Legislative Update – Live from Tallahassee

Welcome to Title Now. My name is Shannon Widman. I'm Deputy General Counsel with The Fund.
 
And we hold these monthly webinars on a regular basis, bringing you industry news, event information, and things that might interest you as a Florida real estate attorney.
 
And today, we're bringing to you a legislative update live from Tallahassee with our legislative advocate. The Fund has their very own legislative advocate and the firm Metz, Husband, and Daughton. And today with me is Jim Daughton.
 
Jim, welcome.
 
Thank you very much, Shannon.
 
Thank you for joining us from Tallahassee.
 
We hear that this is one of the longest legislative sessions ever, and we'd like some color on that. And we're really interested in the information that you can bring us today to kinda bring us up to date on where everything stands.
 
Good afternoon, everyone. As Shannon said, our firm has had the pleasure of representing The Fund for decades now. I'm joined by my colleague, my offspring, Ambrose Lewis, who also works on Fund issues with other members of our firm.
 
And Shannon said, "Welcome to day 100 of the 2025 legislative session."
 
I saw a tweet yesterday, so it must be true. I saw a tweet yesterday that said, I guess, in 1955, the legislative session went a little bit longer than this. And the way they settled the issues that session was just call for brand-new elections.
 
I don't think we're at that point yet in the 2025 legislative session. We do like deadlines at Florida, and so I'll remind everyone that the fiscal year ends on June 30.
 
The only constitutionally mandated role for the legislative building that it has to do is pass a balanced budget. And that is the holdup, and the reason for the extension of the 2025 legislative session.

As an aside, when I say day 100, that does not include the months of interim committee meetings beginning in January, special sessions from January and February, or the ice storm that occurred in Tallahassee during some of that. So this concept of a part-time legislature that travels and just comes for a few weeks a year for the third-largest state in the country is not the case anymore.
 
The holdup that sort of kept the House and Senate from achieving their goal on time was sort of philosophical issues related to the budget, not how much to spend candidly, but how much to reduce the size and scope of government.
 
I think it's fair to say that the House's priority is sort of like what I call it "choke the beast" approach, which is to be in a position for the state government to rely less on dollars so that it can reduce its size.
 
The Senate takes a little bit more moderate approach, almost still interested in reducing taxes but aligning a little bit more with Governor Santos on, perhaps, a reduction in property taxes, something that could be on the ballot in 2026, and spending less money in different ways.
 
Typically, when the regular session ends or the 60 days are up, they decide to come back a little bit later. Usually, emotions cool. It's like breaking from any type of negotiation; sometimes take a couple of days off. We have not necessarily seen that. We have a case this year that actually increased after the legislature worked at home for a while. They've not been back for the last 8 or 9 days. The rhetoric has mostly subsided.
 
The budget subcommittees that were negotiating a bunch of silos, for example, the education appropriations committees in the Senate or the justice appropriations committees are done meeting. Unresolved issues have been elevated to the full appropriations chairs, that's Lawrence McClure in the House and Eddy Cooper in the Senate, and they've been meeting for the last couple of 3 days on and off, mostly off, to resolve outstanding issues and kind of bring this budget in for landing.
 
If all goes well over the next 24 hours or so, they will finish the budget negotiations, get a document that the public can view and there's a 72-hour cooling-off period before the legislature can come back and vote on a final budget.
 
Most people think that could be as early as Monday if everybody kinda gets along between now and over the next 24 hours.
 
There are not 160 legislators in town. Many of them are not involved in these final negotiations. There are probably 10 or 15 members of the legislature that are actually in Tallahassee in these final negotiations.
 
They figured out that texting works and phone calls work just as well as each legislator looks to fund his or her priorities.
 
There's a new wrinkle, which is never good in the final hours of the negotiations.
 
The Governor said, as recently as yesterday, he'd like to give all property owners a $1,000 check in property tax relief.
 
I suspect that costs a little bit. That has not been on the radar screen, at least publicly, of the House and Senate in these final negotiations.
 
And so when I say fingers are kinda crossed over the next 24 hours, that's, you know, that's what we're all kinda waiting on to see whether that would be an immediate thing that upsets the budget, whether that could be a special session issue, or whether that's something that'll be part of a larger kinda comprehensive tax reform package in later years.
 
Depending on one's perspective, after the 60 days concluded, one of the nice procedural things that the legislature did was sort of put all the other bills, all the other non-budget-related bills, in a band, basically killing them for the 2025 legislative session. So there's a piece of legislation that, you know, dealt with, you know, pick your topic, you know, school crossing guards, and it hadn't passed the legislature at that time. That bill is dead. It is not part of these negotiations. Now I've seen through the years one can't read in what they consider budget related, so I suspect before this is all over, there will be some legislation that has not been vetted through the appropriation through the regular bill process that somehow winds up as part of this negotiation.
 
But I can say with about 99% certainty any bills that you may have been watching, and certainly The Fund has been watching, during the legislative session are kind of done.
 
I'm gonna run through a few of those bills and then sort of try to prognosticate what we anticipate for the next several months.
 
Yeah. Let me start with that. And just to ask you, Jim, it just seems like there's a whole lot that has to happen over the next 2 days.
 
Is Monday kind of just their anticipated deadline of when they expect to come to a resolution? It's not really the deadline because they really could run right up to the beginning of the next fiscal year.
 
But they're running out of time. We're almost halfway through June.
 
That's exactly right, Shannon. So that is the the deadline that the Speaker and the Senate President would like to achieve if negotiations blow up over the next couple of days. Yes, they could go up until June 30.
 
I suspect if things were to blow up over the next 24 or 36 hours, the governor would probably weigh in even more because that constitutional responsibility then gets a little more nerve-wracking. We pride ourselves on not being Washington, DC, in that we like to balance and we like to do things on time.
 
I think, again, I saw this on X, so that's to be true. In 1992, the legislature went beyond the June 30 deadline and had to do some of the machinations to keep the government running with nonessential employees and the whole nine yards. I think everybody really wants to avoid that scenario.
 
That's good.
 
So I'm not sure if you can see it, but I had a lot more hair at the beginning of this project.
 
And maybe more in 1992?
 
Probably not. I'm using that. Yes. I was there.
 
And how much has the dynamics of the political atmosphere in Tallahassee played into what we're seeing now? Is it basically that this delay up to this point has been a result of maybe the House and the Senate not being on the same page or the House and the Governor's office maybe not being on the same page on a few things and the Senate maybe acting a little bit as an intermediary to try and get some things done?
 
It just seems like there's a whole lot that they were talking about. I mean, there were over 1,900 bills filed at the beginning of the session, but only 249 had passed by the time the session supposedly ended or was supposed to end on May 2. So, you know, is it the political infighting that we don't necessarily or that, actually, this year, we actually saw quite a bit of it. But, you know, is that a big player in what we're seeing now, or is it more just that they really truly honestly can't decide where to land on this budget because there are some issues that they can't decide whether or not they should fund?
 
That's a those are those are great questions. I will say this overall on the number of bills that passed compared to the number of those that are about standard compared to prior years.
 
But more fundamentally, I think you have, and and I give the speaker credit here. The speaker has not hidden in the ball. When the speaker said, when he was, he took the reins even prior to that and said he really wanted to accomplish two goals. He wanted us to sort of reassert the independence of the legislative branch.
 
I think, you know, he had a feeling that the executive was super powerful over the prior, you know, 6 years or so, and he just wanted to kinda reassert that legislative intent. He was very, very clear about that. The second thing he was clear about is that he wanted to reduce the size and scope of state government. So while the rhetoric, a little out of hand in this section and very political, I do think, you know, everyone saw this, you know, everybody's positioned for now and I think it's fair to say the Senate doesn't disagree necessarily with the with the Speaker's position on the assertion of the impact the independence of the legislative branch, but I think probably took a little bit different or does take a little bit different approach on on spending reductions.
 
Right now, it's really, really down to the detail. How do we want to handle funding water projects?
 
You know, they've agreed on what the overall kind of type of government should be, which is gonna be about 2.4 billion dollars.
 
But it's sort of over the last 4 weeks; they've sort of come to how much is the tax deduction gonna be. But now it is in trying to, you know, balance 116 billion dollars where the each of the Senate tops may have different priorities and a necessity to also deal with a governor who has a veto plan. Yeah. So it is a tough balancing act. I think we would like to see that mutually achieved within the 60 days. It's just taking a lot longer.
 
Well, let's get into what they have agreed upon so far and some of these bills that have passed. What would you like to start with?
 
So for those on the webinar, I'd say that it's nice to see Shannon and me talking in a very calm manner. That belies the text, phone calls, running around the capital, and communicating our team communicating with Shannon and Melissa on a daily, hourly, or sometimes fifteen-minute basis as things move in a very dynamic legislative process. There are some issues, though, that have passed, and I think we can report on Shannon. We can start, I guess, with kind of 4.0.
 
That sounds great. I think a lot of our members need to know what's happening now.

Sure. Sure. And what I'm gonna time you for, for those on the call, if you know the nuance, the specifics of these bills, we'll cite the bill number, and you can, you know, easily point that out. It's also been the subject of the funds reporting to you. So I won't get into the nitty-gritty of these. It's where I tell you where they are in the process and what the legislature was looking at as we were working with them during the legislative session. A condo reform 4.0 should tell you how many reforms we're gonna see in condominium regulation in the state of Florida, House Bill 913. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/913
 
It started politically. The issue started politically. Governor DeSantis wanted the legislature to address condo issues much sooner in the process, was prepared, and called it into special session to deal with that. He felt like day-to-day condo owners were being impacted by the massive changes that were made to the law in prior years.
 
The legislature said, "Hey. We can kind of walk and chew gum at the same time. We can care about these kinds of issues as well, but let's just do it in the legislative session. There's no real need to be here to do this in January. Let us get a little bit more information."
 
Candidly, it was a little more time to allow more of the milestone building inspection data to be collected. So that was the legislature's response. So it started out kinda rocky. Everybody wanted to do something, but they didn't necessarily agree on it.
 
When about halfway through the legislative session, as competing bills were being considered, the governor sort of weighed in and said, "We're meeting our House version with a little bit more geared toward developers."
 
You know, in theory, they're gonna force people out of their units because they couldn't afford what was anticipated to be a large prospective special assessment. So he sort of took the Senate approach on some of their efforts. And so leading into the negotiations, even though you see it's House Bill 913, that's the subject of a lot of negotiations between the House and Senate as sponsored by the way, that was Representative, Nikki Lopez, who spent a ton of time on this in the House, and Senator Jennifer Bradley from Orange Park. So both have been embedded in these issues now for a while. And, and I think, you know, have a really good working relationship.
 
I will say that a couple of the issues that were on the legislature's mind—and you see this sort of play out in the legislation, and a lot of this is technical—but for example, they want to make sure that oversight accountability issues were maintained. So if you're doing one of these reserve studies, they wanted to make sure you disclose what your interest might be down the road if you were also going to provide services to the kind of people who are able to come into compliance with the milestone. So that's an example of sort of the technical fixes they used.
 
Right. The guy says, "Look. You have a parking garage that has structural problems. We need to rebuild the whole thing. By the way, my company can do the work."
 
Right.
 
That's exactly right.
 
Yeah.
 
That's exactly right. And so, you know, there there are those fixes. They were also wanting to ensure, for example, if there's a large special session, excuse me, that the condo associations could use a credit, a line of credit, or a loan to achieve the short-term cash that it might need to come into compliance.
 
The Realtor Association wanted to ensure that board of directors minutes from the prior year, I believe, were available to the public so that way, if you're purchasing a condo, you could see what discussions were conveyed in the prior year in terms of what a future assessment could look like.
 
And I know that, Shannon, you mentioned that already, based on this, there's been some action for the Bars already for changes to the riders. Is that right?
 
That's right. The FR/Bar Committee has already approved changes to the condo rider pending the governor's signature on House Bill 913.
 
So, you know, this is them ready to go. The realtors are ready to go. They just wanted those changes, obviously, so the disclosures could be filled out correctly and people wouldn't have a problem buying or selling property and knowing what they're in for in terms of special assessments and getting that information.
 
The association managers for these condo associations will now need to put all of this information up on a public website so the information will be easier to get.
 
And, Shannon, you raised a good point. You said you sort of ending the governor's approval. So there, I just wanna mention that. There are a couple of other bills we're gonna talk about that are in the same situation.
 
And it's a little weird because we're in an extended set. So, as I recall, State Con Law, the constitution says, a little confusing, but usually, when the session concludes or within a few days of the session concluding, the governor has 15 days to act on a piece of legislation.
 
Here's the keyword: upon receipt. And so, the legislature sometimes takes its time to deliver bills to the governor before that 15 day filing starts.
 
And so the upon receipt is pretty important. Sometimes that's political. Sometimes it just takes time.

Or the governor might say, "Hey. I wanna make a big deal out of signing the condo bill. Could you send it to me so I can act on it by next Tuesday?" So there's a lot of informal communication going on, not always adversarial, just to sort of, or "I wanna do a bunch of healthcare bills next week, Can you send me all of them?" So that's an example.
 
It gets a little dicier when they're still in session, in part sort of when they end.
 
Constitutionally, there's a 7 day provision. I don't think that's gonna impact any of these bills, but knock yourself out if you wanna go look it up. It does get a tad complicated when session has been extended, but I think we would operate from the governor after 15 days upon receipt. He has not received that bill yet. It's and we've gone to effect, July 1. There have been rare occasions, and this could be one of them, where the governor will not act on the legislation prior to the effective date because it's a little weird, but again, that's pretty rare, and, of course, we're in pretty rare times.
 
Right. Right. Yeah. Because what would happen if we basically have until 5 more days or 4 more days at this point for him to receive it, for him to make that July for it to be effective July 1 and for that deadline to be reached?
 
But that's right.
 
I mean, he can always sign it immediately.
 
Doesn't have to wait the whole time or let him become all of that signature. But right.
 
98% or 95%, 98% of the time, this all gets gets resolved, and it kinda becomes more of a, you know, law school class discussion. But we'll see what happens. We're in weird times.
 
Wow. Well, what other legislation will our Members be interested in knowing about?
 
I did want to mention a couple more.
 
There's legislation that was sort of crafted and pushed by the business law section of The Florida Bar this year. It dealt with series LLCs.
 
That's Senate Bill 316. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/316
 
So, amazingly enough, Florida did not have the ability to have an LLC that sort of is the umbrella for underlying LLCs.
 
It's so they would have to kinda create the umbrella LLC and do this in other jurisdictions like Delaware and North Carolina. So we did a soft section notice that's brought this issue forward.
 
It's really an umbrella, as I mentioned, an umbrella LLC under which way more protected series LLCs are created.
 
And then this protected series LLC has its own assets and liabilities and is treated separately. These are sort of important for a number of reasons.
 
As many of you know, the sections of The Florida Bar spend a good deal of time trying to vet these promoters before they bring them to the legislature.
 
And so, assuming we get favorable termination from the governor's office, that's Senate Bill, 316. It has this effective date not until July 1, 2026. There's a little bit of time to kind of come into compliance with the law.
 
And, again, that was a business law section initiative that we kept an eye on.
 
That sounds good. How about that new flood disclosure bill? It kind of extends the prior year's flood disclosure bill.
 
That's exactly right. So, again, our friend, Senator Jen Bradley, emerges again from Warren's Park dealing with where these types of issues. She was partnered with Representative Christine Hunschofsky, who is from Parkland and a former mayor and is now the incoming Democratic leader of that house. Both are really great members to work with.
 
Flood disclosure is Senate Bill 948. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/948
 
And it basically spends time in kind of a rental, mobile home, condo or space.
 
So, it requires a landlord, a residential renter property, or a mobile home park owner to disclose information regarding the flood risks.
 
And, past flooding the property, they have to disclose that to perspective tenants who are renting for one year or longer, so the long-term lease rental, have to disclose their, you know, sort of the flood information.
 
The tenant does not have to receive the disclosures unless there are substantial losses or damages due to flooding.
 
And they, if they do, if they receive information, they can terminate the lease, I guess, is sort of the provision. Wanted to point out, there is a little bit of impact in the residential space. The seller requires a seller to disclose whether he or she is aware of any flood damage that occurred during the ownership and whether they received assistance from any source for flood damage to the property as opposed to just federal sources. So again, more disclosure, more transparency on flooding on a piece of property. Again, bill has not been sent to the governor.
 
That bill would go into effect on October 1 once it's received, moves pretty easily through the process, and gets it done by bipartisan support through legislation.
 
That's good to know, and it speaks to those of us who have worked with landlord-tenant law. And there's another bill that came out that I believe was signed by the governor. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is the electronic delivery of notices between landlord and tenant.
 
House Bill 615. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/615
 
Mhmm. So House Bill 615 was signed by the governor. So this is good law, and it was effective upon becoming law. So this is the, as opposed to, like, a later effective date that you normally see in legislation, this went into effect on April 29. It went into effect immediately upon his signature. Sponsors were Tiffany Esposito, Representative Tiffany Esposito from the Fort Myers area and Senator Tom Lee from Ormond Beach, Saint Augustine.
 
Gary, Senator Lee has done many other issues on this topic. The lawyer from that area is in the insurance space now and is gonna be senate president, by the way. Representative Esposito, I worked with Senator Lee on this legislation.
 
And, basically, it allows the electronic delivery of notices, sort of an update to the statute. We've seen this in other areas, not necessarily related to the landlord-tenant, but in a number of file series where they're just trying to update these types of delivery notices.
 
The other parties have to agree or see those notices, and they can kind of do it the old-fashioned way, like I did with the American Express bill.
 
One bill that's interesting and caused a little bit of a stir at the latest RPPTL meeting was this legal tender bill that apparently also has been signed by the governor, House Bill 999. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/999
 
Yeah. So we can all kind of collectively scratch our heads on this one as it gets implemented. I can tell you that during the legislative session, there was a lot of discussion about, you know, real money means real freedom, that gold and silver should be considered legal tender in Florida. It did not create a state bank of any kind. It does allow for the acceptance of gold and silver as long as both parties are willing it's legal tender. Sort of the rhetoric around this was, you know, Florida's led the fight nationally against a central digital bank currency and kind of, borrowing terms here, but "woke" (that's the quotes) "woke" banks, Chinese investments in Florida's farmlands, ESG investments.
 
So along that theme, there's sort of a return to being able to use silver and gold as currencies. Will be the largest state to recognize this. The bill was signed by the governor. The legislature does have to implement rules from the Financial Services Commission, and those rules are due to the legislature by November 1 of this year. The Financial Services Commission is the governor and cabinet. They sit as a quasi executive as the Financial Services Commission when the cabinet meets.
 
Really, day to day, that's gonna be, I suspect, the Office of Financial Regulation, OFR, that's gonna do the heavy lifting on implementing, this piece of legislation and then getting it ratified, getting those rules ratified by the legislature.
 
And as of yesterday, I think the office regulation is starting to try to get input on what rules might look like.
 
I know that Shannon can't wait to participate in that process.
 
Well, and I'm pretty sure we have some Fund Members who might get phone calls saying, "Hey. The buyer and seller have agreed that they'll trade this property for a stack of gold bars. Can we hold gold bars in our trust account?"
 
And you're right, Shannon. A lot of those questions came up. I would point out, too, that that you can. It has authorized these goals that were both physical and digital.
 
So I'm not sure we need to expand the size of your conference room or walls.
 
We'll have Fund Members needing Brink's trucks. There were a few things that didn't pass this year, and it kind of gives us time to think about when they might come back again with these same sorts of bills next year, or, you know, there was one in particular. I know we don't have a lot of time left. We're a little bit over time, but there's one in particular that was really interesting.
 
The recreational covenants and amenities bill. I know there's a national home builder that was really behind the language.
 
It showed up in 5 separate bills between the House and the Senate.

And, you know, I ran out of time at Fund Assembly to be able to talk about this. So I was just wondering, do you expect that next year we'll run into this again? And also to give our audience members a little bit of background, these are changes that are proposed to Chapter 718 where a developer can separate out amenity dues, which are fees for recreational amenities separate from the common area assessments from the recreational covenants, which are recorded covenants separate and distinct from the declaration of covenants. And the idea is that the developer may then charge fees and lien property through Chapter 718 but is not necessarily a nonprofit company.
 
And it's not bound by the homeowners association approving or voting on a budget for these particular fees.
 
Do you expect this to come back again in some way, shape, or form next year?
 
Shannon, that's a great question. And the short answer is I do expect it to come back. And more importantly, I think this is an opportunity on issues as we've seen this issue, you know, through the years where The Fund could really shine, where legislators are looking for concrete policy background, for examples, and for the impact of a piece of legislation, sort of a day to day environment.
 
And, frankly, that's where The Fund shines: bringing some policy expertise to an issue like this. So I think, you know, our summer homework, and I'd encourage all of you to participate with Shannon on this, is to sort of take a look at House Bill 579 (https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/579), and also look at other legislation, amendments filed by Representative, who's sort of working on this issue, and make sure that we're in a position to deal with the mechanics and the policy implications of an issue like this. So, short answer, yes. Longer answer: we need some help to educate the legislature.
 
That's good advice, Jim. And, to remind everyone that we have kind of a short break, when this session finally does end, the new fiscal year begins, and then it won't be but just a few months before the legislature will be back in Tallahassee and discussing issues for an upcoming session. 2026 is going to start in January rather than March due to the election year for midterm elections. So there's a shorter period of time in between in which we have to speak with our legislators and regulators about upcoming issues that are emerging that they feel are important to be included in new legislation.
 
So I will also remind the Members that a great way to support The Fund and its advocacy efforts that Jim and his team help us with is through TITL, Title Insurance Through Lawyers. It's The Fund's very own advocacy pack, and it gives us a seat at the table so that when legislators and regulators are making decisions that affect the title industry, we are there as a resource for them. We can answer their questions, and we can help them understand our industry and what Fund Members and real estate attorneys deal with throughout the state. So the legislation and regulations that they're proposing can affect the industry in, hopefully, a good and positive way for all of us and for the consumers that we support, protect, and advocate for.
 
Jim, thank you so much for joining today. Thank you to Anna Grace, who I know is in the background and helping out. We so very much appreciate your team up in Tallahassee, and we wish you the best of luck over the next week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, or however long it's going to take to wrap up this session.
 
We I do wanna remind our viewers that this webinar gets pushed out as a podcast. The audio portion gets pushed out to YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, and it is free.
 
So please sign up and subscribe to the podcast, and we'll come to you on about a monthly basis with more interesting topics that will affect you and your practice.
 
So, as always, thank you so much for your support of The Fund, and thank you again to Jim and the team.