- July 8, 2026
I've been involved in local government long enough to understand that growth is inevitable in Florida. People are moving here. That's not going to change. And for most of my career, the way we managed that growth — imperfectly, slowly, sometimes frustratingly — was through a process. Public hearings. Elected boards. Comprehensive plans built by the communities they were meant to protect.
That process isn't gone. But it's being quietly dismantled, one state legislative session at a time.
Flagler County residents who wonder why their commissioners seem powerless to slow the wall of development moving down the coast should understand something: in many cases, they aren't just powerless. They're legally prohibited from saying "no".
In the past three years, the Florida Legislature has passed a series of laws that transfer land-use authority from locally elected bodies to Tallahassee, dressed up in the language of housing affordability and economic growth. Three of them deserve your attention.
The Live Local Act (2023, amended yearly since) requires local governments to administratively approve multifamily housing developments on commercial and industrial land as long as 40 percent of the units are designated affordable. That sounds reasonable until you understand what "administrative approval" means in practice: no rezoning required, no public hearing, no planning board vote. Height and density aren't set by your local code either; they're set by whatever exists within a mile of the proposed project. Your county commission never gets a vote.
House Bill 399, signed into law earlier this year, raises the bar for denial so high that local boards now assume legal exposure every time they vote no. Boards must now document in writing not just that a project is incompatible with the surrounding area, but that no possible mitigation could fix it and that no feasible alternative exists. The practical effect is that saying no has become a legal risk. Saying yes has not.
Senate Bill 686, which went into effect on July 1, creates a fast-track path to convert agricultural land into development sites. If a farm is surrounded on 75 percent of its perimeter by commercial, residential or industrial land, a description that fits a lot of Flagler and St. Johns County farmland, the owner can apply for expedited conversion. Once the application is certified, the local government must approve a land-use change consistent with whatever the surrounding area allows. The county gets 180 days to process it. They don't get to say no.
I want to be careful here not to overstate the case. Some of these laws have legitimate goals. Florida does have a housing affordability problem. Farmland surrounded by subdivisions does create awkward planning situations. And some local governments have genuinely used their discretion to block projects that should have been approved.
But the solution to occasional local overreach isn't to eliminate local authority wholesale.
What frustrates those of us who work in this field isn't the growth itself. It's that the people who bear the consequences of that growth, residents in Flagler, in St. Johns, in counties up and down the I-95 corridor, elected commissioners and council members specifically to manage it. And those elected officials are increasingly showing up to meetings where the decisions have already been made in Tallahassee. Yet, residents are largely unaware of these laws and yell at their local elected officials!
And now there is one more piece to consider, which will be huge and is one that hasn't taken effect yet, but may matter more than all of them combined.
This past June, the Florida Legislature passed a constitutional amendment that will appear on the November ballot. If 60% of voters approve it, the homestead exemption (the amount of a home's value shielded from property taxes) will jump from $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027, and then to $250,000 in 2028. The governor has framed it as overdue relief for Florida homeowners squeezed by rising values. He isn't wrong that property tax bills have climbed. But the math of what comes next is sobering.
Economists estimate local governments would see a $5 billion reduction in property tax revenue in the first year alone, which is growing to nearly $8.8 billion in year two, $9.7 billion in year three and approaching $12 billion annually by 2031. To put that in local terms: small and rural communities with a large percentage of homestead properties in their tax base are expected to be among the hardest hit. That's a description of Flagler County. That's a description of most of northeast Florida.
The amendment does include some protections, such as, property tax revenues would be restricted to core functions such as public safety, education and infrastructure. Supporters point to that as evidence essential services will be protected. But the practical implication is that budget cuts would fall on everything else: parks, libraries, public works, special districts and general administration. And to make up the difference, experts say local governments will likely shift costs to water bills, garbage fees, franchise fees, gas taxes, stormwater/drainage fees and other charges that people tend not to notice ... until they do.
Here is the connection that concerns me most, and that I don't hear discussed enough: we are simultaneously forcing local governments to approve more development — faster, with less discretion — while stripping away the revenue those same governments depend on to fund the roads, utilities, and services that new development demands. You cannot build your way into fiscal health if the tax base that development creates is being exempted away at the state level before the ink on the plat is dry!
The three laws I described remove the tools local governments use to manage growth. This amendment removes the resources to pay for it. Together, they form something more than a policy agenda. They form a conclusion, which is, that local government, as Floridians have practiced it, should do less, cost less and decide less.
Whether you agree with that conclusion is a legitimate question for voters. But it should at least be stated plainly, rather than arrived at piece by piece, session by session, in language most residents never see.
Lance Alred is a commissioner for East Flagler Mosquito Control with more than two decades of construction administration and public administration experience.
