The regular session of the 2025 Florida Legislation has expired with the House and Senate voting to extend the session until at least June 6, 2025. This week the House convened and passed a resolution to continue until June 30th, but the Senate did not convene and therefore has not concurred. There is much tension between the two chambers over proposals for tax relief and neither side appears to be willing to budge from their stated positions. Of course their only obligation is to pass a budget and with the distance between the two not closing, there is no budget in sight in the near term.
What does this mean for bills that were filed and deliberated over the 60-day session? Of the 68 bills that we monitored in our Legislative Tracking folder, 54 have been labeled as Indefinitely Postponed and Withdrawn from Consideration. Of the 14 remaining, most are laid on the table with reference to a companion, or similar bill, or they are in messages with only two bills enrolled.
It is suspected that the time to debate policy issues is over, but with a few lingering leadership priority bills nothing is finished until the hankie drops. (Sine die).
We will continue to monitor activities in Tallahassee and we must give a big shout-out to our lobbyist, Eric Prutsman who put alot of extra effort in this year visiting with legislative members and lobbyists representing some of our industry friends regarding bad amendments on certain bills. With Eric's leadership and the presence of our West Central Director Jim Millican in Tallahassee all session we were well represented in all committee stops where we had issues and bad amendments were either amended or removed.
We would also like to recognize all of our fire service partners as we all communicated well on bills that should not (and were not) filed such as legislation to remove engineers from fire alarm plan review processes. We also defeated a proposal that would have allowed single-exit stairs in multi-story buildings before it was even filed. Removing certain actions and boards/committees under DBPR and private plan review legislation was also a challenge that we will certainly see again. These are just a couple of examples of some of the real concerns that crossed our plates this year. The unified approach from all of our partners, including but not limited to FFCA, FPF, the Division of State Fire Marshal and Legislative Affairs Office in the Department of Financial Services all communicating a common message was strong. This assisted our related industry partners in assuring we were all together in our messaging.
We look forward to seeing what is eventually sent to the Governor for signature and we brace for what will surely be another battle in just a few short months when committee weeks begin ahead of an early session next year.
Please visit our tracking page/action center as all bills have been updated to reflect the current status.