Preemption Bills
The Florida State Legislative session opens today, March 7, and there is a LOT happening in this session. As the session progresses, I’ll be highlighting a few of the bills I am watching as they make their way through the process.
Preemption Bills
I’m always interested in State Preemption bills. What are Preemption bills? These are bills that preempt the ability of local government to make decisions that are in the best interest of their local constituents. Most of these are written based on a presumption that “Tallahassee knows best,” or that all Florida counties have the same needs.
Certainly, the differences between Miami and Jacksonville, Jacksonville and Tallahassee, Orlando and Tallahassee, Tampa and Jacksonville, The Keys and Jacksonville should serve as reminders of the vast differences in needs of different counties. Yet so many of the legislative decisions override or ignore those differences.
I’ll start today with one of the most egregious preemption bills, Senate Bill 170. This bill is a watered-down version of the 2022 session’s Senate Bill 620 which passed but was not signed into law.
Senate Bill 170
Local Ordinances; Authorizing courts to assess and award reasonable attorney fees and costs and damages in certain civil actions filed against local governments; providing certain procedures for continued meetings on proposed ordinances for counties; requiring a county to suspend enforcement of an ordinance that is the subject of a certain legal action if certain conditions are met; providing certain procedures for continued meetings on proposed ordinances for municipalities, etc.
What does this really mean?
Each local governmental body would have to prepare a business impact analysis before any new ordinance is adopted. That means, St. Johns County would need staff with the experience and capacity to perform business impact analyses on any new ordinance under review. And, that analysis must be published before or at the same time the new ordinance is publicly posted. If a local business decides to challenge that ordinance through the court system, that ordinance must be immediately suspended until it has been defended in the courts. And this bill would award attorney fees and to the plaintiff in such a challenge if they are successful in their challenge.
The impact analysis of this bill notes that the economic impact is “indeterminate” currently. Just looking at the requirements for each municipality one can see that this is going to require additional hiring and costs for the local governments and additional burden on the court systems.
Even though this is much watered-down from last year’s Senate Bill 620, this is still a dream bill for trial lawyers who will greatly benefit from the lawsuits that could be filed under this piece of legislation. And it’s an economic drain for local governments as it interferes with their ability to file local ordinances that are of benefit to the entire local population.
This bill is now on the Special Order Calendar for March 8, 2023.
Beth Tate 