Local government gets a lot of attention. Everything that is wrong with a community falls on the local officials. It’s as if commissioners and council members actually have the Home Rule authority to make the decisions that are in the best interest of their local areas.
However, each year, the under-the-radar State officials do their best to undermine any and all attempts at sensible government and sustainable planning at your local level. They play the same games you used to see here. They throw out distractions like monument removal bills (when’s the last time you heard about one being removed) SB1816 / HB1599; banning weather modification SB56 / HB477; or renaming everything “Gulf of America”.
Their real target is catering to those wanting more development and less local control.
Let’s look at a hypothetical (sort of) discussion that could take place in any House or Senate office or in the Lounge at the Governor’s Club in Tallahassee during the beginning of session this year.
Local Official (LO): Thanks for meeting me. I’d like to speak with you about the worst bills of the 2025 session. Can you please explain how Senate Bill (SB) 1118 / House Bill (HB) 1209 are beneficial to the residents of Florida? How are they supposed to help control growth and costs in our county? These bills are giveaways for free, unfettered development without allowing local governments the Home Rule rights to control growth or the ever-increasing costs required to chase this growth as it sprawls further and further out.
State Legislator (SL): No need to thank me. I’m happy to meet and educate you. You see, we need to allow for private property rights. You local officials can’t stop land owners with agricultural enclaves from building homes. That’s not fair. If you’re all going to decline these rezone requests just because of broken infrastructure or the cost of providing services, that’s your problem, not the property owner’s.
LO: And by “agricultural enclaves”, you’re referring to areas entirely surrounded by residential developments? At the first committee stop, it was expressly stated that these enclaves are the “last undeveloped” parcels “entirely” surrounded by homes.
SO: I guess that depends on what your definition of “last” and “entirely” are. This great bill requires the enclave to be 50% adjacent to developed land. So, somewhat surrounded.
LO: You do realize the difference here, right? One implies a single-approved donut hole. The wording of the bill, which is what actually matters, implies a mechanism to allow for continuous development further and further from services as one qualified “enclave” parcel begets another as they create newly-revised 50% boundaries while paving their way across our agricultural land and across our state. We have that here. We call it Policy 2.1.2.8 and we’re removing it after we saw how destructive it was. This is neither sustainable nor affordable.
SO: I’m sure these developers will be sensible and thoughtful about it.
LO: First off, *winking* at the end of that last sentence doesn’t give me much assurance of your sincerity. But, seriously, there is way too much development in our community and we can’t catch up. We live here. Our constituents know what works and what doesn’t locally. Nowhere in our comprehensive plan does it give development rights to these properties today.
SL: We’re here to correct your comp plans and “rules” when we decide we don’t like them. While we’re in session this year, we are also going to give as-of-right development options for adaptive reuse of old buildings (SB1572 / HB409) and we’re going to firm up as-of-right affordable housing multifamily without your board approval. Only fair for those looking to develop these properties.
LO: I think you are overestimating the amount of development we need and underestimating the negative affects these arbitrary bills will have on our community.
SL: No. I think you local officials are underestimating the need for housing. We here in Tallahassee take the development of affordable housing VERY seriously. We understand that more supply will lower costs for those hard-working families.
LO: I don’t recall it being taken very seriously in Tallahassee when over $2 billion was being swept out of the Sadowski Trust Fund rather than using it for local affordable housing over the past two decades as it was intended. Those funds would have helped tremendously and possibly kept us out of the situation these families are in today. But now your solution is to take development and rezoning approval out of our hands and stick us with the bill.
SL: You’ll figure it out.
LO: Sure. I guess we can increase our impact fees to the fullest-extent to at least try to mitigate the damaging hit to our infrastructure and our residents’ quality of life.
SL: Well, we can’t let you increase them so much that you can actually fix anything. We made sure to put some restrictions on your ability to raise these a few years ago. It’s you local officials who get yelled at about traffic. We get praised for keeping costs down. We’re good with this arrangement.
LO: Yeah, we’re aware. But so are the voters of our county. They worked hard to get sensible commissioners in place so that we can bypass your rules and actually charge what is required. We are working on our extraordinary circumstances study right now here in Manatee County and we will get them increased and finally get our infrastructure funded.
SL: We were afraid of that. Which is why we have SB482 / HB665 filed in 2025. We can’t have you all making your own determination of what’s extraordinary. We’re going to creatively define it based solely on population growth and set a threshold metric that literally no county has ever achieved in the history of our great State (note: this is, in fact, true). If you actually qualify, that most certainly will be extraordinary!
LO: That seems like you don’t really…
SL: By the way, just in case you start to get excited about these bills not moving too fast this session, we took all the “best” parts of them and added them in as amendments to SB 1118. It was already everyone’s favorite bill so we decided to have some fun with it!
LO: That seems like you don’t really understand how growth works or the dynamics that affect counties. We can’t ask our current residents to pay for future growth but you’re eliminating other options. Even bonding would require debt service from general funds, which are already tight. With the homestead index passing on the 2024 ballot, we need to hope the tax base doesn’t go down so we can keep the millage low. Even with that, I’m not sure where costly infrastructure would fit in.
SL: Oh, we’ve decided in Tallahassee that your tax base is already WAY too high as it is. So we have a line-up of bills all teed up. Each has its own way of lowering the current tax base through enhanced homestead exemptions. The homeowners will love them!
LO: So, all these bills will expressly help homeowners keep costs down for their primary residences?
SL: Sure. But some, like SB1512 / HB1259, will give them a nice big tax break with county funds on other properties they DON’T live in so it’s cheaper for them to buy investment rentals! It’ll, um, help with affordable housing.
LO: So those investment rentals will have income restrictions on them?
SL: No. But I’m sure these investors will pass the savings on to their renters.
LO: Seriously, you need to work on that *winking*. You’re all really good about being fiscally conservative with other jurisdiction’s money. Homeowners will love the additional exemptions but they’ll hate the traffic. Not to mention the cuts in service and public safety funds. I guess some counties will have to consider increasing the millage to offset the lower assessments. We’ve cut it three of the last four years but what choice would we have?
SL: Not sure of your choices, but raising the millage may not be one of them. We thought you may say that so we’re working on bills SB996 / HB787 to restrict millage increases. We’re not even going to tie it to inflation so just pray we don’t have increasing tariffs or anything that may make costs go up by more than what we’re allowing you.
LO: It’s as if the only goal is lowering the cost of living and you don’t give a damn about quality of life. As long as it’s cheap to live here - which it’s already not; people can be uncomfortable - which they already are; in your mind. How low do you think you can actually go before breaking the state?
SL: Funny you should ask. We’re working on a study (SB852) to eliminate property taxes all together. It will be glorious. And we can entirely avoid defunding the police, cutting teacher pay or decreasing services!
LO: Really?!? How?
SL: ….
LO: You don’t know, do you?
SO: What I do know is how to make Florida a great place to build and live. Citizens will agree with us that a little dust, traffic and loss of greenspace is worth it for lower taxes. I know what voters want.
LO: That seems pretty presumptuous of you. I guess the only way any Florida voter can actually have a say if they don’t think the way you think they think is with a ballot initiative to prove otherwise. Unfortunately, today those amendments are hard to get on the ballot in Florida and almost impossible to pass once on there. I guess they could try though.
SL: Hard today? You have no idea. Wait until you get a load of SB7016 and HB1205! We’re not using any cute bill name acronym for Tallahassee Always Knows Everything you Insolent Townies but we’re confident it will stop further ballot discussions about who sets the Home Rules here in Florida.
LO: Isn’t that acronym TAKE IT?
SL: ….
LO: ….
SL: Um, I have to get to a very nice dinner. Please see yourself out.
LO: So that’s it? So long and good luck?
SL: I don’t recall saying good luck.
And so, we continue using our depleting local authority to chase sensible local solutions while new bills are passed each session to preempt any solutions local governments find to mitigate past bills aimed at taking over more and more control of your government, your growth, and your community.
Thomas Jefferson said:
“The government closest to the people serves the people best.”
It doesn’t seem like everyone in Tallahassee agrees with President Jefferson…or, at times, basic common sense.
To read more about the spectacularly bad Senate Bill 1118 and sign two petitions:
Seeking Rents Substack: Developer-backed bill would unravel rural protections…
Florida Phoenix: Florida legislators want to pave every rural spot left in the state
Petition: Save Florida’s Agriculture
Petition: Protect Rural Lands
Seems in Tallahassee they want to do away with home rule and turn the state over to developer rule!
You didn’t mention SB 1456 where they want to limit the number of commissioners in our county to 5 by eliminating the at large commissioners and forcing all the commissioners to face an election in 2026…. Even those that were just elected.
George,
Thank you for this posting exposing a trend state legislators pursue at the cost of local communities. Most local governments focus on the significance of Home Rule in their annual Legislative Priorities submitted to their State Delegation only to learn those legislators support bills curtailing Home Rule. The ballot box is the most expedient means to reverse the trend. Manatee County voters acknowledged this threat posed by the previous Commission and showed up to initiate change this past November. Thank you for your commitment to “we the people”.
Terry Schaefer,
Holmes Beach Commissioner