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Special assessments have become an ever more popular form of taxation in Florida’s counties since the passage of Florida’s Amendment 10, the “Save Our Homes” amendment. Concurrently, the state’s courts appear to have relaxed their interpretation of special assessment by counties. The focus of this research, is whether Florida’s local governments are using special assessments to substitute for lost revenues under Amendment 10. Special assessments are particularly suspect because they provide a great amount of revenue and require no referenda for approval. The research relies upon analysis of county and municipal level financial data since implementation of Amendment 10. The implications of this research have broad applicability in view of the myriad tax and expenditure limitations enacted in recent years.

Although municipal enterprise funds provide several advantages to cities in the provision of goods and services, little is known about how these municipally operated businesses affect other aspects of the fiscal management practices of the cities which use them. This is particularly true of non-utility enterprises. This study uses the concept of net revenue transfers to examine how five commonly used non-utility enterprises impact the tax, expenditure, and revenue generation practices of cities. The results provide a new perspective and counter some commonly held views about non-utility enterprises.

The impact of form of government on municipal expenditures has been debated by several scholars and researchers over the past thirty years. Part of the support for preference of the council-manager form of government over the other government forms relies on claims that the council-manager form provides increased efficiency in the operation of government. Results of numerous municipal expenditure studies, however, reveal that this outcome is not always clearly demonstrated. Almost all of this existing literature has utilized data from municipalities with populations greater than 25,000. This study evaluates the relationship between form of government and per capita expenditures in cities and towns with populations between 2,500 and 25,000. Survey data from 559 cities and towns are analyzed to determine whether or not their form of government can be significantly related to municipal per capita expenditures. Results of this analysis reveal that council-manager cities and towns exhibit significantly higher per capita expenditure levels than cities and towns with the non-council-manager forms of government.