Florida Legislature should butt out of cities’ business — and mind its own | Editorial

Last year, it was plastic straws. Florida legislators said that cities couldn’t ban them. Gov. Ron DeSantis rightly pushed back on busybody lawmakers and vetoed the legislation.

This year, the Legislature wants to prevent cities and counties from regulating growth management, homes used as vacation rentals, home-based businesses and too many other issues that municipalities should manage for themselves and, more important, their residents.

It’s called “preemption.” A report from Integrity Florida, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group and government watchdog, calls the overreach what is really is — “The Attack on Home Rule in Florida.”

“The use of preemption as a strategy by the Florida Legislature has become heavy-handed,” said Ben Wilcox, Integrity Florida’s research director. “It’s like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly and it’s largely driven by the campaign contributions and lobbying of corporate special interests.”

It’s largely driven, too, by what the Editorial Board in a previous editorial called legislators’ “contempt” for their constituents. For in usurping municipalities’ ability to answer to their residents, those residents themselves are at a dead end when they seek to petition the local leaders they elected to address their concerns and improve their quality of life.

Here are three of legislators’ latest incursions into cities’ business — that they have no business making:

Vacation rentals

Senate Bill 1128/House Bill 1011 prohibits municipalities from regulating vacation rentals such as those secured through Airbnb and VRBO. According to the Florida League of Cities, the bill nullifies any local ordinances adopted since 2014. Why that date? In 2011, state lawmakers adopted restrictive legislation, preventing cities from regulating, restricting or treating vacation rentals differently from any other residential property. They loosened the law in 2014, giving cities more authority to act. But now, legislators want to return to the 2011 standards — and wipe out ordinances on the local books enacted in the past six years.

That would mean a city couldn’t require a vacation rental unit to, say, have fire extinguishers, or exit signs or smoke detectors if they are not required in other residential properties. And any neighbor who lives next door to a “party house” would be in for a lot of sleepless nights.

Home-based businesses

It’s one thing if your next-door neighbor is a tax attorney or accountant who works out of a home office. It’s a whole other story if you neighbor is a welder or repairs cars or slaughters hogs. HB 537, which, incredibly, passed out the the Commerce Committee and is progressing in the state House, eviscerates local zoning laws.

Cities would be handcuffed, unable to regulate home-based businesses any differently from those in a commercial area. They couldn’t keep semis from rumbling down a tree-lined street, regulate the use of caustic chemicals or the use of hazardous materials.

The League of Cities says the National Federation of Independent Businesses is pushing this one. So far, however, there’s no companion bill in the Senate — and there shouldn’t be.

Employment rules

HB305/SB 1126 preempts a city’s right to regulate conditions of employment: set a minimum wage, require a living wage, mandate health benefits, etc. That’s troubling enough. More troubling however, is that the legislation would void all existing ordinances, regulations or policies “of a political subdivision” related to conditions of employment.

Does that mean Miami-Dade’s groundbreaking human-rights ordinance, which makes it a crime to discriminate in employment — and housing and public accommodations — is eliminated?

Integrity Florida reported that “Some Republicans have expressly acknowledged that the use of preemption is a strategy to block progressive local actions and to punish ‘rogue’ local governments.”

Right — requiring employers to pay a living wage is liberalism run amok.

The governor better keep his veto pen handy.

This story was originally published February 28, 2020 at 5:30 AM.