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.
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