Veto this very bad vacation rental bill, Governor | Editorial

Another preemption of regulation of vacation rentals, stripping power from local government and handing it to Tallahassee, passed this session. It includes a carveout for the county of the Speaker of the House. Those voting against it included not just Democrats, but numerous Republicans. Gov. Ron DeSantis should veto Senate Bill 280.

Gov. Ron DeSantis should do the right thing and undo one of the worst actions by the 2024 Florida Legislature.

DeSantis should veto the Legislature’s latest act of outright contempt toward local government home rule in a fiercely debated bill (SB 280) that would impose new restrictions on how cities can regulate the proliferation of vacation rentals. Also known as party houses, they have invaded and degraded too many neighborhoods with litter, loud noise and lack of respect for other property owners.

The bill expands state regulation of vacation rentals to include licensing of properties and oversight of advertising platforms that are central to the industry. Cities could have registration programs that conform to state rules, but city ordinances enacted after 2011 would be wiped out.

This legislation has drawn intense criticism from local governments and homeowners’ associations and has sharply divided two powerful statewide interest groups. The Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association supports the bill and the Florida Association of Realtors opposes it.

In another sign of this bill’s many problems, it was the only major piece of legislation in this session in which significant numbers of Republicans defected from their party and voted against a bill backed by legislative leaders. That rarely happens any more in Tallahassee’s tightly controlled, top-down Capitol.

A rare Republican revolt

The House vote was 60-51 as 20 Republicans sided with Democrats and voted against this bill — a highly unusual revolt in the House. The nays included Rep. Chip LaMarca, R-Lighthouse Point; Rep. Jim Mooney, R-Key West; and five GOP members of the Miami-Dade delegation. Good for them.

Four Republican senators also opposed the bill, but it passed the Senate, 26-13. It especially rankled some senators that a final House rewrite, which Senate leaders accepted, carves out an exemption for one county, Flagler, from the bill’s new registration requirements. Flagler is the home county of House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast.

That alone would justify a DeSantis veto.

Across the state, supporters and opponents are flooding DeSantis with dueling messages.

Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis is one of hundreds of local officials calling for a veto. “By preventing local government from reasonably regulating vacation rentals, this proposed legislation would undermine the ability of communities to address a serious constituent concern effectively,” Trantalis wrote to the governor.

Realtors are mobilizing opposition on a new website and protesting new, unlimited fees cities can charge for registrations, renewals and inspections.

They claim that new occupancy rules (two people per bedroom and two people for each common area) will discourage large groups from coming to Florida.

Bureaucratic minefields

As usual in Tallahassee, the bill mostly erodes the autonomy of cities, whose leaders and homeowners must cope with the ever-growing problem of vacation rentals on a daily basis.

The mayor of Melbourne Beach, Alison Dennington, told the News Service of Florida the bill is “an existential threat to single-family zoning.” Vacation rental companies claim the bill has due process flaws and will force property owners to litigate minor disputes in court.

Palm Beach County fears being cheated out of a lot of tax revenue.

The county’s elected tax collector, Anne Gannon, told DeSantis that the bill would upend a five-year-old county ordinance that ensures that the county gets its fair share of tourist development taxes from vacation rentals.

Gannon said SB 280 lacks a requirement to enforce strict reporting by property addresses, how many days each property is rented, and the daily rental charge, making the auditing of listings “difficult or impossible,” she wrote.

Can’t ‘yell at their mayor’

As Sen. Jason Pizzo, D-Sunny Isles Beach, told senators, the shifting of regulation from cities to a distant state bureaucracy, a practice known as preemption, continues a terrible trend that makes it harder for voters to hold their local leaders accountable.

“They don’t want you to take away their ability to yell at their mayor, or see their commissioner at a Little League game and talk about what’s going on in their neighborhood,” Pizzo told senators during a long debate on the next-to-last day of the session.

If DeSantis signs SB 280, people who are fed up with problems from vacation rentals will have to take their complaints not to City Hall that’s right around the corner, but to the state Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) in Tallahassee.

The bill contains money for DBPR to hire a paltry nine — nine — employees to oversee a new statewide database of an estimated 172,000 vacation rentals, in which every one would be assigned a unique identifier.

And those are just the rentals the state knows about, because they play by the rules.

That’s woefully insufficient — and it’s one more reason why DeSantis should veto this bill.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.