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Bill of the Week: Land Use and Development Regulations
By the SCCF Environmental Policy Team
Each week of Florida’s 2025 Legislative Session, SCCF is providing a deeper dive into what an introduced bill aims to do and why we think it is important. Our bill this week is HB 1209 / SB 1118: Land Use and Development Regulations.
This bill seeks to clear the way for Florida’s rural lands to become housing developments, even over the objections of local governments. It is one of a long line of preemption efforts from Tallahassee to prevent local leaders from making their own land management decisions.
HB 1209 / SB 1118 puts a priority on sprawl, allowing for and requiring the development of agriculture lands despite any municipal or county land use planning. If enacted, this bill would make it more difficult to protect our local communities and our environment, and make longterm infrastructure planning almost impossible at a time when Florida needs to be actively thinking about what the future will look like.
The bill allows owners of agriculture land to convert it to residential and commercial development, even if doing so would run counter to existing zoning or planning laws. Developers would be empowered to request massive developments in “agricultural enclaves” and, once requested, local governments would be required to grant them. Regardless of rural character, comprehensive land use regulations, environmental concerns, or historic development patterns, if a parcel of land is near an urban service district, it will be treated as though it is included and be granted the corresponding increase to intensity and density.
Additionally, the bill makes citizen participation in the process more difficult by eliminating public hearings for some development proposals. This serves to weaken citizen’s ability to engage with their government to protect their own communities, while making large developments easier to build in areas that are not appropriate for an increased density and intensity of use.
This bill is in line with a pattern we are all too familiar with in Florida. Development is prioritized at the cost of Floridians, the environment, and the economies that rely on healthy wildlife and clean water. It’s no secret that Florida is growing quickly, and our leaders are working to figure out how to keep up with the demands that come with hundreds or thousands of new residents moving here every day. However, if we want to have a Florida to live in and enjoy in the future, it will take carefully thinking about the needs of our state and robust planning of housing, transportation, and other infrastructure to ensure that we can meet those needs without overtaxing the already overutilized resources.
Here in South Florida, we all experience the impacts of building homes without planning robust transportation infrastructure. By allowing agriculture land to quickly become housing developments, this bill would likely add to traffic woes as it puts new people on already full roads. Additionally, it will be an expensive fix to try to add more connections after the fact, rather than having a robust growth plan prior to development. By rushing to hand agriculture land to developers, this bill takes away the necessary time to consider the ramifications of a project. Similar concerns about water quality, wildlife impacts, water availability, noise and light pollution, ecosystem impacts, and other considerations that local governments are best positioned to evaluate will be overlooked, and opportunities for stakeholders to voice their concerns will be largely removed.
By replacing open space with impervious surfaces, these types of developments tend to increase water pollution, while also using massive amount of water for home use and irrigation. Wildlife is impacted by losing large amounts of habitat. And rural character, that so many people seek in our small communities in Florida, will be eroded.
Development is a necessary part of living in Florida, but the checks that remain on wholesale destruction of our remaining open lands are necessary to ensure that we don’t rush to build at the cost of our future generations.
SCCF joins the hundreds of Florida citizens that have contacted their legislators to strongly oppose this pair of bills. Watch for an upcoming Action Alert on HB 1209 / SB 1118 as they are amended and moved through the committee process in the coming weeks.