When the numbers say your idea is expensive, you have two options. You can argue with the numbers, or you can argue with the people who produced them.
Byron Donalds has picked the second one.
Speaking in Jacksonville, the Naples congressman and Republican candidate for governor went after Florida's Revenue Estimating Conference — the nonpartisan body of state economists whose job is to tell the Legislature what things cost.
"The Revenue Estimating Conference has been estimating revenue in our state for 30 years. They're often wrong."
"We've seen it in the Legislature time and time again. When I was there, we were told that there was going to be a revenue shortfall of about $3.5 billion that didn't happen. Right now, the Revenue Estimating Conference is estimating a $6 billion shortfall over the next couple of years, and we have to plan for that. But the truth is, they've been wrong about this several times."
Notice what is missing from that. Donalds says the state's economists are wrong. He does not say what the right number is.
The number he doesn't like
Amendment 3, which Donalds has made the centerpiece of his campaign for governor, would raise Florida's homestead exemption to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028.
The state's Office of Economic and Demographic Research ran the math. Its projection: a total of $11.86 billion a year eventually pulled out of local government budgets. The ramp looks like this:
| Fiscal year | Revenue lost by local governments |
|---|---|
| 2027–28 | nearly $5 billion |
| 2028–29 | $8.775 billion |
| 2029–30 | $9.7 billion |
| 2030–31 | $10.751 billion |
This is not a think tank's guess or an opposition campaign's talking point. It is the analysis produced by the state government Donalds wants to run, by the same office the Legislature relies on every year to write a budget.
And it isn't evenly spread. Commuter counties — the ones with less commercial property and more of their revenue coming from homes — take the worst of it proportionally. St. Lucie County could lose 35% of its revenue. Clay, Baker, Citrus and Hernando counties could each lose more than 30%.
The big urban counties lose the most in raw dollars. By fiscal 2028–29, according to the Florida Association of Counties: Miami-Dade down $445 million, Hillsborough $353 million, Broward about $326 million, Duval $277 million, Orange $253 million.
Under the amendment, what local governments are allowed to fund would be limited to public safety, infrastructure, schools, debt service and pensions, plus county constitutional officers. Everything else a county does comes out of a much smaller pot.
"Often wrong" is not a number
There is a version of this argument that would be legitimate. A candidate could say: here is where the state's model is flawed, here is the assumption I think is bad, and here is my own estimate. Donalds did not do that.
What he offered instead was an anecdote — that during his time in the Florida House he was told to expect a roughly $3.5 billion shortfall that never materialized — and a conclusion drawn from it, that therefore the current estimate is inflated. He did not say by how much. He did not say which projection he was recalling.
That is not a correction. It is a permission slip to ignore the only official cost estimate that exists.
It also cuts both ways. If the Revenue Estimating Conference is unreliable, then the $6 billion shortfall Donalds cites in the same breath is unreliable too — and so is every revenue projection a Governor Donalds would use to write a budget. He is discrediting the instrument he'd have to fly by.
The part where he proposes a graduated tax
The other notable thing Donalds said in those remarks got much less attention.
He floated replacing Florida's uniform property tax with a tiered one — different treatment for counties with big tax bases than for counties without:
"We have one property tax system that governs Putnam and governs Duval. I think in 2026, that doesn't make much sense at all. Especially considering the fact, again, we have supercomputers in our pocket. I think we can design a taxing system that recognizes a fiscally constrained county versus a county that has large economic development."
That is a proposal to have wealthier counties carry counties that can't fund themselves. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has already balked at Amendment 3 as a "progressive" pitch that could lead to a "graduated" property tax system.
So the position is: the state's nonpartisan economists are exaggerating the cost of my amendment, and also, I would like to redesign Florida's property tax into something the Wall Street Journal calls progressive.
Why this matters beyond one ballot measure
Attacking a nonpartisan estimating body is not a small thing. The Revenue Estimating Conference exists precisely so that Florida's budget is written against a shared set of facts rather than whatever number is convenient for whoever is in charge that year.
Donalds isn't disputing a methodology. He is telling voters to discount the referee three months before they vote on a measure he has spent millions promoting.
Florida voters decide on Amendment 3 in November. The people who will find out whether the estimators were right are the ones who call 911, drive on county roads, and use the libraries and parks that fall outside the amendment's protected list.
Source
- Byron Donalds Attacks Nonpartisan Revenue Estimating Conference — FlaglerLive, August 9, 2026, republishing reporting by A.G. Gancarski of Florida Politics. Photo via FlaglerLive.
