City of Sarasota cites a $3.1-million reduction in the 2027 fiscal year and loss of nearly $2.3 million in FY 2028
Sarasota County Government would be expected to lose $87 million in property tax revenue in the 2029 fiscal year — which would begin on Oct. 1, 2028 — if a state property tax referendum wins voter approval this fall, the county’s Office of Financial Management (OFM) told The Sarasota News Leader this week.
The projected loss of revenue just for the General Fund would be anticipated to reach $64.9 million, the OFM pointed out in the same June 3 email.
A local government’s General Fund pays the expenses of departments — such as sheriff’s offices and the police departments — which do not generate sufficient revenue of their own to cover their spending. It also is used to cover unexpected gaps in budgets.
The City of Sarasota’s Financial Administration Department staff has estimated that the city would see its property tax revenue reduced by approximately $3,182,464 in the 2027 fiscal year, with an additional decrease of $2,292,830 in the 2028 fiscal year.
In a June 3 email to the News Leader, city Communications Specialist Luke Mocherman stressed, “These estimates strictly address revenue impacts from proposed homestead exemption increases. There are still uncertainties as to how measures included in the referendum may impact the City’s budget.”
Both local governments provided the information in response to News Leader requests, in the aftermath of the June 2 vote of the Florida Legislature to place the property tax referendum on the November General Election ballot.
Ballotpedia has provided the following details about what formally is titled the Florida Homestead Tax Exemptions, Property Assessments, and Spending Restrictions Amendment:
After the 2028 fiscal year, the June 2 legislative resolution also says, the exemptions would be adjusted annually for inflation, through use of the Consumer Price Index.
Moreover, the resolution states that property taxes levied by counties and municipalities “shall be used only to:
- “Provide for public safety, including law enforcement, fire service, and emergency medical service;
- “Provide funding for education and public schools;
- “Finance or refinance infrastructure, including expenditures on road and bridge construction and maintenance and stormwater control;
- “Finance or refinance natural resource projects, including flood control measures;
- “Issue local bonds for uses consistent with this paragraph and to make debt service payments for existing obligations;
- “Meet obligations for retirement benefits of local government employees;
- “Fund the operations and administration of county officers and commissioners established under Article VIII [of the resolution] and municipalities, and the expenditures approved by such county officers or county or municipal governing bodies, except those expenditures prohibited by general law.”
Part of that last section refers to the elected county constitutional officers, such as the sheriff and the tax collector.
At least 60% of the citizens statewide who vote in the referendum must approve the proposal for it to go into effect.
The Governor’s Office has reported that the $250,000 exemption “would wipe out the need to pay property taxes for 60% of Floridians who own a home and make it their main residence,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported on June 2.
Gov. Ron DeSantis “often framed his push [for elimination of property taxes for permanent residents] this way,” the Tallahassee Democrat also notes: “ ‘Truly owning private property should not mean perpetually paying “rent” ’ to the government in the form of property tax.”
Budget data and the numbers of homestead parcels
For the 2025-26 fiscal year — which began on Oct. 1, 2025 — the City of Sarasota budget estimated that property tax payments would add up to $57,292,797. Those funds are expected to comprise 51.2% of the General Fund revenue, a pie chart shows.
For the county, the estimated general fund revenue for the 2026 fiscal year is $516,398,307, as noted in a slide shown to the County Commission during its May 20 budget workshop. Through March — the midpoint of the fiscal year — staff had spent 46% of that amount, the slide said.
In late June 2025, in compliance with a state law that sets an annual deadline of July 1 for the materials, the Sarasota County Property Appraiser’s Office released detailed property data for all of the local governments in the county. The documents included the numbers of parcels in each jurisdiction that had homestead exemptions and those without them.
Sarasota County Government was shown to have a total of 304,930 parcels. Of those, 105,884 — not quite one-third — had homestead exemptions.
In the same set of 2025 materials, the City of Sarasota was reported to have 28,228 parcels. Of those, 9,916 — again, slightly less than one-third — had homestead exemptions.
Members of the County Commission have expressed concerns numerous times over the past year about the potential that the Legislature would approve a property tax referendum for the November General Election ballot. As a result, they directed County Administrator Jonathan Lewis last summer to alert all of the county’s constitutional officers that they want to make certain that the county’s General Fund rises no more than 1.6% for the 2027 fiscal year and that it be limited to 3.6% upticks from FY 2028 through FY 2031.
During the board’s first budget workshop this year — conducted on Feb. 26 — Sheriff Kurt A. Hoffman and Supervisor of Elections Ron Turner were the only two constitutional officers to indicate that they could achieve the 1.6% threshold for FY 2027.
Moreover, the commissioners approved $5.46 million in reductions in General Fund spending for this fiscal year.
Among the savings were the following, as noted in a slide presented during their May 20 budget workshop:
Another slide presented to the County Commission on May 20 showed recurring reductions in spending starting in the 2027 fiscal year, which will begin on Oct. 1:
