By Craig Pittman
Like a lot of you, I’m a sucker for movies about scrappy underdogs who somehow thrash their way to triumph. “The Bad News Bears,” “The Replacements,” even “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” are films I can watch over and over.
So imagine how excited I am to tell you about all the scrappy underdog stories that are going on in Florida right now.
All over the state, local governments are pushing ahead on common-sense changes to their growth plans, wetlands protection, and impact fees. They’re doing so despite warnings from big, bad opponents that what they have in mind will violate a new pro-developer state law that limits city and county governments’ authority on new land-use or development regulations.
It’s happening in big counties like Orange and small cities like Edgewater. And everywhere it’s happening, it’s bad news for Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature, because it shows that local governments are tired of being pushed around by developers and their toadies and are ready to push back.
“This is one of those tipping points,” Manatee County Commission Chairman George Kruse told me.
As my colleague Mitch Perry reported last week, the law they’re challenging has “become the most controversial new measure” of the 2025 legislative session.
People are now realizing what this law really demonstrates: Tallahassee is tightly controlled by campaign donors who don’t care about what’s best for Florida’s people, only what boosts their private profits, Kruse said. That’s why they wanted to handcuff the local officials who might object.
The bill was passed on the pretext of providing emergency help for hurricane victims. But it contained a poison pill benefiting no one but big developers.
“It’s important to realize that this was described as an emergency bill that goes far beyond an emergency to actually attack the basis of democracy,” said Kim Dinkins, planning and policy director for the smart growth group 1000 Friends of Florida. “It allows a popular vote to be overturned.”
With so many people lining up to resist, I’m thinking we should change our state song from “Old Folks at Home” (yawn!) to the far more appropriate “Fight the Power” by the Isley Brothers.
180 degrees from smart
This was supposed to be the year for our fine Legislature to pass laws promoting Florida’s “rural renaissance.”
Instead, this new law is being used as a steamroller to flatten advocates of protecting rural areas from runaway development.
The law was originally known as Senate Bill 180, as in “180 Degrees from Smart Growth.” It was sponsored by Sen. Nick DiCeglie of Indian Rocks Beach.
Most of the bill talks about helping victims of Helene and Milton, last year’s one-two punch of destructive hurricanes fueled by that thing that the governor and Legislature are scared we’ll talk about.
But it also contains a section that says no local government is allowed to pass any new local land-use or development regulations that could be considered “more restrictive or burdensome” than what was already on the books. And that part isn’t tied to any emergency.
The law covers every part of the state, not just the ones clobbered by the two storms. Even worse, it starts retroactively from August 2024 and stretches on to October 2027. And if another hurricane hits, then the no-regulation time clock starts all over again.
It also says anyone — not just affected parties — can serve a local government with notification of intent to sue if they think the local government has violated the law. The local government then has 14 days to correct any problem. If it refuses, the lawsuit can proceed.
SB 180 didn’t come out of nowhere. It grew out of similar legislation passed in early 2023, a few months after Hurricane Ian slammed into the Southwest Florida coast and killed 149 people, making it one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the U.S. in the past 20 years.
When the Legislature met in special session the following February, Sen. Jonathan Martin of Fort Myers, sponsored a bill that said local officials in the area hit by Ian could not impose any new development rules deemed “more restrictive or burdensome” than what was already on the books. Sound familiar?
During debate, one member of the Florida House, Bob Rommel, applauded that section of the bill and added, “There is nothing more important than protecting private property rights.” Oh yes, that’s MUCH more important than saving people’s lives.
Martin’s bill passed the Legislature and was signed into law by DeSantis, who never says no to whatever developers want. It covered a 100-square mile radius affected by Ian. Also, it was set to expire in 2024.
Months later, though, the Big Bend area was ripped apart by Hurricane Idalia. So, during a special session in November 2023, a new bill, sponsored by Rep. Jason Shoaf of Port St. Joe, extended the ban on any commonsense regulation changes on development through 2026.
Worse, it expanded the area affected to list 10 specific counties that had to wear the Legislature’s handcuffs: Charlotte, Collier, DeSoto, Glades, Hardee, Hendry, Highlands, Lee, Manatee, and Sarasota.
But those were all just warm-ups for SB 180 and its attempt to halt any new regulations on destructive development.
Susan Trevarthen, a Fort Lauderdale attorney, remembers reading through all the bills that passed in the final rush of the session and when she got to SB 180, she recalls thinking, “Wait, this can’t be right.”
When she read it again, she realized what it meant: “Everyone in the whole state of Florida just lost all their zoning power for the next three years.”
If local governments don’t object to this, she told me, they will lose the power to object to anything else.
Now she’s gathering city and county government clients from across the state to file suit to overturn the law as unconstitutional.
Orange you angry about this?
Think I’m exaggerating about the danger this poses? Look at what’s happened with Orange County.
The county spent eight years refining its plan for future growth, taking comments from all sides as it proceeded. What they finally came up with, called Vision 2050, was so popular, 73% of all voters said yes to its rural boundary in November.
And then the DeSantis administration said no way, forget it. All because of SB 180.
“The Florida Department of Commerce cited the language of the statute, signed into law last month by the governor, as a reason for declaring Vision 2050 to be ‘null and void ab initio’ — a phrase meaning the 615-page document was deemed invalid from the outset,” the Orlando Sentinel reported.
Apparently DeSantis prefers Vision 1950, from back when nothing restricted Florida developers.
Then, after the DeSantis administration slammed them from above, Orange County commissioners got attacked from beneath, too.
The Texas-based developer behind a piece of sprawl with a particularly ridiculous name, the 2,000-home Sustanee project, filed suit against Orange County seeking to overturn its growth plan and citing SB 180 as its legal justification.
After hearing from a crowd of about 50 fired-up people, the commissioners announced that they planned to stick to their guns. They’re joining the group that’s suing to overturn the law.
SB 180 “is giving special interests a veto power over what the voters decided,” Orange County Commissioner Kelly Martinez Semrad told me. “Essentially it’s a crap shoot for developers who can say, ‘Oh, I don’t like that, it’s too burdensome so I’ll sue you over it.’”
Or consider what’s happened to Deltona, over in Volusia County. Flooding has become so bad there that the city council was considering a moratorium on further development until it could get a better handle on how to fix its stormwater woes.
A developer sent the council a letter threatening to sue under SB 180 if the city voted for the moratorium. City officials voted to go ahead with the moratorium anyway.
“This bill was about helping people rebuild from the hurricanes,” Deltona Commissioner Dori Howington told me. “But this [development] has nothing to do with the hurricane.”
The city hasn’t raised its development impact fees in a decade, she said, but now they’re being told that raising the fees would also violate SB 180.
“What we’re seeing is that any land-use ordinance change we want to put in place, it violates SB 180,” Howington said. The developers knew this law was coming, she said, adding, “They were waiting for it.”
The billionaire who benefits
When I talked to Kruse, the Manatee County commission chairman started off with a good-humored brag: “We’re both the catalyst and the cause of this.”
The poison part of SB 180 has been widely blamed on Pat Neal, a former legislator who’s built 25,000 homes in Florida, most of them in Manatee and Sarasota counties. He’s now a billionaire, according to Forbes. (Semrad also cites a couple of Central Florida developers.)
Like Deltona, the Manatee County Commission was alarmed by flooding from last year’s hurricanes, so it has been considering a development moratorium while they figure out how to build subdivisions and other projects that will drain better. Neal has been one of the more vocal opponents of a moratorium.
The commissioners who were in office until recently would have kneeled to Neal’s wishes. After all, they were so pro-development that, in 2023, they trashed the county’s wetlands protection rules.
But that was such an unpopular move that last year the voters tossed out all but one of the incumbents. The voters replaced them with people who aren’t afraid to tell guys like Neal “no.” In fact, the commissioners just rejected a development proposal from Neal that would have made flooding worse for its neighbors.
Now the commission is ready to bring back those wetland protection rules they used to have. Suddenly they’re being warned that might violate SB 180. But being scrappy underdogs, they’re not backing down.
“We believe the intent of SB 180 was to only cover storm-damaged properties,” Kruse said. “Plus the bill is super-vague about what ‘more restrictive and burdensome’ means.”
Doing nothing will destroy the state, he told me. He and his colleagues aren’t afraid to take the consequences of doing what’s right.
“So any developer who wants to spend their money suing us,” he said, “I’d tell them to go right ahead.”
Repeal vs. rejection
I asked the folks I interviewed if they want the Legislature to repeal SB 180, or at least the part that ties the hands of the local governments. That’s what 1000 Friends of Florida hopes will happen.
Semrad, the Orange County commissioner, said she had talked to the House sponsor of the bill, Rep. Fiona McFarland, who assured her that what was happening was not what the Legislature intended. She said she’d be okay with repealing the bill.
DiCiglie, in an emailed statement, told me he’d be open to at least reopening the discussion. He didn’t say whether he was aware of what this provision would do?
“I’ve heard concerns from local leaders about provisions affecting municipal authority, such as post-storm land-use restrictions,” the senator said in an emailed statement. “I value this feedback and will continue engaging with stakeholders. If there is an opportunity to improve current law during the next legislative session, I will not hesitate to do that.”
But several folks told me they can’t wait a year for the Legislature to act. They don’t want to gamble on Neal and other developers buying — er, excuse me, I mean “influencing” — our elected officials to do their bidding. They need relief right now.
That’s why they’re pursuing what I like to think of as the Warren Zevon Option — send lawyers, guns, and money and get a judge to throw out the law.
Gov. DeSantis — who never served a day in local government — has been making a lot of noise about cracking down on wasteful spending by local governments. He’s even sicced the Florida version of the Department of Government Efficiency on several of them, including Orange and Manatee counties.
But it seems to me that making these local governments sue to toss out a law that DeSantis should have never signed is a pretty wasteful expense for the taxpayers. It’s his fault this Bad News Bill became law.
That’s why I would encourage those local governments, when they win, to send all of their legal bills to the governor’s mansion for payment. They should also attach a note signed, “Warmest regards from the under-DOGE.”
Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country, which won a gold medal from the Florida Book Awards. His latest, published in 2021, is The State You’re In: Florida Men, Florida Women, and Other Wildlife. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the “Welcome to Florida” podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.
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