In Manatee County, developers can now build closer to mangroves than ever. In New Smyrna Beach, the city’s new flood protections could be overturned. In Orange County, a decade’s worth of planning for a new zoning code is dead in the water.
That’s all thanks to a few crucial words — “restrictive and burdensome” — inserted in a bill initially introduced to help Florida communities recover from devastating hurricanes.
Instead, counties and cities across Florida have faced a wave of lawsuits from developers — citing that key phrase — with demands to build cheaper or denser or to push into land considered flood-prone or closer to protected natural area like mangroves.
A growing number of municipalities and smart growth advocates argue the resulting new law has flipped the power over new development regulations from local governments to the companies doing the building. In effect, it gives developers veto power over local officials and residents and can actually make it harder to build back better after a hurricane.
Now, some of those critics are taking their concerns to court.
Two high-profile lawsuits have recently been filed over the far-reaching effects of what’s known as Senate Bill 180, which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law this summer despite concerns raised by local communities. More than 25 local governments have joined the suit, including Miami Shores, Cutler Bay, Pinecrest, Homestead and Manatee County on the west coast.
A bipartisan array of lawmakers across the state also have openly complained and called for a change to the law, which the original sponsors of the bill have offered to consider in January, when Florida’s legislative session begins.
One of those sponsors, Sen. Nick DiCeglie, a Republican representing Pinellas County, told the Miami Herald he’s heard the feedback and plans to file a bill to address those concerns.
“It was pretty clear to me early on that we’re going to have to tighten this up,” he said. “I’ve been dedicated to ensuring that what I propose as policy, I’m going to get it right. If I have to come back and correct some unintended consequences, I will.”Those unintended consequences, local governments say, include an effective end to the “home rule” that empowers local governments to decide how and where new development happens in their communities. Across the state, cities and counties have found even small changes — like an increased fee to cut down trees in Central Florida’s Windermere — stymied by the new law.
“That is a huge, seismic change in the legal landscape. This upends well over 100 years of law in this country and in this state,” said Richard Grosso, a land use attorney and legal analyst for the smart growth organization 1000 Friends of Florida, which filed the most recent lawsuit against Florida over the law.
“Unless we’re going to stop getting hit by multiple hurricanes a year, which isn’t going to happen,” he said, “this has effectively frozen all local land use plans and codes in time as of 2024.”
The origin of ‘restrictive and burdensome’
SB 180 originally began as a broadly supported bill that aimed to smooth out the kinks of rebuilding after a hurricane. Lawmakers praised the way it slashed permitting red tape for homeowners and ordered more training for emergency managers.Early drafts of the bill in the Florida House and Senate included the phrase that would later become the center of the controversy over the law — “restrictive and burdensome.” However, the concept was removed or watered down during legislative session.
But toward the end of session this year, house sponsor Rep. Fiona McFarland, R-Sarasota, reintroduced and expanded the concept. The amendment blocked local governments from making any changes to the way they regulate development that anyone — not just businesses or property owners — would find “restrictive and burdensome.”
It remains unclear why the bill was drastically altered in the final days of the legislative session. McFarland did not respond to requests for comment.
The phrase “restrictive and burdensome” was adapted from a 2023 law, Senate Bill 250, that aimed to speed recovery efforts in just a few counties heavily damaged by Hurricane Ian. Both have proven troublesome for municipalities there, but SB 180 expanded the impact to the entire state.
The broad language became a tool for some developers to oppose local rules they did not like.
The language first caused a flashpoint between developers and local government in Southwest Florida’s Manatee County, where Republican commissioners wanted to restore local wetland protections, slow rapid growth and raise the fees that developers pay for roads, sewers and schools — moves that had strong support from residents.
Several developers in the area, later backed by the DeSantis administration, used the clause in SB 250 and SB 180 to bring some of the local changes to a halt and challenge others in court. Those developers include Pat Neal and Carlos Beruff, prominent allies of DeSantis and other Republican politicians who have supported pro-development policies.
“What we kind of feel … is that you’re punishing the building industry,” Neal said at a public meeting in May, where he spoke against Manatee’s impact fee hike and argued that it would result in higher prices for first-time homebuyers. “So we ask that you be careful with what you do.”
Neal also warned commissioners that “legal controversy” could be on the way. He later joined Beruff and other home builders in a lawsuit against the county’s impact fee increase that cites SB 180. Neal and Beruff did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The newest law also added a wrinkle that critics said would effectively make restrictions on new development regulations permanent — extending the law for a year every time a county was placed under a state of emergency in advance of a hurricane. In Florida, which has been repeatedly threatened or struck by hurricanes over the last few decades, emergency declarations are common. Every county in Florida, for instance, received an emergency declaration from at least one of the hurricanes in 2024, expanding SB 180 to the entire state.
A campaign to block SB 180
The “restrictive and burdensome” phrase immediately raised alarm with local governments and planners across the state, who led a campaign to strike the language and — when it passed the Legislature — urged Gov. Ron DeSantis to veto the bill. He signed it into law in June.
“It doesn’t take a law degree to look at that phrase and say anybody can claim it means anything. If I don’t like it, it’s restrictive and burdensome. If it takes me an extra day to fill out a form, that’s restrictive,” Grosso said.Indeed, days after the bill was signed into law, developers began citing it in lawsuits against municipalities. Deltona was one of the first to face a suit. Leaning on the new law, developers argued that they shouldn’t even have to pay property taxes.
Dori Howington, a commissioner in Deltona, thought it was ridiculous to base the suit on a law that was supposed to help local governments recover from hurricanes.
“The property they want to build on has never been impacted by a flood or hurricane. It’s one of the highest points in the city. It’s a vacant lot,” she said. “The bill has so much overreach that has nothing to do with emergencies. It’s a gift to developers.”
Developers filed lawsuits against Palm Coast and Manatee County because they found the new, higher fees they pay to local governments restrictive and burdensome.
In Orange County, developers immediately fired off a lawsuit against the county over its new rule making it harder to build more dense housing in rural areas — a change that was supported by 73% of Orange County voters.
The state of Florida has even cited the law to oppose decisions by local leaders. In Orange and Manatee Counties, as well as the city of Ocoee in central Florida, the state has directly intervened in the land-use regulation process and declared certain changes “restrictive and burdensome.” This paused the new regulations from taking effect.
In Manatee County, when Republican commissioners wanted to restore wetlands protections in defiance of the new law, the state of Florida threatened commissioners with “inevitable consequences” for violating SB 180 and SB 250. Fearing that DeSantis would remove them from their seats, they backed down.
“It is a thing that we could be removed from office,” said Manatee County District 1 Commissioner Carol Ann Felts.
“I want everybody to scream about SB 180,” Felts added. “I want this public pressure. But we have to do it in the right way, or you’re going to end up either without a commissioner, or with a commissioner you didn’t elect.”Manatee, along with 24 other municipalities, filed a class-action suit against the state of Florida a few weeks ago to halt the “restrictive and burdensome” aspect of the new law. Several South Florida cities jumped in, largely in anticipation of developer pressure.
Susan Trevarthen, partner at South Florida law firm Weiss, Serota, Helfman, Cole, & Bierman and one of the architects behind the suit, said that a judge’s order to halt the “damaging” effects of the bill is crucial, even if legislators say they will change the law in coming months.
“Even if we get a stay tomorrow, there’s already been damage. What got approved for development between then and now that wouldn’t have been approved otherwise?” she said.
The class action suit accuses the state of violating the Florida constitution by creating a law with more than one subject and infringing on local governments’ right to govern themselves, also known as home rule.
“This framework basically requires us to go to the developer and say ‘Mother, may I’?” Trevarthen said. “If you only have the power to say yes, you don’t have power.”
Fixes on the way?
While both lawsuits are so new that they haven’t been in front of a judge yet, there’s a chance that one of them could see its day in court before legislators in Florida come up with a fix for the bill. The legislative session begins in January next year, and most bills become law in July.
DiCeglie, the senate sponsor for SB 180, said his team is already at work tailoring a narrower version of the bill and plans to make it one of the first pieces of legislation he files this year.
His target, he said, is the “burdensome and restrictive” language that’s at the heart of the uproar. The goal of the legislation was to allow Floridians to rebuild faster and more efficiently, building off the lessons learned from the horrific spate of hurricanes that slammed much of Florida’s Gulf Coast in recent years.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen in many ways somewhat of an opposite effect. A lot of these challenges to land use planning we’ve seen have not been directly related to hurricane recovery,” he said. “I want this to be narrowly focused. I want this to be about recovery.”DiCeglie said he’s also open to the possibility of making the fix bill retroactive, similar to SB 180.
“At the end of the day, we do have home rule. If a county like Orange County does something I might disagree with, but those voters and politicians voted for something, I did not intend for SB 180 to get in the way of it,” he said.