This fall, Florida voters will decide Amendment 3, which would increase the homestead exemption for non-school property taxes to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028. My position is clear: I oppose Amendment 3.

For homeowners confronting rising insurance premiums and living costs, the appeal of property-tax relief is obvious. But Fort Lauderdale cannot consider what disappears from a tax bill without asking what still has to be paid for.

Our property-tax dollars support a city with enormous existing infrastructure obligations. Fort Lauderdale is rebuilding drainage systems, raising seawalls and investing in stormwater resilience because the work is already necessary. April 12, 2023 showed us why: an extreme rainfall event flooded homes, damaged infrastructure and brought parts of the city to a standstill.

Reducing recurring revenue does not make those obligations disappear. The cost can instead return through assessments, fees, additional borrowing, higher insurance costs, reduced services or infrastructure that simply gets pushed into another year.

And deferred costs do not vanish. They get inherited.

Deferred costs do not vanish. They get inherited.

My generation will live with the infrastructure decisions being made now. We will inherit the pipes that were not replaced, the seawalls that were not completed, the debt that was refinanced and the projects that were postponed. What looks like relief today can become our repair bill tomorrow.

New York City offers a warning about what happens when fiscal and infrastructure problems are allowed to compound. Its 1970s crisis had many causes, including economic restructuring, job loss and fiscal-management failures, and Florida today is not 1970s New York. But the consequences remain instructive: services and neighborhoods deteriorated, housing abandonment became widespread, and the city lost roughly 800,000 residents over the decade.

By the time recovery began, another generation was responsible for rebuilding what years of deterioration had left behind.

As a Florida real estate professional, I understand the argument for affordability. But affordability cannot be measured by one line on a tax bill. A home is not more affordable if tax savings eventually reappear as higher assessments, insurance premiums or deteriorating infrastructure. A property does not reliably retain its value when the roads around it flood or essential public systems cannot keep pace with growth.

The people who can least absorb those costs often leave first: young families and workers who make decisions one lease renewal or insurance bill at a time. When they leave, a city loses workers, customers and taxpayers simultaneously.

That is why Fort Lauderdale needs a fuller accounting of what happens after the tax reduction. Before changing the revenue structure supporting cities like ours, voters should demand clear answers: Which obligations remain? What gets delayed? What replaces the revenue? And when today's savings create tomorrow's expense, which generation receives the bill?

Fort Lauderdale is going to continue growing. We should be investing in the infrastructure, workforce and economic base necessary to support that growth rather than assuming today's obligations disappear because their funding changes.

My generation should not be left cleaning up decisions made before we had a meaningful voice in making them. Before casting a ballot, voters should ask whether today's relief simply shifts tomorrow's bill to the next generation.

We should finish paying for what we have already started instead of handing the next generation a city still digging out.

Dear Editor,

The next two years decide who's still here in ten. This fall, Florida voters decide Amendment 3 — a measure that raises the homestead exemption to $150,000 next year and $250,000 the year after, with lawmakers aiming to eliminate property taxes altogether down the line. Vote no. Your property tax dollars aren't sitting in a drawer. A real share is already pledged against loans the city took out years ago for drainage, seawalls, and water systems still half built. Cut that income now, and the bill doesn't shrink. It gets harder to pay: the work stalls, or the city borrows the next round at a worse rate. Either way the cost lands back on you, relabeled — a fee instead of a tax, an assessment instead of a line item you saw coming.

Fortify Lauderdale, the City's stormwater effort, is already raising seawalls and rebuilding drainage block by block, part of a $3.39 billion citywide plan the City has laid out in its own capital and stormwater planning documents. Neighborhoods still need $5.23 billion — a $1.84 billion gap that exists whether or not this amendment passes. What the vote decides is whether it widens: the City's own Budget Advisory Board projects a $17 million revenue loss next year, growing to $27 million the year after.

A flooded street becomes an insurance problem. Insurers price your premium off the real condition of the infrastructure around your house. On April 12, 2023, two feet of rain closed this city in a day and flooded living rooms that had never flooded before. Stall the work that prevents the next one, and your bill doesn't drop. It just moves; from a tax you vote on to a renewal notice you don't. That's the real shape of this "relief": the exemption increase only helps homeowners on a primary residence — it doesn't touch a second home or a rental. What non-homestead owners get instead is a separate provision, a lower cap on how fast their assessments can rise. Either way, the debt behind the infrastructure still gets paid — just through insurance, assessments, and rent, instead of a tax.

Florida Realtors, the state's trade association, has done the opposite of recognizing that math: its board voted to back Amendment 3 and committed $10 million to a "Vote Yes on 3" campaign. I hold a Florida real estate license myself, and I'll say plainly what that vote gets wrong: a home doesn't hold its value in a market insurers won't write policies in, and insurers price that risk off exactly this — whether the drainage works, whether the seawall holds. Gutting the revenue that funds it, in a market this unsettled, isn't relief. It's the industry undercutting the asset it sells.

The people priced out leave first, and not the wealthy — young families and workers with the least holding them here, going quietly, one lease at a time. I've been to those goodbye dinners. A city that loses them loses its workforce, its customers, and its tax base at once, widening the very gap this amendment claims to close.

New York's version of this ran in the opposite direction but landed in the same place. Spending grew faster than revenue through the early 1970s, the gap widened for years before anyone treated it as a crisis, and when the reckoning came, services were the first thing cut. In 1973, a stretch of the West Side Highway collapsed under an ordinary dump truck — years of deferred repair coming due at once. By 1980, the city owned 100,000 abandoned apartments, and one in ten New Yorkers had left. It took a decade of deliberate rebuilding before the city recovered, and the families who'd left were not wealthy — they were the middle class this amendment claims to protect now. Amendment 3 gets to the same kind of gap by a different road, cutting revenue directly instead of letting spending outrun it. Either way, once a city's finances break, they don't mend quickly. New York's climb back took a decade. We're deciding our own trajectory in the next two years, not ten.

Growth gets us out of this faster than cuts do. This city's real bottleneck is brain drain: capable young people leaving for deeper job markets and better schools, while too much of what's left runs on small businesses that break first when a flood or a premium hike hits. We need employers who hire in volume and don't fold in one bad quarter: healthcare, marine science, advanced manufacturing. That means real workforce pipelines and apprenticeships for this city's youth and making the city fast enough that those employers choose it over Charlotte or Raleigh. None of it requires less revenue. It requires spending what we already collect on people, not just pipes.

This comes from a year with residents, developers, and City Hall, two years before that inside four South Florida city governments, the city's only practicing LEED accreditation in neighborhood development, and a seat on its Sustainability Advisory Board. Almost everyone I sit across from wants the same thing: a place that takes care of its own, and I think that's behind most yes votes too — good intentions, reaching for the only lever people think they have. Good intentions don't hold back a flood or pay a claims adjuster. Real care looks like targeted relief and philanthropy for the neighbors struggling, not a blanket cut that quietly bills them later, through insurance or rent instead of a vote. Fortify Lauderdale already proves which version of this city we want. Fort Lauderdale gets built either way. Vote no on Amendment 3, and let us finish paying for what we started, instead of handing the next generation a city still digging out.