UNF professor: Pending legislation preempts democracy and home rule in Florida

Imagine you are living in a state that has very few state-level zoning restrictions on the building of industrial factories in any location.

Learning about a plan to construct a manufacturing factory in proximity to your neighborhood, and worried about the environmental impact on residents, you and a group of concerned citizens organize a petition drive to mobilize residents and meet with city officials. After gaining popular support and convincing city council members, a local ordinance is passed prohibiting unrestricted industrial development.

Other communities also organize campaigns to pass comparable local legislation to prevent industrial development in proximity to residential properties.

At the same time, suppose a trade organization representing industrial manufacturers — armed with professional lobbyists and generous campaign contributions — heads to the state capital to lobby against such ordinances.

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As a result, the Legislature passes a bill that nullifies and prohibits any local ordinances regulating industrial development. All your efforts have been for naught, and any community hoping to implement similar regulations should not waste their time.

This is what is known as state preemption.

Under state preemption, local governments are prohibited from implementing certain ordinances, even when supported by a majority of citizens and lawmakers in that jurisdiction. Today we are witnessing this anti-democratic process playing out on the question of tenant rights and protections.

Because Florida has some of the weakest provisions regulating tenant-landlord relations in the nation, local governments have passed Tenants Bill of Rights to ensure basic protections related to discrimination, rent increases, lease renewals, arbitrary fees and evictions. Miami, Orlando, Tampa and St. Petersburg have all passed a Tenants Bill of Rights.

Associations representing corporate landlords, apartment owners, Realtors and property management companies have organized to squash these ordinances.

As a result, two pieces of corporate-backed legislation — SB1586 and HB1417 — are now before the state Legislature. With the stroke of a pen, these bills would void all existing tenant protection laws.

It would also effectively extinguish the effort to pass a Tenants Bill of Rights in Jacksonville. A piece of local legislation that was included as one of the recommendations on affordable housing by the City Council’s committee for Critical Quality of Life Issues.

Proponents of the legislation claim that a confusing patchwork of different local regulations across the state, created by various tenant protection bills, disincentivizes the provision of affordable housing. If that were the primary concern, one obvious solution would be to pass statewide legislation that incorporates the central tenant protections and rights found in existing ordinances.

But that argument is really a smokescreen hiding the true intent — to protect the interests of corporate landlords, apartment owners and property managers.

As preemptive legislation in Florida expands, citizens will come to realize that democratic civic engagement in local public affairs is futile. The consequence, perhaps intended, will be a politically silenced population.

Further extinguishing any remaining semblance of home rule is the currently pending legislation (SB 170, HB 1515) that will allow any business to file a suit against a local government if they perceive a local ordinance to be “arbitrary and unreasonable.”

With that we will witness the death knell of local democratic governance.

David Jaffee, Neptune Beach

This guest column is the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of the Times-Union. We welcome a diversity of opinions.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Tenant protection, home rule threatened by pair of Florida bills