Forget a building moratorium of any kind. For the next three years, something closer to a moratorium on regulations is in effect in Flagler County, its cities and across Florida, thanks to a provision in a new state law–what emerged from the Legislature as Senate Bill 180–that local governments are only now beginning to understand. The law ties the hands of local land use regulators, prohibiting any “burdensome” restrictions on developers, while giving anyone the right to sue a local government that appears to violate the law.
Chairing the Bunnell City Commission meeting last week, John Rogers said constituents “felt that we need to have another workshop or two in reference to the few large-scale projects we had.” Rogers was referring, for example, to the Reserve at Haw Creek, the 8,000-home development that the commission seemingly killed, only for it to be scheduled for a rehearing in late August.
Paul Waters, the Bunnell city attorney, said no such workshops are allowed anymore. He wasn’t exaggerating.
“On June 26 the governor signed into law a bill that prohibits municipalities from adopting more restrictive or burdensome procedures for development, permits, site plans or development orders,” Waters said. The Legislature–with the governor’s signature–has “taken away home rule authority from the cities. So it would be a violation of Florida statute to hold those workshops.”
The bill went into effect July 1. “They have upended local planning statewide by the stroke of a pen,” Deputy Flagler County Attorney Sean Moylan said.
The new law nullified a tree ordinance Flagler County had just enacted, after a lot of work. The ordinance was to be more stringent than state law, and was the answer to repeated complaints by constituents that too many trees were being needlessly clear-cut to make room for development, without protective measures for older trees.
The law goes much further than that. Any local government is now prohibited from adopting any land use regulation that could be deemed more “restrictive or burdensome” to developers than state law or local ordinances that predate last August. “This sweeping, undefined provision would rule out any changes to local growth guidelines in Florida unless developers agree and sponsor the change,” the Conservancy of Southwest Florida wrote. “Local governments that exercise their planning authority without obtaining approval from developers would face lawsuits, and their taxpayers could be forced to cover developers’ legal costs.”
The Legislature passed the measure almost at the 11th hour in a bill that had already been read twice, and was amended for third reading with what amounts to a three-year restriction on development regulations. The amendment is part of a larger bill, Senate Bill 180, that was ostensibly about emergency preparedness, responses to emergencies and help for victims of hurricanes.
It is that. In many regards the bill contains useful provisions. For example, the local match for state grants for beach-management projects may be waived or reduced. That’ll be of great help to Flagler County. Shelter improvements have been prioritized, and other measures streamlining emergency management operations have been adopted.
But lawmakers took advantage of the “emergency management” premise of the bill to tack on prohibitions or restrictions on land use regulations with far broader consequences.
For example, counties and cities are prohibited from imposing a building moratorium. That renders any such suggestion at the Palm Coast City Council moot. They are prohibited from adding any “burdensome” step for developers submitting a site plan, requesting a development permit or a development review. That may, as Waters told the Bunnell commission, include a prohibition on informational workshops, where developers facing an irate public would be considered “burdensome.” (The developer may voluntarily agree to such workshops.)
Flagler County was working on a Live Local Act ordinance that would have tailored the state law loosening affordable housing regulations with local regulations. That has to be suspended.
Those prohibitions apply in any county within 100 miles of the path of a hurricane or a tropical storm in the last three years. That means every county in the state. The prohibitions apply retroactively to August. 1, 2024, and for three years, to October 2027.
“So we’re frozen. We’re dead in the water. We can’t adopt any more stringent regulations until that time,” Moylan said. The tree ordinance could be revived in August 2027–assuming additional hurricanes don’t extend the window. Lawmakers said the window will be extended wherever hurricanes strike.
In an explanatory May memo to the County Commission, after the bill was approved but before the governor signed it, Moylan had written the County Commission that “the bill gives standing to ‘any person’ to sue the County [or any local city] and requires the County to pay the plaintiff’s attorney’s fees should the plaintiff prevail. We will have to tread carefully as we don’t want to be in a position of litigating whether a land development regulation is or is not more restrictive or burdensome.”
Moylan added: “Under the guise of protecting hurricane victims, the Legislature has taken an enormous step to limit local land use planning in Florida.”
Concurrently, the Legislature approved a separate bill that eliminates preliminary and final plat hearings before planning boards and local government boards. That’s not as onerous a step. It nevertheless removes two public hearings that were routinely part of major developments’ regulatory steps.
“A lot of times when we get preempted, we don’t like it,” Moylan said. We feel like the legislature is not giving us our home rule authority under Florida’s constitution. In this particular instance, we’re happy with the change in the statute, because the public is often confused about plat approvals. The way the statute reads with a plat approval, you are essentially checking off a list: Literally, are the margins half an inch? Is there an arrow pointing north? Does it list the township and range? Very technical type of review, and the public will show up at a county commission meeting thinking that it’s a chance to stop, in their view, overdevelopment. And so this will eliminate that confusion. The chance for the public to chime in is during zoning, and that’s the appropriate time.” Or at site-plan approval.
For developers, however, the removal of plat hearings from the equation (that step will be done administratively from now on) and the far-reaching effects of SB180 until at least late 2027 means it’s a new day development–unless the legislature next winter does a “glitch bill” and dials back the scope of those preemptions, Moylan said. Meanwhile, that popping sound you hear is land-use attorneys and their clients breaking out the Veuve Clicquot.
Merrill Shapiro says
Does it not behoove each and every one of us to ask our elected representatives in Tallahassee what they see as the major differences between say, Miami-Dade County and Flagler County and how they took those differences into account when they passed and signed this bill that prohibits municipalities from adopting more restrictive or burdensome procedures for development, permits, site plans or development orders?
T says
Rick scott destroying fl like always
Nephew Of Uncle Sam says
Once again Floridians get what they Voted for, Developers rule the roost now. Get ready for a heck of a lot more traffic and water problems here.
Billy says
This is one crooked corrupt county!
Deborah Coffey says
Are Floridians happy with all the Fascists they voted into office?
Lick the boot says
Wonder how much Casey the desantis company received from “builders” ?lol the level of corruption is astounding. The desantis crime family should spend the rest of their days at alligator Alcatraz for whatever short period that is, probably till the next hurricane lol! Reap what you sow right? Sure the kids will love it , lil destain can pet the alligators! Don’t worry there’s healthcare on site haha called the swamp! Keep protecting the world’s biggest pedophile! What a disgusting disgrace
Janet Sullivan says
This is a stunning, disappointing development. Look out folks. Developers are in charge, now.
John O'Meally says
We need to vote out the idiots who voted for this idiocy. Will the same lawmakers fund the infrastructure needed to support all this expansion or dump it on the taxpayers? This is unbelievable!
PC has zero infrastructure says
Yesterday, I saw the deforestation on the corner of Old Kings and “Towne Centere Boulevard” (I spell it that way as the place is a total joke, so bare with me) … Reality set it…rinky dink roads barely allowing one lane of travel (for all directions of movement at the light) but yea, lets toss up more houses. Wow. Now this. Ugh.
Ben Hogarth says
Sean’s analysis of SB 180 was spot-on. Earlier during the legislative session, I had provided the public a similar warning. While Section 28 of the bill (now law) effectively undoes any local ordinance going back to last August, Section 18 of the bill is far more insidious. Again, Sean astutely points out that this section would prohibit all future local ordinances within 1 year of a hurricane landfall that occurs within 100 miles from the county boundaries in which a community rests.
Think about the Town of Marineland for a moment – whose boundaries rest in both Flagler and St. Johns County. If a hurricane track were to bring its landfall within 100 miles of EITHER county, Marineland would be prohibited from adopting almost any local ordinance for 1 year from that landfall event. And once again, as Sean aptly reminded the commission and public – these events are so frequent that the future is pretty bleak.
While the bill language states that the ordinance has to be “more prohibitive” than state law to qualify under the new law as preempted… think about how local government operates in the context of the “Supremacy Clause” or even under State Constitutional law. Local governments are subsidiaries of the state (for lack of a better term). As such, we really only ever produce local ordinances that are functionally MORE RESTRICTIVE than state laws. Some could argue “a few exceptions” to the rule, but inherently – they simply are more restrictive in nature.
So when I advise local officials and policy makers about SB 180, I’m telling them it is egregious. I’m telling them it is unprecedented. I’m telling them it is even potentially unconstitutional (state). But I am also telling them that it is the law until it isn’t. And we need to do well to respect it until such time that it isn’t. Elections have consequences and the state voters have given one political party absolution. This is what happens when ANY political party enjoys such power. This is what you get.
Party over democracy and country will play out in many forms. SB 180 is just a byproduct of the people’s unwillingness to learn from history.
Laurel says
Well, thank you Republicans, for selling Florida out to the highest bidder. After all, out of state developers, tourists, and investors, and their money are far, far more important than constituents, or the preservation of a beautiful state, right? Locals clearly don’t matter, and are just in the way of selfish hoarding. Before you start crying how Republicans are unfairly singled out and treated, check on who is in charge, who promoted this bill, who voted for this bill and who signed it, and without asking us what we think about it.
Now, you constituents have no voice. That’s because that “R” after the name, you voted for, doesn’t give a flying f__k what you think or want. Unless, of course, this is exactly what you want. They don’t care about us. They don’t care about our quality of life. They don’t care about the wildlife. All they care about is the Jimmy Buffet Memorial Highway. Get that new visitor center built. Make the locals pay for the beach, you know, for their own good. The only green they care about is paper. We, can go to hell for all they care. The Florida I knew and loved all my life is going to continue to be plowed under, now at a rate that cannot be reversed. Of course the developers will move as fast as they can. They come down here and do the modern day equivalent of raping and pillaging of the land, and leave again. Just step out of the way. You no longer have any rights in “Free Florida”. What’s “free” is our land to be destroyed by money hungry, in my opinion, thieves with friends in power.
You’re kind of a sad group. You have no understanding of the Earth, of wildlife, its balance and how it effects us. Instead, you worship paper and bitcoins, and what it can buy you. But here’s the kicker: you’ll be playing on a polluted, unbalanced, unsustainable playground. The Earth will move on. I don’t know about your offspring, you will leave them what? Lots of bitcoins and nowhere to go?
Your boy, in the White House, wants to put us in a bubble, sell public lands, strip public lands of trees for timber because he’s pissed at Canada not wanting to be under his control, drill for oil in National Parks even though we produce more oil than any other country, and implode your country to give its God given bounty away to a few. Believe me, he doesn’t give a shit about you constituents, either. He’s looking out for the wealthy, in an odd way. Your boy, in Tallahassee, is not yet done with golf courses and hotels in our state parks. Gopher tortoises will continue to be *relocated* to that mysterious gopher tortoise retirement community in who knows where land. Everything else will just be hit by cars, driven by oblivious transplants, and lawns sprayed with pesticides to keep those new yards clear of life. No planning necessary.
Just keep voting in that “R”. Here’s your legacy.
Wow says
Wouldn’t want to burden the developers. I can guess who passed that law.
JimboXYZ says
Yet somehow Mayor Norris as the most vocal of a moratorium is the problem ? Can’t change what was Biden-Harris & Alfin without offending anyone ?
Canary says
I’m old enough to remember when the Republicans were the party who advocated for home rule, not banned it.
Pogo says
@Should be quite a show
… when a UH-60 from the repair depot windmills into the new fuel farm.
MAGA, baby — MAGA, MAGA, MAGA …
A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.
— W. C. Fields
Andy Dance says
To add context to the discussion about the County’s new tree protection ordinance that will be nullified until 2027 by SB 180, please read Pierre’s article from last year, https://flaglerlive.com/flagler-tree-ordinance/. I worked with county staff for over a year to revamp the tree protection ordinance and am disgusted that these protections can so easily be nullified by this legislation. With this ordinance in place, developers have to take into account the existing natural resources (large trees, wetlands, unique natural features, buffers) on the land and incorporate that into their design, instead of just imposing their development plan onto the site. Preserving large, historic sized trees was prioritized.
Just Saying says
This law is a travesty for Florida and it’s residents. All that crap about land preservation from our governments was a bunch of malarkey. I, too once loved this place, but now not so much. The destruction going on all around us is unsustainable and now there’s not a darn thing we can do about it. I hope the developers will pay dearly for this one day. The housing boom in Florida is over! So who’s buying them?? As the cost of living in Florida continues to skyrocket. Lots of luck selling.
The dude says
Yes Jimbo, Biden-Harris forced the extremely weird and creepy Meatball Ron, that you voted for, to impose on his lickspittles in the Floriduh legislature to send this bill up to him to be signed into law. As always, right on the mark.
You MAGA morons are getting EXACTLY what you voted for, and somehow it’s all the fault of those you didn’t vote for.
The cognitive dissonance on display here daily is truly mind blowing.
Critical Eye says
How tiring it is with the constant unbridled chatter by these Mike
Norris Puppets.
They actually believe their idol Mike Norris that can barely form a sentence is able to follow through on his campaign promises! He has miserably failed all of his supporters
How naive for them to consider themselves smarter and more experienced than our elected government officials, when they simply know little to nothing at all about running a city or City Government much less running a State Government.
Arm chair wannabe politicians, that’s what they are, hiding behind the curtain of Social Media platforms.
Left up to these pretenders with their illogical mindset along with Mike Norris with his word salad, incoherent rhetoric. Palm Coast will disappear into nothingness. Maybe they are used to having nothing.
Thank God our State Government has stepped in to save Florida from ruin.
Nothing = Nothing. C’est la vie Moratorium. Gone now and forevermore
Paul Larkin says
Hats off to Andy Dance as an elected official with principle, common sense and the courage of his convictions.