DeSantis’ tax plan hides higher fees behind promised relief.
The property tax amendment Gov. Ron DeSantis forced onto this November’s ballot is a scam, and Floridians should understand the fine print before they sign on the dotted line.
The numbers tell you why. House staff estimated the amendment could reduce local government revenues by more than $8 billion in Fiscal Year 2027-28 and more than $14 billion the following year. That’s not a rounding error. It’s a fiscal cliff for counties, cities and the services Floridians rely on every day.
Miami-Dade alone faces a projected $445 million revenue hit by Fiscal Year 2028-29. Broward isn’t far behind at $326 million.
Those costs don’t disappear. Local governments will still need to fund fire rescue, police, drainage, roads, parks, libraries, emergency response and basic infrastructure. The question isn’t whether those bills get paid. It’s how.
The answer is fire fees, stormwater fees, garbage assessments, utility taxes, parking fees, permit fees, special assessments, local sales tax pressure, delayed maintenance and reduced services. The property tax line may look better, but the overall cost of living gets worse.
It’s a shell game: one line of possible savings up front, with the balloon payment hidden everywhere else.
This was never serious tax reform. It’s a political strategy dressed up as homeowner relief.
Supporters like to say property taxes mean you never truly own your home. That sounds catchy, but it intentionally misframes the issue. Property taxes aren’t mortgage payments to the government. They’re how communities fund the services and infrastructure that make private property worth owning in the first place.
A home holds value because someone paved the road, drains the stormwater, answers 911, keeps the fire station open, maintains parks and makes the community function.
Jeff Brandes, a former Republican state Senator and founder of the Florida Policy Project, called the growing opposition a “Baptists and bootleggers” movement, referring to the coalition of people who supported Prohibition for different reasons — some on a moral basis and some on a profit basis.
And he’s right.
Organized labor, local governments, first responders, housing advocates, the Florida Education Association, and the Florida Chamber of Commerce have all sounded alarms for different reasons. The Chamber warned the Governor in writing that without firm guardrails, the amendment would shift the tax burden onto local businesses and renters.
A formal opposition campaign has now launched under the banner Stop Unfair Tax Shifts, chaired by former Leon County Commissioner Bryan Desloge, who put it plainly: this ends in either crippling service cuts or a tax shift onto everyone else.
We’ve seen this movie before.
In 2024, North Dakota voters rejected a nearly identical property tax elimination proposal by a two-to-one margin, opposing it in all 53 counties, after a coalition spanning labor, business, local government and both parties warned there was no plan to replace the revenue.
North Dakota is a state Donald Trump carried by 33 points. When voters there said no that decisively, it wasn’t because they love taxes. It was because they could see the math.
The pain won’t be distributed equally, either. Urban counties with large commercial tax bases have more tools to absorb the hit. Rural counties don’t. Communities across the Panhandle and North Florida that depend heavily on residential property taxes have no equivalent fallback.
The great irony is that many communities being sold the promise of tax relief may be among the least equipped to survive the consequences.
Companies don’t relocate based on slogans, either. They look at workforce, housing affordability, infrastructure, schools, public safety and quality of life. A business-friendly state doesn’t starve the local services that businesses and their employees depend on.
The Governor’s June 29 vetoes make the contradiction impossible to ignore. On the same day DeSantis signed the budget, he cut fire rescue equipment, stormwater infrastructure, emergency communications systems, behavioral health services, senior programs and road improvements across the state — precisely the kinds of services this amendment would permanently defund at the local level.
He’s cutting them with one hand and asking voters to finish the job with the other.
If this were truly about responsible reform, Florida already has a vehicle for that conversation. The Taxation and Budget Reform Commission meets every 20 years and convenes next year to give major structural tax questions the deliberate, multipartisan scrutiny they require.
Instead, the Governor vetoed the Legislature’s own $1 million property tax study, called a three-day Special Session and demanded a vote before anyone could do the analysis he had just killed.
The ballot language tells the same story. A lawsuit filed in Leon County Circuit Court argues the ballot summary doesn’t explain what the amendment does; it promotes it, using campaign language like “ensuring funding for core services” and “protecting small businesses” that has no basis in the actual text.
If this were honest reform, it wouldn’t need biased ballot language to sell it.
Those of us in public office have an obligation to know the difference between campaigning and governing. This amendment fails that test completely. It was conceived as a campaign tool, pushed through the Legislature without the fiscal analysis it required, and dropped on voters with a slogan instead of a plan.
That’s not leadership. It’s a campaign stunt dressed up as tax reform.
The Governor will spend the next five months selling this hard, and the message will be simple: Do you want lower taxes?
That’s an easy argument to make and a hard one to counter.
But Floridians are smarter than that. Most of us know that when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. When voters understand what this amendment actually does — when they see the fees replacing the taxes, the services disappearing and the fiscal chaos landing on their city and county — they’ll recognize it as the self-inflicted wound it would be.
This is a con, rushed onto the ballot before anyone could do the math, by a Governor who’ll be long gone by the time Floridians realize what they agreed to.
Don’t fall for it.
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Rob Long represents District 90 in the Florida House.