Some acts are tough to follow.
A number of new Florida laws take effect July 1. But after state legislators passed a massive tort reform package last year, something that the business lobby had sought for decades, and enacted laws aimed at addressing Florida’s affordable housing crisis, some observers found the 2024 Florida legislative session lacking.
“It was a much more subdued session” compared to 2023, says Bill Herrle, state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, pointing to fewer bills being passed overall and one example in which a priority of the state’s business lobby — a further reduction in the commercial rent sales tax — failed to pass.
However, there were still significant bills that generated heated debate and will make a difference in Floridians’ lives, advocates say. Lawmakers added $100 million to the “Hometown Heroes” fund, which provides up to $35,000 in down payment help for first-time homebuyers earning less than 150% of the area median income. Last year’s $100-million appropriation was quickly snatched up.
Businesses that want to open a childcare center for their employees can get a tax credit for 50% of the startup costs, or for subsidizing an employee’s childcare for up to $300 per month.
In several cases, state lawmakers decided to limit local governments’ ability to enact local rules and regulations. Here’s a closer look at what cleared both chambers:
Miami Heat
Miami-Dade County last year considered becoming the first in the state to pass an ordinance mandating shade and water breaks every two hours for outdoor workers during periods of extreme heat. Before the county decided, however, the Florida Legislature stepped in and prohibited local governments from enacting such measures.
HB 433 blocks local government from requiring businesses to provide heat exposure protections not required by state or federal law.
Advocates say the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is expected to enact its own worker heat protections, but a legislative staff analysis acknowledges that there are no laws today “that provide heat exposure protections for outdoor workers.”
Business interests, including Associated Industries of Florida and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, backed the law, saying they were concerned businesses otherwise could face “a patchwork” of heat-related ordinances across the state. “Inconsistent and potentially conflicting regulations do not lead to safer or more productive workplaces,” a Chamber statement said, “but rather significant confusion, expense and potentially unsafe conditions for job creators that have employees in multiple jurisdictions.”
Heat exposure can be a life and death matter, so some agriculture workers have partnered with state growers for protections in the Fair Food Program, says Gerardo Reyes of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Those agreements “include rigorously enforced heat stress protections and empower workers themselves to monitor those protections in the workplace.” The coalition hopes to expand those protections to cover all Florida farmworkers.
The bill also blocks local governments from requiring contractors to pay wages above the state’s minimum wage starting in 2026. That’s when the minimum wage hits $15 per hour pursuant to a 2020 constitutional amendment passed by voters.
Health Care Workforce
Outgoing Senate President Kathleen Passidomo calls her Live Healthy package of bills “a game changer” and “the culmination of my career in the Legislature.”
Most of the provisions, which aim to bolster Florida’s health care workforce to help keep pace with the state’s growth, took effect upon Gov. Ron DeSantis’ March 21 signing.
The linchpin is SB 7016, which passed the Senate unanimously and drew just one dissenting vote in the House. It offers $717 million to increase medical residencies and provide tuition reimbursements to entice new physicians to the state as Florida’s population swells.
“Unfortunately,” Passidomo says, “new Floridians are not bringing their health care providers with them.” The legislation, she says, will help bring health care to the people. Much of the new clinical training will take place in rural areas difficult to access “so sick and injured Floridians do not have to travel long distance for care.”
Tuition reimbursements range from $45,000 per year for registered nurses and licensed practical nurses to up to $150,000 per year for physicians. Social workers and mental health professionals can receive up to $75,000 per year in reimbursements. The program can cover four years of college. To be eligible, health care providers must commit to serving Medicaid patients and providing volunteer services.
The Live Healthy law also increases reimbursement rates for treating Medicaid patients, especially maternity care, and expands telehealth programs and offers other ways to bring health care to rural areas.
Other bills in the package target mental health, including designating Tampa General, UF Health Shands, UF Health Jacksonville and Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital as behavioral teaching hospitals.
The mental health emphasis came from DeSantis, Passidomo said when the bill was signed. “I said I want more beds for mental health patients,” DeSantis said, “particularly people who are not able to function in society.”
Big Bottles
Not everything coming out of Tallahassee sparks divisiveness. Take the decision to throw out the state’s ban on commercial sales of wine bottles larger than a gallon, clearing the way for the kinds of giant bottles you might see at some restaurants and bars that hold as much as 15 liters, or nearly 4 gallons.
HB 583 unanimously passed the state House and cleared the Senate 38-1. These still aren’t everyday purchases, says Alex Poreda, vice president of sales for ABC Fine Wine & Spirits. So the prominence of the bottles carrying size names like “Methuselah” and “Nebuchadnezzar” will depend on demand. “But we expect the initial impact will be on the bag-in-box category due to the longevity of the wines after opening and any potential cost savings going up in size.”
“Large-format wines have always been a target for collectors, celebrity and charity events and gift giving,” Poreda says. “A 6.0L of Napa Cabernet Sauvignon would sure do the trick for an impressive birthday gift. Might be tough to wrap, but we’ll figure it out.”
Future Food Fracas
Lab-grown meat isn’t yet on store shelves, but Florida lawmakers decided that Florida consumers won’t be able to buy it when it is available for purchase. Gov. Ron DeSantis says the state’s ban on the product is needed to thwart “authoritarian goals” of finding alternative protein sources pushed by “the global elite.”
Strip away the rhetoric and the bill seems more designed to protect Florida’s cattle and poultry farmers from possible future competition. Lab-grown meat starts with animal cells which are cultivated in bioreactors, potentially developing cheaper and environmentally cleaner products than traditional farming.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the sale of lab-grown chicken a year ago, and the Food and Drug Administration has said the product is safe to eat. In a February letter to Florida lawmakers, North American Meat Institute COO and General Counsel Mark Dopp warned that the legislation might be on thin legal ground. The Federal Meat Inspection Act regulates meat processing and distribution, he wrote, citing case law which he said shows the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause means that federal law trumps any state action. In addition, the bill is bad policy, he wrote, because the viability of lab-grown meat “should be left to the market and consumers, not dictated by legislation that hampers progress and competition.”
Legislators are “playing food police,” says Pepin Tuma, legislative director for the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on plant-based and cultivated meat. Tuma called Florida’s bill “eccentric.”
“American-made cultivated meat has been rigorously inspected and ruled safe by the USDA and FDA, so why are politicians with no experience in food safety interfering where they don’t belong?” Tuma says. “Floridians should decide for themselves what kind of meat they want to eat, and not be limited by government overreach.”
Even the conservative National Review criticized the bill, saying Florida “has taken a wholly worthwhile cause — the cause of individual choice — and sullied it with an unlovely combination of hypocrisy and two-bit protectionism.”
However, Dusty Holley, director of field services for the Florida Cattlemen’s Association, says the bill is needed because too much about the product remains unknown. “We know that meat is animal muscle that’s eaten as food. We know that beef is that animal muscle that comes from a bovine animal that’s eaten as food,” Holley says. “I’m not really sure what this lab-grown protein is. So when you’re not really sure what something is, you’ve got to step back and say, ‘if it’s not meat, and it’s not beef … one thing we know for sure is it should never be labeled as such.’”
E-Verify Fines
The Legislature passed a bill in 2023 mandating that businesses with more than 25 employees use the federal E-Verify system to ensure workers are in the country legally and qualify for hiring. E-Verify checks information like driver’s license or Social Security numbers to see if a non-citizen is legally eligible for work.
The bill included a one-year grace period before fining provisions kicked in. Now, businesses caught failing to check on workers three times within 24 months can be fined up to $1,000 per day and see their licenses suspended or revoked, depending on the number of unauthorized employees, until they come into compliance.
In addition, hospitals must ask patients whether they are lawfully in the United States before being treated or admitted. Their answers won’t lead to a denial of care but will be reported to the state.
Advocates say the requirement may slow the number of illegal immigrants coming to the state for work. Critics say it could make it more difficult for businesses to find workers amid a labor shortage.
Some north Florida homebuilders encountered immediate labor shortages after the bill passed last year, says Truly Burton, executive vice president and government affairs director for the Builders Association of South Florida. For many laborers, it was just easier to find work in neighboring states. “Things have calmed down a bit, and I think we’re not nearly as nervous,” she says.
Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, is a longtime E-Verify critic who casts Florida’s law as “a way to look tough” on illegal immigration that encourages document theft. E-Verify, he says, can be cheated easily.
“E-Verify is still an expensive and ineffective means to exclude illegal immigrants from the workforce,” he tells Florida Trend. “I expect it to raise the cost of hiring for everyone without excluding more than a handful of illegal immigrants from gainful employment. Nothing has occurred to change my perception of E-Verify or its harmful effects.”
That is similar to criticism the Florida Chamber of Commerce issued in 2018, when the Florida Constitution Revision Commission considered a ballot initiative to put E-Verify in the state Constitution. In addition to its belief that the Constitution should not be amended so often, the Chamber said a mandate “would place significant costs on business for little gain. E-Verify is far from perfect and consistently flags lawful employees. The compliance costs and penalties associated with it should not be based on this flawed system.”
Teenage Workland
In 2023, lawmakers overwhelmingly approved a bill mandating that high school classes start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. That bill specifically mentions “the health, safety, and academic impacts of sleep deprivation on middle school and high school students and the benefits of a later school start time.”
But in March, they passed HB 49, allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to work until 11 p.m. on school nights, more than 8 hours on Sundays and holidays preceding a school day, and up to 30 hours per week effective July 1. They can work more if their parents sign a waiver. The final bill didn’t go as far as the original draft, which would have ended restrictions on how late, and how many hours, teens could work.
The changes make it “a partial win,” says Florida Policy Institute analyst Alexis Tsoukalas. “It’s never a win when you’re rolling back child labor protections no matter how much the rollback changed from where session started … A true win would have been had it died and not passed at all, but this is certainly an improvement.”
Herrle, the state NFIB director, says the hype about the bill was overblown and that it is “one of the few” business policies that passed this year. Workforce issues are the biggest challenge for small business, he explains. It’s more difficult for a business to grow if the owner is working the cash register or doing other tasks that teens can do. “The real consequence of the labor shortage is that people who should be spending their time building and growing a business are spending time on the line — in production, behind a cash register, on the cook line, on the manufacturing line, making service calls. And eventually that’s going to come at a cost to our economy.”
It’s possible, Tsoukalas says, that the bill resurfaces next year with a fresh attempt at erasing the 30-hour limit, allowing teens to work more than eight hours in a day, and getting rid of provisions mandating breaks for shifts longer than four hours. The bill is among more than a dozen nationally aimed at expanding teen labor.
Other Business
Education
- Volunteer chaplains can now meet with students in public schools.
- Aiming to reel in the number of challenges to books in school libraries, the Legislature limited the number of times that people who don’t have kids attending school in the relevant district can try to have books removed.
- Florida law now requires that public school students are taught “on the dangers and evils of Communism.”
Cars
- Florida law has long protected homes and life insurance policies for people seeking federal bankruptcy protection. Now up to $5,000 of a car’s value also is protected, the first increase in three decades.
- People caught street racing will face stiffer penalties. Maximum fines doubled from $1,000 to $2,000 for first-time offenders, while repeat offenders could be charged with third-degree felonies.
- Gov. DeSantis committed $450 million to the Toll Relief Program, which cuts rates in half for motorists using toll roads more than 35 times per month through next March.