A plain-English look at where the City's money comes from, where it goes, and how property-tax revenue fits into the adopted budget — built entirely from the adopted budget and public homestead/parcel (NAL) data.
The General Fund is the City's main operating budget. The figures below show recurring General Fund revenue, the FY2026 adopted spending plan, property-tax revenue, and the share of recurring General Fund revenue provided by property taxes.
This budget pays for many day-to-day city operations. Below are the largest operating department lines in the adopted FY2026 budget.
Residents do not experience a budget as accounting lines. They experience it as services: police response, parks, maintenance, technology systems, planning, and city operations.
Patrol, investigations, traffic enforcement, public safety response, and law-enforcement operations.
City management, finance, legal, human resources, purchasing, records, and citywide support.
Facilities, fleet, maintenance support, infrastructure upkeep, and operational support services.
Technology systems, communications, cybersecurity, strategic projects, and digital service support.
Parks, recreation, community programs, public spaces, events, and quality-of-life services.
Planning, development review, zoning, permitting coordination, and community growth management.
Public infrastructure support and city operational services.
Building-code and fire-safety inspection functions — see below for how fire service is actually funded.
Residents often assume police and fire are funded the same way. In Altamonte Springs, they are not, and that difference matters for understanding this budget.
Police is an Altamonte Springs department, budgeted at $16,432,580 — 33.1% of the city's main operating budget. Every dollar shown for police on this page is a City of Altamonte Springs dollar.
Fire protection in Altamonte Springs is provided through Seminole County, funded by a county fire assessment/millage that appears on the county portion of a resident's tax bill, not through this city's General Fund. The small Building and Fire Safety line above ($173,937) covers building-code and fire-safety inspection functions, not fire suppression operations.
This converts the major operating department budget into a $100 example. It is a simple way to understand scale. It does not mean property-tax dollars are legally restricted to these exact uses.
Police is the largest operating department line, followed by Administration, Maintenance Services, Technology/Communications, and Leisure Services.
The $100 view is not a separate budget. It is the same adopted budget translated into a resident-friendly example.
Property taxes are the largest revenue source here, but not the only one. Other sources help support operations but may not fully replace property-tax revenue dollar-for-dollar.
Altamonte Springs' adopted FY2026 budget shows $20,246,071 in property-tax revenue out of $47,319,091 in total operating revenue.
This section uses the supplied parcel-tier dataset to show how residential properties are distributed by assessed value. Assessed value is the more relevant measure for the proposed $250,000 non-school homestead-exemption threshold because it reflects Florida assessment limitations before exemptions are subtracted.
Each bar shows the share of residential parcels in that assessed-value range. The percentages use the 11,019-parcel assessed-value total as the denominator.
Florida's Save Our Homes cap and homestead exemptions already remove a large share of home value from the tax roll, for every homesteaded property, under today's law — before any ballot measure changes anything. The Florida League of Cities publishes this by city; here is Altamonte Springs' own number.
For the typical homesteaded property in Altamonte Springs, the Save Our Homes cap alone already shields about $119,600 of value from taxation. Combined with the standard homestead exemptions, that shield grows to roughly $167,293 — about 61.8% of that home's assessed value.
"Only a small share of home value is untaxed today, so raising exemptions further would only have a small effect."
Under current law, before any reform, 61.8% of the typical homesteaded property's assessed value in this city is already untaxed through Save Our Homes and homestead exemptions combined. The starting point is already large.
Understanding the difference between market value and assessed value is important when discussing Florida property taxes. Market value represents the estimated selling price of a property under current market conditions. Assessed value is determined by the County Property Appraiser using Florida law and is the basis for calculating taxable value after assessment limitations, such as Save Our Homes, and applicable exemptions are applied.
Proposed homestead-exemption changes would affect the assessed or taxable value of qualifying homesteaded properties, not the property's market value. Assessed value therefore provides the more useful measure for showing how many residential properties fall above or below the $250,000 threshold.
Picture 4 typical homes in this city. Roughly this many already sit at or under a $250,000 assessed value:
The 74.4% figure above covers every residential parcel citywide, homesteaded or not — only homesteaded primary residences actually qualify for the exemption. Neither source this page draws from publishes a homestead-only breakdown by value tier, so an exact homestead-specific count isn't available. But the Florida League of Cities data does show the median assessed value among Altamonte Springs' 7,306 homesteaded parcels is $157,794 — well under $250,000. Since the median homesteaded parcel already sits below that line, and homesteaded homes benefit from the Save Our Homes cap that non-homesteaded homes don't, it is reasonable to expect the true homestead-only share to be a majority, and plausibly close to the citywide 74.4%. This page states that as a reasonable range, not an exact count.
A large share of parcels qualifying does not translate dollar-for-dollar into an equally large share of city property-tax revenue disappearing. The parcels most likely to fall under $250,000 are, by definition, this city's lower-value homes, so each one already contributes less to total property-tax revenue than a higher-value home does. The true revenue effect depends on the assessed value represented by exempted parcels, not just their count — and that value breakdown isn't published in either source this page uses, so this page does not estimate a dollar figure. What the data does show: because 61.8% of a typical homesteaded property's value here is already shielded from taxation under current law, a $250,000 exemption would primarily complete that shielding for the city's already lower-value homes, while parcels above $250,000 in assessed value would continue paying tax on the portion above that line.
Property-tax revenue is deposited into the General Fund along with other unrestricted revenue. Together, those resources support many core municipal services. Other operations are financed through utility rates, assessments, grants, impact fees, debt proceeds, or other dedicated funds and generally cannot be treated as interchangeable General Fund money.
The answer depends on which number is being discussed. The adopted budget shows property-tax revenue increased, while all-funds net expenditures decreased compared with the FY2025 adopted budget.
Budgets can be reduced, but the hard question is where. Some spending is tied to staffing, contracts, public-safety operations, maintenance cycles, infrastructure, technology, facilities, or restricted funds.
If residents only read one section, this is the plain-English takeaway from the adopted FY2026 budget numbers.
These answers are meant to educate, not advocate. They summarize what the adopted budget can and cannot tell residents.
No. It shows adopted budget numbers. Proving waste, efficiency, overstaffing, contract savings, or unnecessary spending requires a deeper audit and policy review.
No. Property taxes equal 42.8% of General Fund revenue and 23.3% of all-funds net revenue. The City also has utilities, stormwater, refuse, building inspections, grants, capital funds, impact fees, and other fund types.
Not freely. Utility charges are generally tied to operating and maintaining the utility systems. Some funds may be legally, contractually, or accounting-restricted.
Generally, impact fees are for growth-related capital needs. They are not a simple substitute for recurring General Fund operating revenue.
The adopted budget reports total property-tax revenue. A homestead-only estimate would require tax-roll detail by exemption status and property class. That is not shown in this adopted budget summary.
This page does not model a specific dollar loss to Altamonte Springs under Amendment 3 or any other proposed reform — that would require assumptions not supported by the two sources used here. It does not cover Seminole County's fire budget, since fire is funded through a separate county assessment, not this city's General Fund. Every figure on this page traces to the City of Altamonte Springs FY2026 Adopted Budget or the Florida League of Cities homestead exemption dataset — nothing here is projected, modeled, or estimated beyond what those two sources state.
This page draws from exactly two public data sources, plus one legislative-text source used only to describe the statewide ballot proposal in general terms. Nothing on this page is estimated, modeled, or projected beyond what these sources state.
The city's own official, adopted budget document. Every dollar figure on this page for revenue, department spending, all-funds totals, and year-over-year change is pulled directly from this document.
View the official adopted budget →
A statewide, city-by-city dataset published by the Florida League of Cities, built from county property appraisers' NAL (Name-Address-Legal) files — the standard tax-roll extract every Florida county submits to the Department of Revenue. It supplies this page's homestead parcel count, median assessed value, and Save Our Homes/homestead-exemption percentages.
A parcel-level export, also drawn from NAL tax-roll data, listing each residential parcel's just (market) value and assessed (taxable, Save Our Homes-capped) value. It powers the value-tier chart and the $250,000-threshold comparison on this page, covering 11,019 residential parcels citywide.
Caveat: parcels are matched to the city by situs/mailing address rather than certified incorporated boundary, and the set includes both homesteaded and non-homesteaded properties. Treat it as a close, illustrative approximation — not an official parcel-by-parcel count.
Used only to describe what the statewide ballot proposal itself does — the exemption amounts, the 2027/2028 phase-in schedule, and that it applies to non-school taxes on homesteaded property. This source is not used to generate any Altamonte Springs-specific dollar figure; the city-specific numbers on this page come exclusively from Sources 1 and 2 above.
