Fort Myers property tax: 5 options to close $9.2M budget gap

Fort Myers has put five ways to close a 9.2 million dollar hole in front of its council, and four of the five raise the fire assessment on every house in the city from 218 dollars to about 240

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 13, 2026

Stock photo

Stock photo. Not the actual scene. Photo: Engin Akyurt / Pexels

What it changes

Two numbers decide what this costs a Fort Myers household, and the fire assessment is the one nobody talks about. It is a flat charge per dwelling, currently 218 dollars, and it does not care what a house is worth or whether it is homesteaded. Four of the five scenarios the city has put on the table raise it by 10 percent, which is 21 dollars and 80 cents a year on every single roof in the city, from a Dean Park bungalow to a riverfront condominium. That is the part of the bill a homestead exemption does not touch and a Save Our Homes cap does not soften, so it is the most evenly spread increase in the deck and the most likely to survive whatever else gets cut. The millage line is where the range actually lives. The rolled-back rate is 6.6465, and rolled-back means the rate that raises the same money as last year from the same properties, so anything above it is an increase in the technical sense the state uses on a TRIM notice even when a bill goes down. Scenario one puts the rate at 7.3112, which is exactly ten percent above rolled-back and raises about 7.9 million of the 9.2. Scenario five holds the rate at rolled-back and closes the whole gap from reserves and cuts instead. Everything else sits in between. Because one mill raises about 12 million dollars in this city, the gap between the cheapest and the dearest scenario is roughly two thirds of a mill, or about 67 dollars a year for every 100,000 dollars of taxable value. On a house assessed at 300,000 dollars after exemptions, that is the difference between paying nothing more and paying about 200 dollars more. Watch where the money comes from when it does not come from taxes, because that is the tell. Scenarios two, three and four lean on reserves for between 1.6 and 4.7 million dollars. The city is carrying 44.4 million dollars of unassigned reserves against a 20 percent target of 38.6 million, so there is roughly six million of headroom and no more, and it has already planned to spend 5.8 million of it this year. Reserves close a gap once. They cannot close it again in 2028, which is the year the city's own slide says the homestead amendment starts taking 9.6 million dollars a year out of the same fund, rising to 14.4 million in 2029. Put plainly, the deck describes a 9.2 million dollar problem this autumn and a larger one arriving eighteen months later, and the scenarios that spare taxpayers now are the ones that leave the least cushion for then. The expenditure side is thinner than it looks. The city has quantified about 3.4 million dollars of possible reductions, and the list is arts grants, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund contribution, park repairs and a city hall air handler rather than anything structural. Meanwhile police spending rises 12.5 percent and personnel costs rise 10.3 million, and the general fund has already stopped funding capital projects entirely to make the numbers work. Anyone with a view on this has until the September hearings, because that is where the millage and the fire assessment are actually set, and the rate adopted in September cannot be raised afterwards even if the amendment fails in November.

Fort Myers has laid out the arithmetic of its next budget in a single slide, and it is a subtraction.

At the rolled-back millage rate of 6.6465, the city projects general fund revenue of 183.6 million dollars for the 2027 financial year, which is 400,000 dollars more than the current adopted budget. Spending is projected at 192.8 million dollars, which is 9.6 million dollars more. The difference is a gap of 9.2 million dollars, and closing it is what the council was asked to consider at a budget workshop on August 10.

The presentation, given by Finance Director Christine Tenney, sets out five ways to do it.

Scenario one raises the millage rate to 7.3112, exactly ten percent above rolled-back, and raises the fire assessment by ten percent. That produces 7.9 million dollars from property tax and 1.5 million from the assessment, and touches no reserves. Scenario two sets the rate at 7.1555 with the same ten percent fire increase and draws 1.6 million dollars from reserves. Scenario three sets the rate at 6.9999 with a five percent fire increase and draws 4.2 million from reserves. Scenario four sets the rate at 6.9000 with a ten percent fire increase and draws 4.7 million. Scenario five holds the rate at rolled-back, raises the fire assessment by ten percent, draws 5.0 million from reserves and finds 2.7 million in expenditure reductions.

Every row totals 9.2 million dollars. No scenario has been adopted.

Scenario one is also the ceiling. The council voted on August 3 to advertise a not-to-exceed rate of 7.3112 mills, and Florida law lets a city come down from an advertised rate before the September hearings but never up. The most expensive option in the workshop deck is therefore the most the council can now levy, and the other four are the ways of going lower.

The fire assessment is the piece that reaches every property the same way. The city currently charges 218 dollars per residential dwelling unit, and the ten percent column in the presentation puts that at 239 dollars and 80 cents. Commercial property is assessed at 21.93 cents a square foot today, rising to 24.12 cents, with a cap of 115,800 square feet assessed. The assessment raised 14.9 million dollars this year and would raise 16.9 million at the higher rate.

On the property tax side, the presentation states that one mill raises 12,003,600 dollars in Fort Myers, and that a tenth of a mill raises 1,200,400 dollars.

What is driving the spending is mostly people and debt. Personnel costs rise 10.3 million dollars and debt repayments rise 3.7 million, including a 4.8 million dollar interest payment on the city's 2026 bonds. The police department budget rises from 65.0 million to 73.1 million dollars, a 12.5 percent increase, and fire and emergency management rises 4.6 percent to 38.1 million. Against that, the city manager's office and human resources are each cut by about 15 percent, and the general fund stops paying for capital projects altogether, a 5.3 million dollar transfer that disappears.

The city has quantified about 3.4 million dollars of further reductions it could make. The list runs to arts and community contributions of 1.9 million dollars, including a one million dollar payment to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, programme and grant funding, 681,500 dollars of building repairs including a 320,000 dollar city hall air handler, and the budget of an internal audit division the presentation describes as currently fully vacant. The city is carrying 33 vacant general fund posts worth 3.4 million dollars in annualised salary.

Reserves are finite and the presentation says how finite. Unassigned reserves stood at 44,378,383 dollars on September 30 last year, which is 23 percent of next year's spending against a target of 20 percent, or 38,563,939 dollars. The city has already budgeted to use 5,819,444 dollars of reserves this year to stay inside that target.

The final slide is about the year after next. Under the heading the city gives as Amendment 3, it states that Fort Myers has 16,679 homesteaded properties with a 2026 taxable value of 3.5 billion dollars, that a 150,000 dollar exemption would cut that to 1.9 billion in 2027 and a 250,000 dollar exemption to 1.2 billion in 2028, and that the resulting revenue loss would be 9.6 million dollars in the 2028 financial year and 14.4 million in 2029. It puts a further 1.85 million dollar loss on 23,129 non-homesteaded properties under a five percent assessment cap.

Fort Myers has put five ways to close a 9.2 million dollar hole in front of its council, and four of the five raise the fire assessment on every house in the city from 218 dollars to about 240

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