budgets tighten further, the first things to go are rarely the things that make headlines. They’re the after-school programs that help keep a teenager in school and off the corner instead of on it. The mentoring programs that give a kid without a father at home somewhere to be. The community treatment slots that give those with substance use disorders the treatment they need to stay clean and to turn their lives around.
I know what it costs a family when those programs are severely cut or disappear, because I’ve sat with those families. A mother whose son can’t get into a treatment bed because the county cut funding. A grandmother raising three kids because their parents never made it out of addiction, hoping the local Boys & Girls Club stays open one more year. These aren’t abstractions to the people I’ve represented and the families I have worked with. They’re the difference between somebody’s child making it and somebody’s child not.
Supporters of Amendment 3 will tell you this is about tax relief, and for the lucky homeowners with the highest-value properties, it is. But relief for some has to come from somewhere, and in this amendment, it comes out of the services that lower-income and challenged families depend on most — services whose recipients don’t have a lobbyist in Tallahassee and don’t get a vote when a county commission is forced to decide where the cuts land.
I’m leaving the Senate this year after 18 years, but I’m not leaving this fight. Wherever I serve next, I’ll keep showing up for the programs that gave me my life back and that keep giving other people theirs. I’m asking you to do the same. Look past the promise of tax relief to the real effect. Ask who benefits and who loses the services they can’t live without. Then vote no on Amendment 3.
Darryl Rouson represents Florida’s 16th Senate District, covering St. Petersburg and Tampa, and served 18 years total in the Florida Legislature. He sponsored Senate Bill 1620, the state’s landmark mental health and substance abuse law, and is the namesake of the University of South Florida’s Rouson Center for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Research.