Sep 21, 2026, 21:11

A Florida judge gutted your property tax cut because he thinks the words sound too good, and he's worried everybody's going to vote for it. This is a giant loss for taxpayers and a huge win for the politicians who are planning on raising your property taxes the minute this vote fails. In this video, I'll show you who's really behind the lawsuit that just gutted your ballot, the people who are fighting hard to make sure your property taxes keep going up, and how much money is going back in your pocket if you vote yes on Amendment 3. Let's jump in. The biggest property tax cut in Florida history, called Save Our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes, Amendment 3, passed the Florida Legislature and is set to go straight to your ballot this November. It's a done deal and ready to go in front of voters. And almost as fast as it landed on the ballot, three separate lawsuits got filed to stop it. Here's who's actually behind them, a non-profit calling itself Save Our Voters from Misleading Ballot Language, and these politicians, former Stuart Mayor Thomas Campeni, former Key Biscayne Mayor Michael Davey, former South Miami Mayor Phillip Stoddard, former Democrat Congressman Al Lawson, and former Republican State Senator Jeff Brandes. Not a single truck driver, no plumbers, not a mom who read her sample ballot and got confused. Every name on that lawsuit is a career politician, people who spent their entire lives inside government now suing to change the words you're going to read before you vote. Here's why the wording matters so much that they're willing to go to court over it. Amendment 3 needs 60% of Florida voters to say yes. That's a super majority. So if you're trying to kill this thing, you don't fight the amendment, you fight the words describing it. You take a title like Save Our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes and you water it down. You turn it into something that sounds like a tax hike. Something like Increase Tax Exemption in the hopes that voters see the word increase and vote no. Or that it sounds too boring that Florida voters won't bother to read it. So they won't vote for it, which is just as good as a no vote. That's the whole play. They only need to confuse 41% into skipping it, misunderstanding it, or voting no without ever realizing they just voted against thousands of dollars in their own pocket. Do that and the amendment fails and the wasteful spending machine at your local government keeps right on rolling like nothing ever happened. So now that you know their plan, the only question left is, will it actually work? On July 29th, all three lawsuits landed in front of Leon County Circuit Judge David Frank. And you're going to want to remember that name because this is the same judge that ruled gubernatorial candidate James Fishback could stay on the ballot. Despite damning evidence against him, including his own admission under oath about living and voting in D.C. the last couple of years. I'll link that video at the end of this one because it's wild. Now a week later, this same judge is deciding whether the words on your ballot are too convincing to let you see them. On August 4th, Judge Frank made his decision and he sided with the politicians. Of course he did. Judge Frank said the ballot title, Save Our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes, is more like a political slogan than an actual description of what the amendment does. He says it's not fair, not neutral. He says it's selling you something instead of explaining it to you. He even calls out the word save specifically. He said it's designed to make you feel something instead of just laying out the facts. And he doesn't stop at the title. He also wants four lines in the ballot summary gone, every single one. The summary said the amendment benefits Florida taxpayers, which it obviously does, but Judge Frank said that's the whole debate you're supposed to be deciding, not something the ballot gets to just tell you as a fact. So it's gone. The amendment also says it protects small businesses, which it does because it now caps our property tax increases at 5% instead of 10%, which can destroy the profits of your local coffee shop, restaurant, and barber shop. But Judge Frank said the same thing, that's a conclusion, not a description. Gone. It said the amendment ensures funding for core services, which is true because it forces local governments to fund police, schools, roads, and fire departments first, before funding gay pride parades and DEI programs. The judge said change the wording. The amendment also said it ensures fairness for Florida residents. He didn't like that either. Here's the thing though, the amendment does what it says it does. Judge Frank didn't rule any of that was false. He ruled it was too convincing. And here's the great news, Judge Frank was clear, he's not killing Amendment 3. He said flat out that whether cutting your property taxes is good policy is not his call. That decision still belongs to voters in November. But he handed Attorney General James Uthmeyer exactly 10 days to rewrite the language he said was misleading. Counties start printing ballots on August 27th, so they gotta get this done fast. So the same judge who let Fishback stay on the ballot despite serious questions about his eligibility, turned around and ruled your tax cut language was too convincing. Which raises the real question, what exactly is in this amendment that's got politicians this scared? Here's what Amendment 3 actually does. Right now, Florida homeowners get a homestead exemption of about $50,000. Amendment 3 raises that to $150,000 in 2027, then $250,000 in 2028. Once that $250,000 exemption kicks in, the governor's own office estimates that roughly 60% of homesteaded Florida homeowners will owe $0 in non-school property taxes. Not a discount, zero. School taxes still remain in place. So if your home's assessed value, not market value, sits under $250,000, your city and county non-school property tax bill on that home disappears completely. This is a huge deal. Now here's the part these politicians are really upset about. The amendment also restricts what cities and counties can spend your remaining property tax dollars on, limiting it to a defined list of core services. Public safety, law enforcement, fire protection, emergency medical services, infrastructure, roads, bridges, stormwater, natural resources, existing bond and retirement obligations. That's the actual list written into the amendment itself. So the same politicians who are scaring you into thinking police and fire are going to go away if this passes are leaving out one small detail. They're going to be required to fund those budgets first. You hear all this, oh, we're not going to be able to, they're going to have no police anymore. Do you honestly believe that? Do you honestly believe we're just not going to have police? I mean, come on, seriously. Cutting their budgets doesn't mean cutting police and fire. It means cutting the stuff nobody voted for. The programs that have nothing to do with running a city or a county. Like Broward County spending $890,000 on DEI training, including pushing something called the gender-bred person. Or Hillsborough County spending $950,000 on employee vehicle allowances. And Jacksonville spending $1.9 million in grants to DEI-focused art groups. That's what your property taxes are paying for right now. Would you care if these programs went away? I wouldn't. Those are the services local governments would have to find new funding for if budgets get tight. Police and fire get funded first. That's going to be the law. So Pensacola is going to have to fund police before paying a management company $150,000 a year to bring drag shows to their city theater. True story. Your yes vote on Amendment 3 stops all of this, and that's exactly why they're pissed. You're cutting into what they think is their money. It's not. It's yours. And this isn't the first time they've tried to scare you into voting against your own tax cut either. They ran the same play the last time a property tax cut was on the ballot. None of this is new. Florida politicians and local governments had run this same scare campaign before. And guess what? Police and fire departments are still here. Let's talk about who's actually running it. The Florida League of Cities represents more than 400 cities across Florida. And right now, they're running a statewide campaign called the Florida Formula, telling you Amendment 3 isn't a tax cut. It's a tax shift. Here's the part they don't put on the flyer. The League of Cities is funded by membership dues paid for by every one of those 400 plus cities out of their city budgets. And by their own admission, over half of a typical Florida city budget comes from local property taxes. So think about that for a second. They're literally using the property taxes you already paid to fund a campaign convincing you not to lower your property taxes. Who's that benefit? Not you. And this isn't their first rodeo. In 2008, Florida voters faced Amendment 1, a similar property tax relief measure. The same groups, local officials, city associations, public safety unions warned it would gut police and fire budgets across the state. Same scare tactics they're using today. Voters didn't buy it, though. Amendment 1 passed with 64% of the vote. And here we are, almost two decades later, and Florida still has police officers and firefighters showing up every time you call. You want the real pattern here? It's not that property tax cuts destroy Florida. It's that the politicians whose bloated budgets depend on your tax dollars are going to say whatever it takes to protect those budgets, just like they did in 2008. And now they're saying it again. At some point, you gotta ask how many times you're gonna fall for the same warning before you notice it's coming from the same people again. And more importantly, what does DeSantis have to say about all this? You work hard, you purchase land, purchase a home, maybe you have a mortgage, you pay off your mortgage, and it's like, at what point are you free and clear? And what property tax says is that you never really own your property because you gotta pay rent to the government. And I just think that you have senior citizens that are on fixed incomes, and their home is now being, they're being told their home that they bought for $200,000 30 years ago is now worth $1.3 million, and they gotta pony up and pay more taxes. And the homestead exemption is too weak to protect people. So that's just, that's a problem. We got the best governor in the country in Ron DeSantis, and he wanted to eliminate property taxes completely, even school taxes. Amendment 3 is still a huge tax cut, but it's nothing compared to what DeSantis proposed. Because property taxes have exploded over the last few years, and he called it out. When I became governor in 2019, now property taxes are local, it's not, it doesn't go to the state. We don't levy them, we don't collect them. But local governments throughout Florida took in $32 billion in property tax revenue. Today, it's $60 billion in property tax revenue. By 2031, it's going to be $84 billion on current trajectory. If Amendment 3 doesn't pass, you're basically giving these politicians a green light to keep raising taxes. And that means another 40% increase by 2031. 40%! Because their spending never stops. So you better believe they're going to jack up your property taxes if Amendment 3 fails. Why wouldn't they? You just told them it's fine. And DeSantis warned that these politicians are going to pull every trick in the book to keep you paying. You are going to hear those horror stories from every local government in the state. I know that, and they're doing that to try to get people to not vote for this. They have a self-interest in keeping the gravy train going. If you can't see that, I don't know how I can help you. You're going to continue to be inundated by this. They're going to tell you, they're going to tell you there's no money for infrastructure, you're not going to have any money for police, you're not going to have any money for any of these things. They are going to say that over and over again. So if you've ever complained about the cost of living being too high in Florida, or your property taxes are out of control, now's your chance to do something about it. Because it's completely up to you to save yourself this November. DeSantis isn't going to help. When he was asked if he was going to lead the charge on Amendment 3 to get this across the finish line, here's what he had to say. I don't think so, and the reason is what the legislature did wasn't my proposal. And so we had a proposal, and I felt an obligation if that were on the ballot to lead the effort. We would have done a political committee. We would have made sure that we were able to do that and explain and just educate people on it. In terms of leading the effort, in terms of me saying, here we go, we're going to do this, we're going to do all that, you know, I'm not going to do it. I think it'll likely pass, I mean, because if you read it, I think most people are going to be supportive of it. Because while I support it, you know, I do think it's not, you know, all that I was hoping to see. Right now, there's zero political committees educating voters on the benefits of Amendment 3. There's zero people putting up billboards, running ads on TV or social media, educating your neighbors on the benefit of a property tax cut. Why? Because there's no money in cutting taxes for politicians. But there's a ton of political committees, nonprofits, news organizations, politicians, government employees paying to get you to vote no on your own tax cut. Because they all benefit on keeping the gravy train rolling. So stop listening to the people that feed off your property tax money and start standing up for yourself. Vote yes on Amendment 3 and put your money back in your pocket where it belongs. And listen, you're not going to want to miss what's coming next, so hit subscribe now before you forget. Then, click here to learn how Florida voters lose big as this judge rules on Fishback. I'll show you how Fishback got caught in a lie he swore up and down wasn't true, how this court case opened him up to a giant legal nightmare, and how this isn't even close to his biggest legal problem he's facing right now. Click here and I'll see you there.