SCANNING Sarasota PLANNING

  The Florida Legislature may reconsider next year a very bad law that prohibits approval of any measure by a local government that developers deem “burdensome or restrictive”.   Your help is needed to make it happen.   The law is known by its 2025 Senate bill number, SB 180 .  It was slipped by developer lobbyists into a bill for hurricane damage relief. Legislators were falsely told that it only protects the right to rebuild property damaged by a hurricane.    Instead, the new law , s. 252.422(2), Florida Statutes,  prohibits any county or city for one year after being within 100 miles of a hurricane path, from adopting   “a more restrictive or burdensome amendment to its comprehensive plan or land development regulations” or development approval procedure.   Restore good wetland protections?  Nope.  Rein in urban sprawl?  Nope.  Increase building setbacks or limit heights?  Nope.  Not even a little.  Our ...

For more on this topic, see the talk by Dr. Tiffany Troxler, who spoke at a SCAN meeting in June. Katie Brigham, HeatMap The Biden administration  loves a hub . There are the  hydrogen hubs , the  direct air capture hubs , and now there are the  tech hubs.  Established as a part of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, the $10 billion program has so far seeded 12 such hubs across the country. Four of these are focused on clean energy and sustainability, and one is located in the great state of Florida, which  recently passed legislation  essentially deleting the words “climate change” from state law. The  South Florida ClimateReady Tech Hub  did not, in the end, eliminate climate from its name. But while Governor Ron DeSantis might not approve, the federal government didn’t seem to mind, as the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration awarded the hub $19.5 million to “advance its global leadership in sustainable and resilie...