Amendment 3 drastically increases the homestead exemption for homeowners. | Jessica Palombo, Jacksonville Today
Published on November 8, 2026 at 2:42 pm
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Florida voters approved Amendment 3 last week, and for homeowners it will be a boost, increasing the homestead exemption to $150,000 next year and $250,000 the year after.
It also lowers the cap on assessment increases for non-homestead properties to 5%. And it severely limits what local governments can spend property tax collections on, restricting expenditure to police, fire, infrastructure, government operations, and other “core functions.”
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The amendment’s ratification closes the door on 20th century liberalism — specifically, the idea that there necessarily would or should be a safety net and that government can be trusted with social uplift. The budget won’t be there for it on a local level.
The fiscal cliff is here. In 2027, expectations are that Jacksonville will face a $200 million haircut — roughly a tenth of the general fund budget. In 2028, $300 million is the forecast.
And even though big cities like Jacksonville will bear a disproportionate hit from the amendment, especially given Gov. DeSantis has promised a trust fund to backfill needs of rural and bedroom communities from the state budget, Duval voters asked for it: 56.5% of the vote locally is a clear mandate.
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Those who worked to get it on the ballot, such as Republican mayoral candidate state Rep. Wyman Duggan, who presided over the House when it passed the bill, quickly moved to weaponize the voters’ will into a critique of Donna Deegan.
“Mayor Deegan campaigned against Amendment 3, looked taxpayers in the eye and said, ‘There is no waste in this budget.’ Last night, 57% of Duval County voters told her she was wrong. While families struggle with higher property taxes, higher utility bills and a doubled garbage fee, this administration has grown City Hall’s budget with no end in sight,” Duggan said.
“This vote was a rejection of Donna Deegan’s tax-and-spend agenda. Jacksonville voters were clear: they want lower taxes and an end to wasteful spending, and as Mayor, that’s exactly what I’ll deliver,” Duggan tweeted Wednesday.
Duggan’s words tell half the story though.
As the late longtime city Chief Administrative Officer Sam Mousa said: In budget season, “the mayor proposes and the City Council disposes.”
The executive branch lacks appropriations power. It’s up to the legislative to make it happen.
And make it happen, they have.
This column was a lonely voice against funding the “Stadium of the Future,” not because it hates football, but because the mechanism — taking five years’ worth of sales tax money that had been repurposed to retiring legacy pension debt and putting it into a public-private partnership with a multibillionaire — went against best principles of fiscal management.
Many of the same City Council members who will beat their chests in this new climate of fiscal rectitude were just as demonstrative in favor of public spending for private benefit. And there was very little interest in a referendum, as proposed in this column back in 2024, to gauge the voters’ will.
When Deegan introduced the current budget, she said it was flat except for increased public safety spending — which was something agreed to by the city council, including roads to the Florida Retirement System for police and fire.
I could go on, but all of it is prologue to what will happen next: the mother of all belt-tightening exercises.
It’s also the mother of all political theater exercises.
The cuts are going to be deep and ugly, like Dusty Rhodes’ forehead after three decades of blade jobs. And as it stands now, Mayor Deegan is compelled to play defense against them. Meanwhile, running on her record will be more difficult given the structural conditions that allowed her to function in the current term are inexorably changed now.
Mayors have dealt with austerity before — single-term Mayor Alvin Brown was hamstrung by the molasses-slow recovery of property tax collections, leading to staff and service cuts that ultimately complicated his message in 2015.
Lenny Curry also dealt with consequences. Pension reform in his first term was driven in part because the costs of those obligations threatened the city’s ability to spend on anything else. That’s one reason the ½-cent Better Jacksonville Plan sales tax, mentioned in the stadium section of this article, was extended and repurposed for pension — without it, the revenue wasn’t there.
One could argue that efforts to sell JEA were driven in part because the city’s solvency wasn’t quite as assured as people want to think.
Now we’re back in the thick of it. Losing 15% of the general fund budget will compel radical solutions — perhaps including seeing what Florida Power and Light will pay for the utility again.
Particularly with legislators at the state level being expected to block abilities of local governments to sidestep voter intent with other fees and taxes, today’s policymakers may face constraints that haven’t been seen locally for nearly two decades.
The funding collapse will be grist for the campaign season. But in the long term, it will create a governance crisis for whoever wins in March and May. And unlike the slow-rolled recovery from the impacts of the 2008 economic crash, this will simply be the new normal: a diminishment of services and the inability of local governments to perform functions that were once taken for granted.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
