The defining item on Miami's summer calendar sits four months out: a citywide bond referendum and special election scheduled for November 3, 2026, per the city's capital improvements notices. The vote would decide whether Miami takes on a new round of borrowing for capital projects, and it frames every decision City Hall, at 3500 Pan American Drive on Dinner Key, makes between now and the fall budget hearings.
Mayor Eileen Higgins, the city's first woman mayor, spent the winter and spring making her case for scrutiny before spending. In January she told local outlets she was ordering a deep, line-by-line review of a general fund that has doubled in five years, per Coconut Grove Spotlight reporting, with the city's operating budget at roughly $1.8 billion and about $650 million of it from property taxes. The formal proposal for the next fiscal year, which begins October 1, arrives in late summer, and this year it lands directly on top of the referendum campaign.
Why it matters here: the two tracks converge on every neighborhood at once. A new bond would set which streets, parks, fire stations, and flood-control projects get funded in the years ahead, the same pipeline that produced the tidal valves and drainage work now running under the Miami Forever Bond of 2017. And the state-level campaign to eliminate property taxes, which Higgins has warned would force steep cuts, threatens the roughly one-third of the city's operating money that funds police, fire-rescue, and parks payrolls. Which projects survive, which hours at neighborhood parks hold, and which paving schedules keep their place all trace back to the paperwork moving through City Hall this summer.
A bond vote also carries a specific irony worth naming. General obligation borrowing is repaid through property taxes, the very revenue source Tallahassee is debating, so the campaign for new capital spending and the campaign to shrink the city's tax base will run through the same autumn. City officials designing the referendum must therefore assume a taxpayer already questioning the bill, which is the political arithmetic Higgins's budget review was built to answer before the first ballot question is printed.
Related stories: Mayor Higgins Orders a Line-by-Line Look at a City Budget That Doubled · Bayfront Park Runs Under City Control as the Trust That Managed It Ends.
Ballot language, cost estimates, and the project list behind the referendum were still moving through commission review as of early August, per the city's notices, which leaves the campaign's central question, how much to borrow and for what, formally open.
The commission's summer agenda and the ballot language for the November referendum remain subject to final action, and residents can track both through the city's published notices as of early August 2026.