Until Tuesday, Florida’s county commissions and city councils were getting ready for a thought experiment. HB 1329 asks each of them, every year starting in 2027, to identify how they would cut next year’s budget by 10 percent without compromising essential services. Identify, not cut. Most planned to treat it that way.
On Tuesday, voters made the experiment real. Amendment 3 passed with about 62 percent of the vote.
What actually changed
Starting with the 2027 tax roll, the non-school homestead exemption rises to $150,000, then to $250,000 in 2028. The assessment cap on non-homestead property drops from 10 percent to 5 percent. The state’s Revenue Estimating Conference puts the loss to local governments at about $4.9 billion in the first year, $8.7 billion in the second, and $11.8 billion a year once fully phased in.
That last number is roughly a third of what counties, cities and special districts collected in non-school property tax in 2025. The hit is uneven. Tourism-heavy coastal counties lose less. Homestead-heavy suburban counties lose more, and the hardest hit stand to lose more than a third of their own levy.
There’s a second change that has drawn far less attention. Property tax may now pay only for listed uses: public safety, roads, stormwater, debt, pensions, and operations and administration. Parks, libraries, human services, housing, economic development and transit aren’t on the list. How strictly that applies depends on the implementing law the Legislature takes up when its session opens March 2.
The first budget built under all of this is FY2027-28. It shows up on TRIM notices in August. That leaves about nine months.
The 10 percent workshop is now where it happens
HB 1329 still requires the workshop, at least 14 days before the final budget vote, in public. What changed is the stakes. For most governments, the list they bring to that workshop is no longer hypothetical. It’s the starting point for real reductions. And because the loss lands on the general fund and the other property-tax-supported funds, a list built across the whole budget won’t show where the pressure actually falls.
Under that kind of pressure, the easy cuts come first: hold vacancies open, defer capital, trim every department by the same percentage. Each of those protects whatever is best defended. None of them asks what this community needs most from its government.
Deciding what is essential is the hard part
Cutting is arithmetic. Deciding what is essential is judgment, and the law leaves that judgment to each governing body.
The Questions Baldrige Asks
The Baldrige framework, the national standard for organizational performance, gives that judgment a discipline. It asks questions most governments have never answered in one place:
- Who do we serve, and what does each group require from us? Residents, businesses, visitors and other agencies need different things. “Essential” is defined by them, not by which department speaks loudest.
- What work produces each service, and what does it cost? Count, time, money and quality, for each key process. Most governments have pieces of this scattered across departments.
- Where are we strong, and where are the gaps? The strengths are what you build on when money is short. The gaps are where waste hides.
None of that is new. Organizations have used Baldrige to answer those questions for nearly 40 years. Amendment 3 put a deadline on it.
Florida already has the infrastructure
Florida has had a Baldrige-based program for more than three decades: the Sterling Council. Its trained examiners assess organizations against the framework and return a written view of strengths and opportunities. Its Examiner Training teaches staff to see their own organization the way an examiner does. That skill stays in the building after the consultants leave.
Start this winter
Budget calendars are due January 30. The workshop lands in summer. If the evidence about customers, costs and processes is going to be ready by then, the work starts now.
Your government will decide what is essential either way. It can decide with evidence, in advance, or from a list two weeks before the vote.
How is your organization planning to approach its first budget under Amendment 3?
