TALLAHASSEE. Fla — Florida lawmakers are back in Tallahassee for their annual legislative session. Among the key items to be addressed this session are immigration, gun legislation, and pay raises.
So far, more than one thousand bills have been filed for the current session.
Action News Jax’s State and Capitol Reporter Jake Stofan spoke with “Jacksonville’s Morning News” about what people could expect during this legislative session.
“You have Governor Ron DeSantis, who is really prioritizing fiscal responsibility, cutting government, and also focusing on pay raises for teachers and law enforcement,” said Stofan.
Senate President Ben Albritton, who is also a Republican. is advocating for what he calls the “Rural Renaissance,” which includes “three hundred million dollars in total spending, about $197 million of that new money going towards grants for rural farmers, rural counties, improvements to rural roads, and affordable housing initiatives in rural counties.”
Florida lawmakers are also set to explore the elimination of property taxes, a proposal backed by Governor Ron DeSantis.
“Interestingly, it wouldn’t technically be a bill; it will have to be a resolution because it will have to be a constitutional change. It would have a higher threshold for passage through the Legislature and then voters will have to vote on a sixty percent threshold to pass something like that in the 2026 election,” says Stofan.
The debate regarding illegal immigration appears to have been addressed in recent sessions but Stofan says that voters should expect more developments on the issue.
“One thing that I was able to find [is] filed by our local State Representative Kiyan Michael. She’s got a bill that’s mirroring local legislation that we just recently saw filed here in Jacksonville that will prohibit tax dollars from being spent on people who are in the country illegally.”
Stofan also adds that he believes Northeast Florida will have a strong representation in 2025, with people like State Representative Wyman Duggan and other local leaders present.
The Florida Legislative Session starts today and runs through May 2, 2025.
Transcript
It’s 9:11 on the Friday edition of Jacksonville’s morning news. Rich Jones, Kristine Bellino live on location at the Renaissance World Golf Village on the eve of Salute America, remembering Rush Limbaugh. Make sure you grab your tickets before we are fully sold out at WOKV.com. Just a few dozen seats remain. And we’ll see you out here tomorrow. A lot happening in Jacksonville in Northeast Florida today and through the weekend. Home and Patio show is over at the prime. The Gate River run is tomorrow. Florida Man games tomorrow and we heard from one of the organizers, Troy a little bit ago on that one. Looking forward to seeing that at the St. Johns County Fairgrounds, and then next week is the start of the 2025 Florida legislative session and no shortage of storylines developing there. So we wanted to bring in our guy, Jake Stofan, who’s Action News Jax State Capitol reporter to talk through every single one of the 1400 bills that have been filed this session. So Jake, I hope you’re ready for this, because there’s like a lot to talk about. Seriously. Like, I can’t believe the flurry of activity that they do ahead of a session.
Well, you got to think out of those 1400 bills, we’ll probably see about 2 or 300 Max actually passed at the end of the day, and there’s a lot of doubles too. So you see 1400 and you can safely assume it’s maybe more like 800 unique pieces of legislation. Some bills aren’t going to have a House and Senate sponsor, but most will.
Is there an overall theme that you’re seeing emerge out ahead of this session?
Well, it depends on who you talk to ‘cause I think there’s sort of three different themes. You know, on one hand, you have Governor Ron DeSantis who’s really prioritizing fiscal responsibility cutting government kind of like a state level DOGE, if you will like we’re seeing at the national level, but he’s also focusing on kind of the biggest budget items I’ve seen him ask for are pay raises. You know specifically for teachers and law enforcement, 250 million more dollars to go towards teacher pay raises this year, already funded at 1.25 billion last year that’s at teacher pay categorical that can only go towards teacher pay. He’s also asking for about $119 million for law enforcement pay raises, with some veteran officers seeing as large as a 25% year over year pay raise, which is pretty significant, you know, on the other hand, you have Senate President Ben Albritton who’s you know, a rural guy. He’s in the agriculture industry and his big thing this year is the rural renaissance iss what he’s dubbed it. He just released that legislation recently. Could be about $300 million in total spending, about 197 million of that new money going towards grants for, you know, rural farmers, rural counties, improvements to rural roads, affordable housing initiatives in rural counties. And also increased healthcare access is a lot of the times those rural areas they’re kid of Healthcare deserts, if you will. And then you know on the House side you got Speaker Perez, who’s really said his focus is going to be on affordability this year, I would expect to see some initiatives dealing with property insurance coming out of the House. Maybe we’ll see affordable housing or some sort of tax cuts to try and make Florida more affordable for those who have lived here for a long time.
Jake, it seems like every session and even special sessions lawmakers say that they want to bring in or reel in the cost of property insurance and there has been action taken and yet still we continue to see this crisis plaguing our state.
Yeah, it’s one of those issues that I don’t know how long it’s going to be around and continue to be a conversation but since I started covering the state Capitol back in 2017, it was every year there was some big battle over insurance trying to balance the, you know, the fiscal health of insurance companies and also, you know, be cognizant of the rates that Floridians are paying. We’ve obviously seen several special sessions, big legislative pushes over the past just year or two. Depending on who you ask, I mean, rates are still obviously very high in Florida, but we have seen some positive signs that have been touted by the governor and other Florida Rep lawmakers with more insurers entering the market for the first time in quite a while, I mean the story for a long time was insurers going belly up and Floridians losing coverage on a moment’s notice, whereas now we are starting to see hopefully a trend towards more competition in the marketplace. I know several insurers actually filed for rate decreases in the last year, though. When you consider how big some of the rate increases were in the past few years it’s hard to make the argument that it’s fully balanced out. But you know, there are some signs that it’s headed in the right direction, but I think at this point, lawmakers are actually, you know, considering to some degree consumer protections whereas a lot of the previous legislation has been focused on getting the insurance companies, you know in good fiscal health so that they wouldn’t go belly up and leave Floridians without insurance at all. So, I think maybe we might start to see the scales balance a little bit more in, in terms of favor of the of the consumer this session.
Jake Stofan, Action News Jax Capital reporter who’s going to be in Tallahassee at the start of the session, and one of the stories that made news over the last several days been bubbling up is the idea that the governor has been pitching about eliminating the property tax here and I mean how does that even begin to become a bill? And what could that potentially mean to local governments that rely on all of that revenue?
Well, interestingly, it wouldn’t technically be a bill. It would have to be a resolution because it would have to be a constitutional change, so it would have a higher threshold for passage through the legislature and then voters would have to vote, you know. On a six to 10 or 60% threshold to pass something like that in the 2026 election. I actually got to ask the governor directly about this yesterday. This all kind of started with a post on X that he made where he said I would support, you know, repeal property taxes and kind of laid out his physical philosophical disagreement with the way property taxes work. Basically, that it’s kind of a forever tax you never really fully own your home because you’re always paying rent to the government is kind of his perspective on this. But the reality is local governments take in $55 billion in property tax revenue collectively on an annual basis throughout Florida, and the only thing that even comes close is sales tax, which Florida Tax watch, if I’m remembering my numbers correctly, I think it was about somewhere between 30 and 40 billion. So, if you were to completely eliminate $55 billion out of the budgets of local governments throughout the state, that money, at least to a large degree, would still have to come from somewhere, and it seems like the most plausible place where it’s coming from would be increasing sales tax. If you wanted to fully make up that 55 billion, you’d have to more than double sales tax to make it up. So, unless you want to pay $0.12 or $0.14 on every dollar you spend at the grocery store, there’s maybe an argument to be made to keep property taxes around to some level, so when I asked the governor about this yesterday, he kind of softened his, you know, comments on it. He opened the door to some other possibilities. Legislation we’ve actually already seen filed ahead of the session, things like freezing property tax increases for seniors 65 and older. There may be some additional requirements in that, but that was kind of the gist of the bill, so that if somebody’s owned their house for a really, really long time, that they’re not continuing to pay more and more once they hit an age where maybe they’re at a fixed income. Also things like just increasing the homestead exemption right now, homeowners get two $25,000 homestead exemptions which means $50,000 worth of your house is not taxed, essentially. There’s a proposal out there right now to raise at least one of those to $75,000, so there’d be some immediate savings there. Obviously, both those proposals would still cost local governments some money in property tax revenue. But the governor, again with the DOGE not only at the state level, but also pushing for it at the local level, thinks that whatever revenue is lost by lowering property taxes can be made-up by making local and state governments more efficient.
We’ve already seen some action with the immigration at the state level. Are there and how many or how significant is the push for legislation in the session to continue to throw resources, money and more at the federal immigration and therefore the state immigration fight overall?
Well, obviously there’s already a lot of money expended in the special session. I think it was $250 million in grants to help supplement local law enforcement efforts in terms of enforcing immigration. I think that’s probably the big bill that we’ll see this year on immigration. I don’t expect anything necessarily super big or drastic to come out of regular session, but I’ll highlight one thing that I was able to find filed by our local state representative, Kiyan Michael. She’s got a bill that’s mirroring local legislation that we just recently saw filed here in Jacksonville that would prohibit tax dollars from being spent on people who are in the country illegally. So, that would mean things like Non profits that receive state funding could lose it if they don’t vet who their doling money out to resources, things like that. You know that’s maybe something where we could see the state go a little bit further on. But I haven’t seen anything super, super, you know, Earth shattering on immigration beyond what we saw in the in the special session.
Maybe on this Jake, as I consider some of the names from Northeast Florida in both the house and the Senate. What sort of an imprint will the Jacksonville and Northeast Florida metro area make overall? On this upcoming legislative session, you think?
Well, you know, we do have a lot of legislators this time around who are in pretty prominent positions in the legislature. We have state Representative Wyman Duggan, who is the speaker Pro Tem. So kind of the number two in line to the House Speaker. We also have some local representatives who are chairing committees. State Representative Sam Garrison. Sorry for struggling on his aim there, Sam Garrison.
That’s a lot of names. Yeah.
He’s, you know, next in line to be the house speaker. So come 2026, you know, he’s gonna be the top dog in one of the three or two legislative branches of government, you know, kind of second or third in line to the to the governor.
Hmm.
So, you know, I think Northeast Florida will be well represented this year. Obviously, there’s some dynamics with having a Mayor here in Jacksonville that has a D next to her name instead of an R. That’s always kind of something that could potentially put the city at risk of having a more difficult time of getting state funding. But there’s always a budget veto pen and Governor DeSantis is not afraid to use it.
Yeah, it’s true. Indeed, he’s proven that over the course of last. Oh, by the way, before we let you go, you did also have a chance to ask Governor DeSantis about his wife and maybe a potential run for governor now that Byron Donalds is in and has the backing of President Trump. What did he say?
Well, the previous night someone had asked him something similar and he kind of walked around the question, didn’t really answer it directly, so I thought it’d be interesting to try to elicit more of a direct response and.
Yeah.
He pretty much said there’s a lot of possibilities. There’s a lot of things that are possible. When I asked whether his wife, Casey DeSantis, is still considering a run, given that Congressman Byron Donalds obviously has officially entered the race with President Donald Trump’s endorsement, which you know for DeSantis, I mean that was that was the key to him winning the Republican primary back in in 2018. You know, it’s an uphill battle and we saw when DeSantis went head to head with President Trump in the Republican presidential primary, so, you know, I guess he thinks that his wife may stand a decent shot against a Trump nominee. I mean, I think Donalds is going to have an interesting dynamic here. Obviously The DeSantis’ are quite popular among Florida Republicans. I mean the guy won by.
She’s got the name. I mean that UNF poll that was just out this week showed it.
Yeah. Well, and, you know, he won the state by 20 points in 2022 so, and we really haven’t heard. Donalds criticized DeSantis necessarily when he’s been asked about all this. Whereas we’ve heard DeSantis kind of take some shots at Donalds suggesting that, you know, he’s a congressman and Congress gets nothing done or whatever you know. So, I think Donalds has a fine line to walk where he’s going to have to find a way to convince DeSantis Republicans in Florida that a vote for Donalds is not necessarily a vote against DeSantis, but maybe a vote just for something different.
Jake Stofan, Action News Jax going to be in the at the Capitol next week for the start of the legislative session, yeah.
Oh I wish I’m working the next 13 out of 14 days and the one day I have off is my…
Is the start of session.
It’s funny how things like that workout.
It is, but you’ll, I know you’re going to be following every step of the way.
You love it. He loves it.
Yeah, and. We’ll be checking in with you.
There’s 60 days, you know, and the first day is all the pomp and circumstance stuff.
There’s a long ways to go. Yeah, you don’t need to see all the flowers and all that stuff. Well, we’ll get into the real meaty stuff.
I’ll be watching from home.
Alright, we’ll check in with you weekly during the session. Sound good? All right.
I would love to.
Thank you, Jake Stofan, Action News Jax Capital reporter with us this morning on the Friday edition of Jacksonville’s Morning News Live on location at the Renaissance World Golf Village. Only a handful of tickets remain to tomorrow night’s salute America remembering Rush, head to wokv.com get yours now. WOKV News time 925.
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