11-04-2025
Where do your property taxes go in Miami-Dade? Take a look at our deep dive
When Jared Lago reports for a 24-hour shift in one of Miami-Dade's newest fire stations, property taxes pay almost all of his wages.
Lago, 25 and the three other members of the Dolphin Station 68 crew start work at 7 a.m. and don't go home until the next morning. Hired in February as part of a department expansion in a station that opened last year, one of Lago's first rescue calls was a health emergency at the nearby Dolphin Mall. An older woman at a restaurant had trouble breathing, prompting help from the Dolphin Station across the street in Sweetwater instead of one of two suburban stations 5 miles away that would have handled the call before.
'She was having a panic attack,' Lago said. 'We gave her an IV and calmed her down.'
READ MORE: What happens if property taxes go away in Florida?
The rookie firefighter is part of the roughly 3,000 people who work for the county's Fire Rescue Department, where property tax pays 85% of the agency's $752 million budget.
That puts the department near the top of the list for receiving Miami-Dade property taxes, a revenue source now under attack in Tallahassee by Gov. Ron DeSantis and others.
'Everybody in Florida is essentially renting their properties from the state,' said Rep. Ryan Chamberlin, a Republican from Belleview in Central Florida who is pushing for the elimination of property taxes statewide. 'There is a better way to tax people and raise the same amount of money.'
It's not just Republicans in Florida's capitol. Last month, a bipartisan group of Miami-Dade commissioners took a vote urging state lawmakers to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to bar local governments from imposing property taxes on primary homes. Those 'homesteaded' residences make up about 43% of Miami-Dade's residential tax base.
Amid calls for eliminating property taxes altogether or slashing the number of homeowners paying them, an analysis of budget figures in Miami-Dade shows schools and public safety agencies have the most to lose.
Combined, those two budget categories eat up about 70 cents of every dollar of the $7 billion in property taxes that Miami-Dade's countywide governments are forecast to spend this year, according to the Miami Herald's analysis.
The high share for safety and schools highlights the challenge in slashing property-tax revenue without slamming the county's budgets for jail guards, police officers, firefighters, paramedics, teachers and the maintenance crews that keep schools functioning.
'If we didn't have property taxes, we'd have no money whatsoever to repair anything at the schools. A/C units die here in Miami very frequently,' said Martha Diaz, chief budget officer for the Miami-Dade school system, where about half of the budget comes from property taxes. Losing property-tax revenue 'would definitely cripple the system.'
For this story, the Herald went through budgets tied to a dozen Miami-Dade property taxes — different buckets of revenue dedicated to things like countywide government operations, the school system, public libraries and more.
Combined, those taxes are expected to generate about $7 billion this year. The Herald's analysis does not include the $2 billion in city property taxes collected by Miami, Hialeah and the 32 other municipalities that have their own budgets and revenue sources.
To illustrate where that money goes, we used budget documents to calculate what portion of each government agency's budget is funded by property taxes. Finally, we broke out the components of those budgets and ranked them by how much they rely on property taxes.
The analysis found:
Education expenses easily top the list. The Herald analysis found that roughly 50 cents of every dollar collected in county property taxes goes to the school system. Miami-Dade public schools are set to receive roughly $3.5 billion in property taxes this year to educate more than 300,000 students. About $2 billion of that money goes to the instructional budget, things like teacher pay and textbooks. That puts instructional expenses at the top of the Herald's list of property-tax expenses eat up a large chunk. About 21 cents of the county's budgeted tax dollars go to Miami-Dade's three countywide public safety agencies: Fire Rescue, Corrections and the Sheriff's Office. Together, they're set to spend about $1.5 billion in property taxes this year. (Property owners in cities with their own fire departments don't pay the county's fire tax. The Sheriff's Office receives money from a tax charged to all property owners and one charged only on property outside of city limits. To see a property's tax breakdown, visit the Property Appraiser Office's 'Tax Visualizer' website.)Health and social services aren't especially high on the list. Combined, social services and health costs account for about 9 cents of every property-tax dollar in the Herald's analysis. The county's Jackson Health hospital system receives about $300 million from property taxes, making the public hospital the largest expense in this category. A close second is the Children's Trust, a grant-making agency funded by a special property tax that Miami-Dade voters approved in 2002. That tax is forecast to generate about $225 million this year. Miami-Dade's county government also expects to spend about $110 million in property taxes on charity grants, elder care, case workers for juvenile offenders and other social services.
For Karina Pavone, a cofounder of the Amigos for Kids nonprofit in Miami, a $300,000 annual grant from the Children's Trust lets her organization fund social workers who help low-income parents facing eviction.
'We call them success coaches,' she said. She said about 90 families are enrolled, with social workers helping them secure benefits that can help them pay rent or tackle issues like substance abuse.
'We only take the toughest cases,' Pavone said. While private donations help, Pavone said Amigos relies on the stable funding stream that the Children's Trust provides with the help of property-tax dollars. 'I'm going to be very honest with you: Private philanthropy is hard,' she said. 'The uncertainty is really hard on nonprofits.'
The push to cut back on local governments' property-tax budgets has Miami-Dade's Democratic mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, warning of financial pain. Last month she released a memo with cost estimates on various property-tax legislation circulating in Tallahassee, including creating a $100,000 exemption for all real estate (a change she said would reduce Miami-Dade's property-tax revenue by 22%) and a study to eliminate all property taxes (which would wipe out all of the $3 billion in property taxes that goes into Miami-Dade's $12.7 billion budget).
'Property taxes are the backbone of our local government,' Levine Cava, a Democrat reelected to a second term last year, said in an interview. 'They fund the public services that everyone relies on.'
While DeSantis has proposed that Florida homeowners receive a state-funded rebate for property taxes, expected to average $1,000 this year, he's also part of the push to change Florida's constitution to reduce the amount of taxes on homeowners.
'This is just the opening salvo. We want to have a constitutional amendment on property taxes,' DeSantis said in a March 31 speech in Orlando to the Florida Association of Realtors.
He didn't provide details on what he wants but suggested property taxes could plunge or vanish for homeowners in exchange for more taxes on real estate owned by vacationers and investors.
'This can actually be done,' DeSantis said.
He's already pushing local governments to agree to audits from a state efficiency task force he's established that's named after DOGE, the Elon Musk-led group that has been slashing jobs and offices in the federal government under President Donald Trump. Those audits, DeSantis told the Realtors group, will show local governments 'they have the ability to both shrink their own budgets but also shift tax burdens to our tourists and our non-Floridians.'
Payroll is a major expense for local governments — costing about $4 billion this year in Miami-Dade's $12.7 billion budget — so any significant drops in property-tax revenue would likely bring layoffs or salary cuts. Politically influential unions negotiate the contracts that govern how much most government employees get paid in Miami-Dade.
At Station 68, the white board by the common room has a reminder of a raise to come: '3% COLA on 4/17.'
The cost-of-living adjustment was part of the union contract approved by Miami-Dade County commissioners last year and negotiated by the mayor's administration. Adding roughly $29 million a year to the $752 million Fire Rescue budget, the deal gave firefighters like Lago annual 3% pay boosts in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
Other unions got the same pay increases under deals that added another $125 million a year to the county's budget, according to county memos. Under Levine Cava's budget, the average county worker earns about $96,000, compared to about $63,000 for the average worker in South Florida. For the Station 68 crew, the average pay is about $100,000, according to a county compensation database.
Lago said he first applied for his job three years ago and kept reapplying while working as a private-sector ambulance driver and completing firefighter school. 'I was just blessed,' he said.
Because of rising property values and new construction, Fire Rescue saw its property-tax revenue increase 11% this year, allowing it to make about 170 new hires, including Lago.
But relying on real estate taxes isn't always a recipe for steady hiring at Fire Rescue. Firefighter Bibich Zabaleta joined the department in 2013 when Miami-Dade was still recovering from a plunge in property taxes during the real estate crash that began in 2009. The 45-year-old said that back then, he wasn't sure his rookie slot on the payroll was secure. 'I remember they told us we just got hired, but we might get fired,' he said.
Veronica Cordoba, 31, joined the department in 2018 and now serves as a lieutenant. She grew up in a family of New York police officers but said she opted for rescue work after she witnessed a friend die in a four-wheeling accident while in her early 20s. 'I wanted to follow in her legacy,' Cordoba said.
She's part of the four-person crew that heads out on the station's lone fire truck. Crashes on the nearby Florida Turnpike keep the squad busy, as do health emergencies from tourists in nearby hotels. Engine 68 recently got a call to a rock quarry to save a man who became trapped in machinery during an overnight shift.
While the new station has a fire truck, there's no ambulance. The Station 68 crew needs to request an ambulance from another station if somebody they're treating needs to go to the hospital. They're expecting Fire Rescue to provide an ambulance for the station once funding frees up for the extra equipment.
'It would be nice,' said Chris Carlson, 35, a county firefighter hired in 2018. 'This is a very busy station.'
