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Is Governor Ron DeSantis working with developers to help exploit a hurricane relief law? One journalist says yes
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Is Governor Ron DeSantis working with developers to help exploit a hurricane relief law?
Jason Garcia is the publisher of Seeking Rents, a newsletter about Florida politics with a focus on how big business and other special interests influence public policy.
He says yes.
The law, Senate Bill 180, was promoted as hurricane recovery legislation but includes a provision barring cities and counties from enacting any development regulations deemed “more restrictive or burdensome.”
“So what you are seeing now is developers around the state are taking advantage of this provision by using it to both block new policies that they don’t like that some city and community commissioners are trying to enact or going back and trying to get policies that they opposed but lost on, and trying to get those retroactively dissolved using this law,” Garcia told WMNF.
And Garcia said Manatee County is ground zero for this – especially when it comes to wetland buffers.
Buffers mean that developers had to maintain a certain amount of undisturbed wetlands when building.
It’s been a controversial issue in Manatee County, with many locals advocating for the buffers and developers against it.
Commissioners had set a vote on it –
“But when the time came when they scheduled this vote to restore these wetland buffers, developers and the DeSantis administration all invoked Senate Bill 180 to say, you cannot do this because you are now prohibited from doing anything that would make development more restrictive or burdensome, and requiring larger wetland buffers would be more restrictive or burdensome.
And that was serious enough that the county commission at the last minute canceled this vote on whether or not to restore these, because they were genuinely concerned that the governor, who has made, like, really aggressive use of his power to suspend local officials, invoking it and suspending local officials over policy disagreements, they were genuinely concerned that the governor would suspend them if they voted to protect more wetlands, because that would be a violation of Senate Bill 180,” Garcia said.
Garcia says this and other issues, not only in Manatee County, but statewide, bring up a larger question of home rule and local government power.
Read Garcia’s article here.
The post Is Governor Ron DeSantis working with developers to help exploit a hurricane relief law? One journalist says yes appeared first on WMNF 88.5 FM.
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By Listen:
Is Governor Ron DeSantis working with developers to help exploit a hurricane relief law?
Jason Garcia is the publisher of Seeking Rents, a newsletter about Florida politics with a focus on how big business and other special interests influence public policy.
He says yes.
The law, Senate Bill 180, was promoted as hurricane recovery legislation but includes a provision barring cities and counties from enacting any development regulations deemed “more restrictive or burdensome.”
“So what you are seeing now is developers around the state are taking advantage of this provision by using it to both block new policies that they don’t like that some city and community commissioners are trying to enact or going back and trying to get policies that they opposed but lost on, and trying to get those retroactively dissolved using this law,” Garcia told WMNF.
And Garcia said Manatee County is ground zero for this – especially when it comes to wetland buffers.
Buffers mean that developers had to maintain a certain amount of undisturbed wetlands when building.
It’s been a controversial issue in Manatee County, with many locals advocating for the buffers and developers against it.
Commissioners had set a vote on it –
“But when the time came when they scheduled this vote to restore these wetland buffers, developers and the DeSantis administration all invoked Senate Bill 180 to say, you cannot do this because you are now prohibited from doing anything that would make development more restrictive or burdensome, and requiring larger wetland buffers would be more restrictive or burdensome.
And that was serious enough that the county commission at the last minute canceled this vote on whether or not to restore these, because they were genuinely concerned that the governor, who has made, like, really aggressive use of his power to suspend local officials, invoking it and suspending local officials over policy disagreements, they were genuinely concerned that the governor would suspend them if they voted to protect more wetlands, because that would be a violation of Senate Bill 180,” Garcia said.
Garcia says this and other issues, not only in Manatee County, but statewide, bring up a larger question of home rule and local government power.
Read Garcia’s article here.
The post Is Governor Ron DeSantis working with developers to help exploit a hurricane relief law? One journalist says yes appeared first on WMNF 88.5 FM.