January 22, 2024
Thank you to the many of you who traveled to Tallahassee last week to attend Day in the Legislature. We heard so many positive reports on the meetings you had with your delegation members. We hope you found the event and all the information presented beneficial.
Our team at GrayRobinson is once again providing us with our bill tracker. All of the bills we are tracking are listed on the report in numerical order. Bills that align to our platform are highlighted in yellow. A few of the bills to highlight:
- HB 7025 by Rep. Trabulsy, one of the House’s Deregulation bills, was heard in its second committee. While the sentiment expressed by some members of the committee was a continued interest in seeing more of the deregulation bill aspects seen in the Senate versions, the bill passed unanimously out of committee. It will next go to House Education & Employment Committee.
- HB 7039 by Rep. Rizo, the other of the two House Deregulation bills, was also heard in its second committee. After only one question and no debate the bill passed unanimously with Rep. Rizo commenting that the House is ready to do business with the Senate.
- Rep Tomkow’s HB 1403 School Choice was heard in its second committee stop. This bill repeals the Hope Scholarship as well as attempts to streamline the process for distributing the scholarships, trying to overcome some of the difficulties families and schools have seen with the implementation of HB 1 this school year.
- HB 109 Conversion Charter Schools was heard in its first committee of reference – Choice and Innovation Subcommittee. This bill would ease the requirements needed to convert a traditional public school to a charter school as well as allow a municipality to apply to convert all of the traditional public schools within its jurisdiction to charter schools. An amendment that was filed and adopted to the bill allows DOE and DMS to designate vacant real property as surplus if the districts sees at least a 1% decrease in student enrollment for at least 2 consecutive years and make that surplus property available to any charter school or charter school governing board without charging any rent or fees. If a charter school or charter school governing body doesn’t request the surplus property within 6 months, the property shall be made available for affordable housing. While the amendment was adopted, it significantly changed the scope of the bill and so the bill was then temporarily postponed in committee and no vote on the bill was taken.
