Dear Friend,
Hard as it is to believe, we’re already almost halfway through the 2025 Legislative Session.
We just finished another busy week, which was the fourth week of the nine-week (60-day) session. It included our first full floor session in the House, where we passed a good bill that would repeal Florida’s infamous “Free Kill” law for negligent doctors – but also a bad bill that would unravel one of the most important gun-safety reforms.
There’s good news to report: A bill I’m sponsoring to protect kids with disabilities in public schools began to move forward, as did a bill to support our local small breweries. But a lot of bad bills are racing through Tallahassee right now, too, including attacks on workers’ rights, reproductive freedom, and the LGBTQ+ community.
You’ll find updates on all those issues and many more in our Week Four Session Update below.
The coming week is going to be a big one, too. There’ll be a showdown on the House floor over a dangerous bill that is designed to stop any future citizen-led constitutional amendments – like the amendments that brought us $15 minimum wage, term limits, and universal pre-kindergarten.
So if you aren’t already, please make sure to connect with us on all our social-media channels – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube – where we post action alerts, daily news updates, and more.
We can still shape the agenda in the Florida Legislature, if we all pull together.
Onward,
House passes bills to repeal ‘Free Kill’ law and undo post-Parkland gun-safety reform
We held our first regular floor session in the House last week, which is when the entire, 120-member chamber debates and takes final votes on bills that have made it through the committee process.
One of the bills we passed last week was House Bill 6017, which would repeal Florida’s “Free Kill” law.
This is a law that unfairly prevents some Floridians from holding irresponsible healthcare providers accountable when a parent or child is killed as a result of medical malpractice. Specifically, the law blocks parents from recovering monetary damages if the victim of the healthcare provider’s negligence is an adult child. It also stops adult children from recovering damages when the victim was their parent.
I voted for this bill. You can watch my debate on HB 6017 here.
Unfortunately, we also passed House Bill 759, which would lower the minimum age to buy a gun in Florida from 21 to 18. This is a dangerous bill that undoes one of the most important – and bipartisan – gun-safety reforms that former Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature enacted in 2018, after the horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
Fortunately, the Senate version of this bill hasn’t moved at all so far this session.
I voted against this bill. You can watch my debate on HB 759 here.
‘Campus carry’ gun bill stalls in the Senate
While the Florida House passed one dangerous gun bill, the Florida Senate stopped another.
That one is Senate Bill 814, and it’s sponsored by Sen. Randy Fine (R-Brevard County). It would allow people to bring guns on to school and college campuses.
But in one of Randy Fine’s final bill hearings before he leaves the Legislature, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee rejected the bill on a bipartisan, 4-3 vote against. Special thanks to my work husband – Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D-Orlando) – for casting one of the deciding votes that stopped this terrible bill in its tracks.
Another ugly bill also ran into trouble in the Senate last week: Senate Bill 1816, which is designed to stop local communities from taking down monuments honoring Confederate Army leaders and other supporters of slavery.
Sponsored by Sen. Stan McClain (R-Ocala), the Confederate monuments bill was in the middle of being heard by the Senate Governmental Accountability & Oversight Committee last week when the committee abruptly adjourned without taking a vote. The move leaves the legislation in limbo, though it could still be resurrected.
Student elopement bill clears first committee
I’m so pleased to report that a bill I filed this session to ensure the safety of special-needs kids in public schools passed its first committee last week.
House Bill 345 – a bipartisan bill I’m proud to sponsor alongside Rep. Chase Tramont (R-Port Orange) – would ensure that all school districts establish “School Staff Assistance for Emergencies” (SAFE) Teams and emergency elopement plans to respond to students who wander off a school campus.
Some students with developments have a tendency to wander off – or “elope” – which can lead them into dangerous situations, if, for instance, they end up near a busy road or a retention pond. This legislation will ensure schools have emergency action plans that can be instantly implemented if such a student elopes during the school day.
The bill passed the Student Academic Success Subcommittee by a unanimous vote. This policy is not just proactive – it is lifesaving, and we’re proud to sponsor it in partnership with organizations like the Autism Society of Greater Orlando.
Fight over citizen-led constitutional amendments heads to the House floor
One of the worst bills of this year’s session is about to head to the House floor. House Bill 1205 is basically meant to be a death knell for all future citizen-led constitutional amendments.
It’s being forced through the Florida Legislature by Republican politicians in Tallahassee who hate the fact that Florida voters have been able to go around Tallahassee and use the petition process to pass amendments raising the minimum wage, imposing term limits on politicians, and ensuring funding for environmental protection. It’s also intended to prevent another vote on abortion rights in Florida – after Amendment 4 got more than 57 percent support last year, just short of the 60 percent supermajority needed to pass.
HB 1205 places layers of new red tape and legal barriers in front of people who want to collect petitions in support of a proposed amendment. And then it imposes massive financial penalties on anyone who trips over any of these intentional obstacles.
For example, the bill reduces the amount of time someone has to turn in a signed petition by two-thirds (from 30 days to 10 days). But it also raises the maximum fine for turning a petition in late by 50 times (from $50 to $2,500).
HB 1205 came through the State Affairs Committee last week, where Republican lawmakers who oppose citizen-led constitutional amendments made it even worse. They added an amendment that would remove Florida’s top economist as a voting member from the economic panel that studies the financial impact of proposed amendments.
Why would they do that? Because they want to punish Florida’s top economist – Amy Baker – for refusing to help Gov. Ron DeSantis put a misleading and inaccurate financial impact statement onto the ballot for Amendment 4 last year.
I serve on the State Affairs Committee and I obviously voted against this bill. You can watch my debate against it here.
There’ll be an even bigger battle this week, because HB 1205 is scheduled to be heard in the full Florida House on Thursday afternoon.
We’ll be ready with amendments.
A bill to help our small breweries
One reason I’m so committed to calling out the influence of big corporations in Tallahassee is because so much of what the Big Business lobby does is designed to rig the rules so that small businesses cannot compete against them.
So I was thrilled to support a bill last week that rolls back some of those anti-competitive rules for one group of small businesses – our local microbreweries and craft beer brewers.
The legislation is House Bill 499, and it would allow beer makers who produce fewer than 31,000 gallons per year to sell their beer directly to stores. That would enable them to go around monopolistic middleman distributors who too often favor the giant beer companies and help craft brewers get their products in front of more Floridians – and at lower prices.
HB 499 passed the House Industries & Professional Activities, which is one of the committees I serve on. Click here to watch my debate for the bill.
A giant tax cut – and a chance to do some real reform
The House and Senate unveiled their proposed budgets last week, and there’s a big gap between them – about $4.4 billion.
One reason is because House Speaker Danny Perez (R-Miami) has proposed cutting the statewide sales tax tax from 6 percent to 5.25 percent – which would save Floridians, but cost the state, roughly $5 billion.
I’m actually really intrigued by this idea. Florida has the most regressive tax structure in the entire country, which means that working- and middle-class folks pay a far higher share of their income toward state taxes than wealthy people do. And sales tax is a particularly regressive tax, so cutting it could help make our tax structure a little fairer.
But that’s only if we don’t pay for this tax cut by slashing $5 billion from important programs and services that so many Floridians rely upon. We already chronically underfund everything from pre-kindergarten to services for the disabled, and we don’t want to make those problems even worse.
But this also could be an opportunity to do some genuine tax reform. For example, if we both cut the sales tax and pass a policy known as “combined reporting” – which would close corporate tax loopholes and make sure the biggest corporations are actually paying what they owe in state taxes – that would be really meaningful for most Floridians.
So stay tuned on this front.
Property tax cuts being debated
We’re also seeing some a bunch of property tax proposals this session, including some giant ones that would gut funding for police and fire protection, trash collection, and other critical services provided by local governments.
One example is House Joint Resolution 1257, which would create a new property tax exemption for owners of second and third homes that are rented out to others. The bill came through the House Ways & Means Committee last week.
While I understand the goal here – we’re all looking for ways to make affordable housing more affordable – this is a really poorly thought out idea. It could create an easily exploitable loophole that would lead to tax breaks for everyone from owners of multimillion-dollar vacation homes to private equity firms that are buying up entire neighborhoods.
I obviously voted against it.
That said, I do think we should be looking for ways to provide targeted property tax relief for working and middle class homeowners. But we need to be careful that we’re helping people who actually need it – and that we’re not crippling community services in the process.
Another attack on reproductive freedom
We continue to see more attacks on reproductive freedom.
The latest is Senate Bill 1288, which would prevent teenagers from accessing contraceptives or testing for sexually transmitted infections with a parent’s permission. The legislation would also allow a parent to review a teenager’s answers to confidential questionnaires when they visit a healthcare provider.
The bill passed the Senate Education PreK-12 Committee – although just barely. The committee vote was 5-4.
Allowing schools to keep starting before 8 am
The Florida Senate passed a bill that will allow public schools to continue beginning classes before 8 am.
You might remember that, in 2023, we passed a law forbidding public and charter middle schools from beginning their instructional school days before 8 am – and high schools from starting before 8:30 am. That later start-time rules are supposed to go into effect by the start of the 2026-27 school year.
But Senate Bill 296, which passed the Senate last week by a 38-0 vote, will allow school districts to continue using earlier start times as long as they produce a report detailing the start times for each school in their district, the strategies they’ve considered to implement later start times, and the impact and potential unintended consequences of those strategies.
A similar bill is moving in the House: House Bill 261, which passed the Education Administration Subcommittee last week.
Rolling back child labor laws, weakening the minimum wage, and busting labor unions
One of the worst ideas from last year’s session – eliminating child-labor laws – is back again this year.
The Senate Commerce and Tourism Committee last week passed Senate Bill 918, which would undo rules around the number of hours children as young as 14 can be made to work by an employer – even during the school year. The bill would literally allow 7-Eleven to put a high school sophomore on an overnight shift the night before an exam.
The House version of this bill – House Bill 1225 – is going to be heard in committee this week, too.
Meanwhile, the bills to weaken our state minimum wage are moving very quickly.
House Bill 541 and Senate Bill 676 – which allow businesses to pay some workers less than minimum wage – both passed their second committees last week.
These bills are especially dangerous because they are clearly unconstitutional under Florida’s voter-approved minimum wage amendment. And that means they could be a ploy to tee up a court challenge that could be used to rip open a legal loophole of some kind.
And these still aren’t the only anti-worker bills moving this session. For example, the House Government Operations Subcommittee passed House Bill 1387, which would make it even more difficult for most public-sector workers to form and maintain labor unions and collectively bargain for better pay and benefits.
Protecting transphobes while banning Pride flags
A couple of really ugly anti-LGBTQ+ bills moved forward last week.
The Senate Community Affairs Committee passed Senate Bill 440, which is basically an attempt to prevent trans Floridians from being able to use their preferred pronouns at work. Among other things, the bill protects toxic workplaces by preventing businesses from disciplining workers who intentionally misgender their own colleagues.
The same committee also passed Senate Bill 100, the flag-banning bill we saw last year, too. The bill is an attempt to ban the display of Pride flags in government buildings. The bill would also ban flags supporting groups like Black Lives Matter.
Round up: Gold coins, fluoride and electric cars
As always, we’ll end this week’s recap with a roundup of few other bills that moved forward last week:
- Senate Bill 134 and House Bill 6021, which would create a complete sales-tax exemption for the sale of gold coins
- House Bill 651 and Senate Bill 700, which would ban communities from adding fluoride to their drinking water and also create anti-competitive labeling regulations for plant-based milk, meat and eggs
- House Bill 667 and Senate Bill 752, which would make it easier for people to sue news organizations for defamation
- Senate Bill 832, which would make it harder for people to sue the Mosaic Co. over public health impacts from radioactive contamination in formerly mined land
- Senate Bill 872, which could allow towing companies to charge as much as three times more to tow an electric vehicle