A judge ordered Amendment 3's ballot wording rewritten by August 14, and Florida's own estimate puts the property tax cut at 203.3 million dollars a year in Collier and 453.3 million in Lee

A circuit judge in Leon County has ordered the state to rewrite the ballot title and summary for Amendment 3, the property tax measure Florida voters decide on November 3, according to reporting by Christine Sexton at Florida Phoenix and by Valarie Harring at the Cape Coral Breeze.

Judge David Frank issued an 18 page order on Monday. Both reporters quote him finding that the proposed title "does not state the basic legal purpose of the amendment; it endorses it and diverts voters from its actual effect." Sexton reported that Frank described the title, Save Our Homes From Excessive Property Taxes, as "akin to a political slogan," and that he found the summary defective for omitting a material fact, writing that the amendment "purports to change the constitutional baseline of city and county power by placing in the Constitution for the first time the Legislature's right to control ad valorem tax spending." Those quotations are the reporters' work and are credited to them.

Two things the order does not do are worth stating before anything else. It does not remove Amendment 3 from the ballot, and Harring reported that the plaintiffs did not ask for that, on the understanding that it is not available. It does not change the exemption. Harring reported that the court retained jurisdiction over any challenge to whatever revised wording the attorney general produces.

Sexton reported that Attorney General James Uthmeier has until August 14 to file corrected language if there is no appeal, that the cases were consolidated and argued last week, that the lawsuits named Uthmeier and Secretary of State Cord Byrd, that a Department of State spokesperson declined to comment on pending litigation, and that Uthmeier's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Whether the state will appeal was not known when those accounts were published, and is not known here.

What this brief adds is the document underneath the argument, which is public and was opened here.

The enrolled text of CS/HJR 1F, passed in the 2026F special session, carries the disputed ballot statement in full at pages 19 and 20. It opens "SAVE OUR HOMES FROM EXCESSIVE PROPERTY TAXES.-This amendment benefits Florida taxpayers by:" and then sets out four headed paragraphs: "Exempting homestead properties from taxation," "Ensuring funding for core services," "Protecting small businesses," and "Ensuring fairness for Florida residents." Anyone can read the wording the judge was ruling on without waiting for the rewrite.

Reading that statement against the amendment text in the same document turns up a gap that has nothing to do with the court case and is worth knowing before November.

The ballot summary tells a voter the amendment "Exempts the first $250,000 of a homestead's value from taxation for all levies other than school district levies and requires, through general law, a schedule for full elimination." The amendment text does not do that in one step. It exempts up to 150,000 dollars of assessed value from non school levies beginning January 1, 2027, then up to 250,000 dollars beginning January 1, 2028, and it indexes that second figure to the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers annually from January 1, 2028. The 2027 step does not appear in the summary at all. This publication makes no claim about whether that omission was among the deficiencies the judge identified, because the order was not obtained.

The passage Sexton reported the judge singling out for omission is also in the document. The amendment rewrites Article VII, section 9 to list the purposes for which counties and municipalities may use ad valorem revenue, running through debt service, retirement obligations for local government employees and, at subparagraph (g), the operations and administration of county officers and commissioners and municipalities, followed by the qualifier "except those expenditures prohibited by general law."

The local numbers come from a second document that is equally public. The Revenue Estimating Conference adopted impact table dated July 10, 2026, gives the recurring non school effect county by county for fiscal 2026-27. Collier appears at 203.3 million dollars and Lee at 453.3 million, against a statewide total of 11,834.7 million. Only six counties carry a larger figure than Lee: Miami-Dade at 1,392.6 million, Broward at 1,193.2, Palm Beach at 1,070.1, Hillsborough at 942.0, Orange at 781.1 and Pinellas at 561.4. Duval sits below Lee, at 416.2 million. Between them the two Southwest Florida counties account for 656.6 million dollars, or 5.5 percent of the state total.

Those two counties have been working the consequences all summer. The Lee County Property Appraiser's parcel level estimate put the loss at 58 percent of the county's homestead tax base at the 250,000 dollar level, with the Lehigh Acres fire district at 90 percent and Sanibel at 24 percent. Marco Island's council called off the police outsourcing study it had begun over a first year loss the same state economists put at 1,074,700 dollars. The Fort Myers City Council discussed the measure while setting its own millage ceiling, because a smaller base is what a rate is applied to. Our fuller account of what the amendment does, including the part of it that has nothing to do with homesteads, is here.

The reporting this brief rests on is at floridaphoenix.com and capecoralbreeze.com. The enrolled resolution is here and the estimating conference table is here.