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(Video) Palm Beach County Officials Warn Amendment 3 Puts Police and Fire on the Chopping Block

Writer: Indivisible Boca Raton
Indivisible Boca Raton
6 days ago
8 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Senator Tina Polsky, County Administrator Joe Abruzzo, and Council Member Yvette Drucker laid out what the homestead amendment would cost local government, and who would end up paying for it.


This November, Florida voters will decide on Amendment 3, a constitutional ballot measure that expands the homestead exemption for property owners who have lived in their home for at least five years. Supporters call it tax relief, but the three officials on Indivisible Boca Raton’s panel described something very different: a measure that shifts the cost of local government onto renters, small businesses, and shoppers, while putting police and fire budgets on the chopping block.


State Senator Tina Polsky, who represents the district and voted against the amendment in Tallahassee, moderated the panel. She was joined by Palm Beach County Administrator Joe Abruzzo and Boca Raton City Council Member Yvette Drucker, who is also running for Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller.


What Amendment 3 actually does

Senator Polsky opened by correcting a common misconception about the amendment. Amendment 3 leaves property taxes in place and expands the homestead exemption, which is the share of a primary home's value that local governments cannot tax. The expanded exemption applies only to homeowners who have owned their property for five years or more, so new homebuyers get nothing. In Palm Beach County, where home values run well above the amendment's $250,000 cap, the savings will be limited, while the damage to local government, Polsky argued, will be far greater.


She described the process that produced the amendment as rushed and opaque. Governor Ron DeSantis spent a year promising to eliminate property taxes without ever introducing a proposal, she said, before delivering language during the legislature’s final special session with almost no time for debate, no public testimony, and no independent financial analysis, leaving the Senate two days to vote.


“We are literally changing the Constitution, which we will never be able to change back if it succeeds,” Polsky told the room. “We are completely upending the whole property tax system, and it was done with no financial analysis.”


She rejected the argument, made by the amendment’s backers, that rising local government budgets amount to waste. Local governments carry more expenses because they serve more people with more needs, she said. Voters, she argued, are being asked to gut a functioning system on the strength of a talking point.


The county-level math

Administrator Joe Abruzzo followed with the numbers his office has been running. Statewide, he said, the amendment’s fiscal analysis shows a hit of more than $12 billion a year to local governments. In Palm Beach County alone, once the exemption fully phases in, the county faces roughly a quarter-billion-dollar hit to its general fund, the main account that pays for everyday county services, and a separate $150 million hit to Fire Rescue, which operates on its own funding line outside the general fund.


The Vote No on 3 campaign puts the long-term statewide cost even higher, as much as $34 billion, citing a Florida Chamber of Commerce white paper. The campaign also notes that public safety is the single largest budget item in more than 80% of Florida communities, consuming over half of every general fund dollar. Abruzzo made the same case from the county’s side: when revenue shrinks, the cuts land on public safety whether or not lawmakers intend them to.


Abruzzo was blunt about what a quarter-billion-dollar hole does to a county government. Set first responders aside and roughly $609 million remains in the general fund to run parks, emergency operations, roads, and more than thirty other departments. A hit of that size, he said, cannot be absorbed without touching services people rely on every day.


Then there is the question of which local governments survive at all. Abruzzo told the audience the county has identified somewhere between 8 and 13 municipalities that, in his assessment, have no mathematical path to survive Amendment 3, either because their property tax rates, known as millage rates, are already near the legal maximum or because they have too few businesses and commercial properties to make up the difference. When those municipalities fold, he said, Palm Beach County inherits their operations along with their debt. “It’s unheard of. It’s never been done,” Abruzzo said.


The loophole nobody voted on

One of the more pointed exchanges of the night concerned what happens after November if the amendment passes. Abruzzo explained that the ballot language sets a $250,000 exemption cap, but the legislature still has to pass a separate law, called an implementing bill, spelling out how the amendment actually works. That law has not been written yet, and nothing in the amendment, he said, stops lawmakers from raising the cap above $250,000 when they write it.


He pointed to the governor’s own website, built to let residents estimate their savings under the amendment, which includes a $500,000 savings line alongside the $250,000 figure the amendment itself describes, a detail Abruzzo read as a signal.


“He’s well aware that he can ask the legislature to make it 500 or completely eliminate it,” Abruzzo said. “This is not a scare tactic. This is the facts.”


The Vote No on 3 campaign goes further, describing the amendment’s fine print as requiring the legislature to eliminate homestead property taxes entirely on a fixed schedule, regardless of the consequences for public safety, roads, water systems, or hurricane preparedness. The original version of the amendment included a state trust fund intended to backfill lost local revenue. Both Polsky and Abruzzo confirmed the legislature removed it before the amendment reached the ballot, and nothing has replaced it.


Boca Raton is already adjusting

City Council Member Yvette Drucker described how Boca Raton, one of the more financially sound cities in the county, has already begun preparing. The city is raising its fire assessment fee for the first time in a decade, in part to fund additional firefighter staffing on the barrier island. It signed a one-year contract with its largest union rather than the customary three-year term, specifically because nobody knows what the city’s finances will look like after January.


Drucker pushed back directly on a claim she said she has seen repeated online: that public safety spending is protected because the ballot language lists it as an allowable use of local tax dollars. Being listed as allowable guarantees that spending nothing, she said, and when a shrinking general fund forces proportional cuts, the largest line item takes the largest hit. “The way you should view this amendment is that it is the defund the police and defund your fire rescue amendment,” Drucker said.


In Boca Raton, the math is stark. The city’s general fund runs about $256 million, and 61% of it, roughly $157 million, goes to public safety. That leaves about $98 million to run a city of 103,000 residents, including 49 parks, beaches, boat ramps, traffic infrastructure, and a growing homeless outreach effort. Drucker said the city’s response times, currently under two minutes for fire and police, are the kind of service that erodes quietly when budgets tighten, through reduced shift schedules and slower availability, long before any headline-grabbing layoffs.


Asked what services residents are likely to lose first, Drucker pointed to garbage collection frequency, bulk pickup, and park ranger staffing, all already under review heading into the city’s September budget cycle.


Who actually picks up the tab

The panelists returned repeatedly to a single theme: money that no longer comes from homestead property taxes has to come from somewhere, and it lands on whoever is left paying into the system. Abruzzo said that if the exemption cap rises significantly or is eliminated outright, as some Amendment 3 proponents including Senator Rick Scott and Representative Byron Donalds have said they would prefer, the county's only real options are raising property tax rates on businesses, rental properties, and second homes, which do not qualify for the homestead exemption, or raising the local sales tax. He cited an analysis from New Jersey on full property tax elimination, which found it would require sales tax rates in the range of 20% to 21% to replace the lost revenue.


The Vote No on 3 campaign’s own modeling points the same direction, citing Tax Foundation estimates that Florida’s 6% sales tax would need to climb past 15% statewide, and above 30% in some communities, to fully replace eliminated property tax revenue. The campaign argues the burden will land unevenly. Renters, who see no benefit from a homestead exemption, absorb higher costs as landlords pass along rising commercial tax bills. First-time homebuyers get hit twice, facing higher closing fees while missing out on an exemption reserved for owners of five years or more. Small businesses, which the campaign notes already carry close to two-thirds of Florida’s total property tax burden, have the least room to absorb further increases. Rural counties, with smaller commercial tax bases to lean on, have the fewest options for closing the gap at all.


A commercial property manager in the audience underlined the point from her own experience. Real estate taxes on commercial buildings get passed through to tenants as part of their lease, she said, and tenants pass those costs on to customers. The people who rent a storefront, and the people who buy from it, end up covering the increase.


The bond rating problem

Abruzzo also raised a less visible consequence: Palm Beach County's credit rating. The county holds a triple-A rating from all three major agencies, the highest grade possible. It works much like an excellent personal credit score, keeping borrowing costs low on everything from road projects to county buildings. Abruzzo said his annual review with the rating agencies, conducted a few weeks before the forum, was almost entirely consumed by questions about Amendment 3's fiscal impact, a departure from prior years. He called it "extremely clear" that the county's rating is at risk of dropping, which would raise interest costs on every future loan the county takes out and compound the amendment's direct budget hit with a second one.

What comes next

Polsky, who is retiring from the legislature but remains active as co-chair of the Vote No on Amendment 3 campaign, closed by asking attendees to get involved directly: sharing information, following the campaign’s social channels, and using Vote411.org to research what else is on their November ballot. She was candid about the political dynamics working against the opposition. Tax cuts poll well regardless of the fine print, she said, and Democrats in the legislature, who hold less than a third of the seats, have had limited ability to force alternative proposals to a vote. Still, she pointed to polling she said is trending in the campaign’s favor as reason for cautious optimism, provided voters understand what they are actually deciding.


The panelists were asked more than once whether any of this can be undone if voters get it wrong, and their answer was consistently no. A local tax rate cut can be reversed the following budget cycle, as Delray Beach did years ago after a short-lived cut to public safety spending proved unworkable. Once Amendment 3 is written into Florida's Constitution, reversing it would require another statewide vote, another campaign, and years that Palm Beach County's first responders and local budgets may not have.



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