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.
The General Fund pays for many day-to-day city operations. Below are the adopted FY2026 General Fund department lines, from largest to smallest.
Residents do not experience a budget as accounting lines. They experience it as services: public safety, parks, maintenance, infrastructure, technology, planning, and city operations.
Patrol, investigations, traffic enforcement, public-safety response, and law-enforcement operations.
City services and operating functions supported through the General Fund.
Parks, recreation, community programs, public spaces, events, and quality-of-life services.
Technology systems, communications, cybersecurity, and digital service support.
Parks, recreation, community programs, public spaces, events, and quality-of-life services.
Facilities, fleet, maintenance support, infrastructure upkeep, and operational support services.
City services and operating functions supported through the General Fund.
City services and operating functions supported through the General Fund.
Facilities, fleet, maintenance support, infrastructure upkeep, and operational support services.
City services and operating functions supported through the General Fund.
Planning, development review, permitting, inspections, zoning, and community growth management.
City management, finance, legal, human resources, purchasing, records, and citywide support.
City management, finance, legal, human resources, purchasing, records, and citywide support.
Planning, development review, permitting, inspections, zoning, and community growth management.
Facilities, fleet, maintenance support, infrastructure upkeep, and operational support services.
City services and operating functions supported through the General Fund.
City services and operating functions supported through the General Fund.
City services and operating functions supported through the General Fund.
City services and operating functions supported through the General Fund.
Residents often assume police and fire are funded the same way. In Casselberry, they are not, and that difference matters for understanding this budget.
Police is a Casselberry department, budgeted at $11,500,000 — 38.2% of the city's General Fund spending. Every dollar shown for police on this page is a City of Casselberry dollar.
Fire protection in Casselberry 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. Casselberry's General Fund does not show a municipal Fire Department operating division in the same way a city-operated fire-rescue city would.
This converts the General Fund 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.
Property taxes are the largest single General Fund revenue source, but not the only one. Other revenue sources help support operations but may not fully replace property-tax revenue dollar-for-dollar.
The adopted budget shows $10,601,467 from Ad Valorem Taxes, the largest revenue source shown.
This section groups mapped residential parcels into assessed-value ranges reported in the supplied property data. Assessed value is the value used as the starting point for taxable value after Florida assessment limits and exemptions. The ranges help residents see how many properties fall at or below, and above, the $250,000 threshold being discussed.
Each bar shows the share of residential parcels in that assessed-value range. The percentages use the 8,637-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 Casselberry's own number. Unlike the assessed-value distribution above, these figures describe homesteaded parcels and the protection provided by Save Our Homes and existing homestead exemptions.
The published homestead data for Casselberry shows that current law already shields a meaningful portion of qualifying home value through Save Our Homes and homestead exemptions. The reported combined protected share is 64.05%.
Only a small share of homestead value is already protected under current law.
The published city-level homestead figures above show the measured effect of Save Our Homes and existing exemptions before any proposed reform.
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 75.0% figure above covers every mapped residential parcel citywide, homesteaded or not. The separate homestead dataset reports 5,656 homesteaded parcels in Casselberry with a median assessed value of $147,545. Because the two sources cover different parcel populations, this page does not present an exact homestead-only count by value tier.
A large share of parcels falling below the threshold does not translate dollar-for-dollar into the same share of city property-tax revenue disappearing. Revenue effects depend on taxable value, exemption eligibility, final legal language, phase-in rules, and replacement funding—not parcel count alone. Current-law protections already shield about 64.0% of the typical homesteaded property value shown in the separate homestead dataset.
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.
Yes, on every major measure. The FY2026 adopted budget raises the City's millage rate, and both the General Fund and the all-funds citywide budget grew compared with FY2025.
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 35.2% of General Fund revenue, and are about 12.1% of the City's overall budget, since utilities, fire assessment, and other funds sit outside the General Fund.
Fire suppression and EMS response are provided through Seminole County. The City budget does not show a municipal Fire Department operating division in the same way a city-operated fire-rescue city would.
Not always. Some funds are restricted by law, accounting purpose, contract, grant rules, bond requirements, or local policy. They are not always interchangeable with General Fund dollars.
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 Casselberry under Amendment 3 or any other proposed reform — that would require assumptions not supported by the sources used here. Every dollar figure on this page traces to the City of Casselberry FY2026 budget information or the Florida League of Cities homestead exemption dataset — nothing here is projected, modeled, or estimated beyond what those sources state.
This page draws from a small set of public data sources. Nothing on this page is estimated, modeled, or projected beyond what these sources state.
General Fund revenue and department spending figures for Casselberry, drawn from the City's published FY2026 budget information.
View City of Casselberry Annual Budgets →
A statewide, city-by-city dataset published by the Florida League of Cities, built from county property appraisers' NAL (Name-Address-Legal) files. 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 8,637 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. This source is not used to generate any Casselberry-specific dollar figure; the city-specific numbers on this page come exclusively from Sources 1 and 2 above.
