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Collier County voters have approved the change that lets every voter inside the Greater Naples Fire Rescue District elect all five fire commissioners, 16,246 to 11,312, and the division seats that have split the ballot since the 2014 merger disappear with the November 2028 election
Money & World
The Editorial Team · August 19, 2026
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Stock photo. Not the actual scene. Photo: Anna Shvets / Pexels
What it changes
The Greater Naples Fire Rescue District is the largest independent fire district in Florida, it covers 1,517 square miles of Collier County, and in fiscal year 2023 it ran on 51.6 million dollars, 85 percent of which came out of property taxes at a millage of 1.5. Until Tuesday night the five people who set that millage were not all chosen by the same voters. Two seats belonged to the East Naples Division, two belonged to the Golden Gate Division, and one was elected by the district as a whole. That ends. The referendum carried 16,246 to 11,312, a margin of 4,934 votes on 27,558 cast, and beginning with the November 2028 election every voter in the district votes on every seat. The vote was comfortable rather than lopsided, and it held its shape across all three ways of voting: yes led on election day 6,210 to 3,810, led early voting 3,723 to 2,570, and led the mail 6,313 to 4,932. There was no method of voting on which the no side finished ahead. All 36 participating precincts are in, the county has all 67 of its precincts reporting, and it marks election day, early voting and mail as completely counted. The page still says preliminary at the top, as it will until the canvassing board finishes with mail ballot cures and provisionals, but a 17.9 percent margin sits far outside anything a recount provision reaches. What a reader should understand is that the district did not do this on its own. A special district in Florida holds only the powers its charter gives it, and the Greater Naples charter is a special act of the Legislature, chapter 2014-240, so the district could not change its own election method by resolution. It had to ask Tallahassee. Representative Lauren Melo filed HB 4029 on February 18, 2025. It cleared three House committees 16 to 0, 18 to 0 and 24 to 0, passed the House 115 to 0 on April 16, passed the Senate 36 to 0 on April 30, and Governor Ron DeSantis approved it on June 6, 2025. It became chapter 2025-232, Laws of Florida. And then it sat there doing nothing, because section 3 of the act says it takes effect only on a majority vote of the district's electors, in a referendum held no later than December 31, 2026. Tuesday was that referendum, and the act has now switched on. The oddity the change corrects is one the district states plainly in its own public notice: a commissioner elected by the Golden Gate Division has never been required to live in Golden Gate, and a commissioner elected by the East Naples Division has never been required to live in East Naples. So the divisions have determined who may vote for a seat without determining who may hold it. A no vote would have left that arrangement exactly as it stands, divisions and all. A yes vote collapses the question to one electorate. Two effects follow, and they point in different directions. The first is that every household inside the district now gets a say on all five commissioners rather than on three of them. The second is that Golden Gate and East Naples lose the thing the divisions gave them, which is a set of seats their own voters decided by themselves. Those two divisions were separate fire districts until 2014, when their voters approved the merger, and the division seats are what survived of that arrangement. From 2028 they are gone. The board itself does not change size. Florida law requires an independent special fire control district to be governed by a five member board, the Greater Naples board dropped from eight seats to five in November 2018, and the terms remain four years and staggered. Nothing about the millage, the budget or the service area moved on this ballot either. The House staff analysis put the bill's fiscal impact at none, and that is accurate in the narrow sense: this changes who elects the board, not what the board is funded to do. The district serves Chokoloskee, Everglades City, Golden Gate, East Naples, Isles of Capri, Port of the Islands and the ground around them, and it will serve them on the same terms next week as last week. The change arrives in the 2028 election, not this year, and any seat on the ballot before then runs under the old rules.
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