Why we built this
Amendment 3 has generated a lot of talking points and not much data. We wanted to know what it actually means, in dollars, for the local governments that would live with it, so we built a tool to find out.
We are not advocating for or against Amendment 3. We are data-driven people, and we think this kind of information should be public and easy to find.
What this is really about
Most of the public conversation around Amendment 3 has stayed at the level of a soundbite: it’s a tax cut, or it’s a budget hole. Both are true, but neither tells you what it means for a specific city or county: how big the gap actually is, what share of the budget that represents, and what a local government would realistically have to do to close it. That’s the question this tool answers, address by address and jurisdiction by jurisdiction, using public property records and published budgets rather than estimates or talking points.
How we think about it
We work on resilience every day. At its core, resilience is about how a community handles shocks and stressors: the disruptions that test whether it can keep functioning and recover. That work usually means storms, flooding, and heat. But communities also face financial shocks, sudden and significant changes to the resources a local government has to work with. Those shocks come from different directions.
A local decision: a millage cut, a new exemption, a budget choice made by the city or county itself.
A state or federal policy change, like Amendment 3, that a local government has no control over but has to absorb.
Shifts in property values, growth, or the broader market that change the revenue a budget was built to expect.
Amendment 3 falls into the second category. It isn’t a choice any individual city or county makes; it’s a change legislated at the state level that lands differently everywhere depending on how much of that government’s budget relies on the taxes it would reduce. We believe that giving people clear, specific data about a shock like this, rather than leaving it to competing talking points, leads to more transparent decision-making, for residents and for the officials who have to respond.
Every figure on this site traces back to public property records and published budgets. See Our Methodology for how we built them.