Florida legislators want to cut building permit times, despite safety risk

The other day I was driving north on U.S. 19, which is the most Florida of Florida roads. I say that because it passes by a dinosaur-shaped gas station, the park that employs the Weeki Wachee mermaids, a ginormous manatee statue at Homosassa Springs, a road named for an Elvis movie filmed near there, and the Suwannee River.

Just north of the river, in Dixie County, is a little place where I often stop to buy boiled peanuts, which are the perfect road food. The name of the place is Maria’s Dixie Nuthouse, and as I passed it I wondered — not for the first time — if that wouldn’t be a better name for our state capital.

Florida lawmakers convened Tuesday in their version of Maria’s to start their annual 60-day legislative session. As usual, their attention seems more focused on nutty issues that will be worth less than a bag of soggy goobers for most of Florida’s residents.

This year they want to ban the display of Pride flags in government buildings! They intend to dictate to private employers what pronouns their employees can use! And they are determined to stop local officials from removing Confederate monuments!

Meanwhile, Gov. Ron “Why Are They Playing ‘Stage Fright’ Before My Iowa Rally?” DeSantis has done nothing to stop the cray-cray. On Tuesday he flew in, delivered his “just keep doing whatever it was you were doing before” speech and then hopped a plane back to Iowa.

Can you see why I sometimes refer to the Capitol building as “Ron’s Dixie Nuthouse”?

But amid the nutty bills that would provide tax cuts for people who buy private jets and require teaching schoolkids that the Democratic Party supported slavery in the 1800s there are a few that are serious threats to the life we enjoy here in Florida.

One of those is House Bill 267, which I heard about from the smart growth folks at 1000 Friends of Florida. Its goal: Allow builders and developers to race past local regulations, no matter what the consequences.

“This bill shortens the time period for local governments to review building permits,” the sponsor, Rep. Tiffany Esposito, R-Hurryhurryhurry!, told a House committee last month.

In other words, get those bureaucrats out of the way and let the developers do what they want — and do it faster than anyone with a lick of sense would ever allow.

Not that anyone has ever accused our Legislature of having a lick of sense.

‘Our’ developers

A lot of Florida lawmakers hate local government. I don’t mean they merely dislike it, the way you may dislike pineapple as a pizza topping.

I mean they hate it the way we all hate spam calls, the way we hate seeing roaches crawling on our pillow, the way Madeline Kahn’s character in the movie “Clue” hated the woman she killed: “Flames! Flames on the side of my face!”

Over and over, they’ve done their best to override or shut down local government decisions. This week they took it to a new level when one state representative, Wyman Duggan, suggested eliminating some Florida cities and counties.

To my surprise, none of his colleagues thought to say, “Why, man?”

I should mention, by the way, that Duggan is a Jacksonville attorney for developers who tends to represent their interests more than his actual constituents.

And developers REALLY hate local government — specifically, their rules and regulations.

Builders and developers are constantly chafing at how long it takes them to acquire the permits they need. They don’t like waiting for local and state government approvals, and so Esposito’s bill is designed to alleviate that concern.

“The streamlined permitting processes in the bill may expedite development across the state,” a legislative staff analysis of Esposito’s bill says, as if that’s a good thing.

But meeting these accelerated deadlines “would be a challenge for local government,” Kim Dinkins of 1000 Friends told me.

So, who is Esposito and why is she doing this? She is not, as far as I can tell, related to ’80s teen pop sensation Tiffany.

Instead, Esposito heads a version of the Chamber of Commerce called Southwest Florida Inc. You might think that means she’s merely a cheerleader for business, but her campaign website says she “has spent her professional career fighting to keep the heavy hand of government out of the way of job creators.”

State records show she received $1,000 campaign contributions — the maximum amount possible — from the Florida Home Builders Political Action Committee and such builders and developers as Syd Kitson, Craig Klingensmith, Danny Aguirre, Sinclair Custom Homes, and the Lee Building Industry Association. That’s not to mention $2,000 from a pair of PACs run by Spring Hill builder Blaise Ingoglia, who’s also a state senator (and the sponsor of that bill about which party supported slavery in the 1800s).

Perhaps that’s why Esposito refers to “our developers” the way a frat house mom would refer to her “boys.”

Asked to explain her bill to the House Regulatory Reform Committee last month, Esposito said, “Time is money, so the longer our developers and our builders have to wait for permits to come in, the more expensive the end product is for consumers.”

And if that rush to save “our developers” some money means what’s built is risky for those consumers?

Well, that’s just too bad.

A buzzcut for Keanu

Let’s call Esposito’s bill what it really is: The Rush It Through No Matter What Law.

It doesn’t trim the amount of time local government has to review builders’ plans to make sure they comply with the rules. It provides a radical cut, not unlike giving shaggy-haired Keanu Reeves a Marine Corps high-and-tight buzz.

Right now, state law says cities and counties can take 30 days to review building permits for single family homes and up to 120 days for larger projects such as condominiums.

They have 45 days to determine if the application is complete. And if it’s not, they can ask the developer for additional information three times, each time stopping the clock on the review.

Esposito’s bill would reset every deadline. All building permits — condos included — would have to be issued by that same 30-day limit. If the builder or developer hires their own permit reviewer, then the city or county would have even less time — a mere 15 days.

Under the bill, the amount of time to determine if the application is complete would be cut to only 10 days. And the cities and counties could ask for more information only two times, not three.

If they fail to meet those accelerated deadlines, then the permit is approved automatically.

There are several similar bills with the same aim, including a Senate version sponsored by Ingoglia, the homebuilder and slavery expert. But Esposito’s bill is the only one so far that has passed its first committee vote.

All the members of Esposito’s Republican Party voted for it, and everyone who’s not in her party voted against it. The committee itself then became the bill’s sponsor, which provides added clout.

Under questioning by the opponents, Esposito told the committee that she alone was responsible for the content of her bill and not some lobbyist. But you may not be surprised to learn that it has the backing of the Florida Home Builders Association and Lennar Homes.

Meanwhile, the list of those opposed includes, among other groups, the Florida League of Cities.

In a December letter to Esposito, the league’s senior legislative advocate, Jeff Branch, asked her to alter her bill “to ensure that municipal staff is able to review residential building permits without compromising the safety of our residents.”

Ah yes, “safety.” That’s the word I was waiting to hear.

Because Esposito, Ingoglia, and our other nutty lawmakers apparently don’t care about that. But they should.

A piece of junk

I talked to several people about this bill who didn’t want me to use their names. But here’s a name that they mentioned that I am allowed to tell you. Lean in close so I can whisper it in your ear.

Surfside.

If you’re one of those 900 new residents who moved to Florida yesterday, you may not recognize that one. You may wonder: Does it have something to do with surfing? Cue the Beach Boys, man! Cowabunga!

But if you’ve been here for at least three years, you know it means something else, something that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on June 24, 2021, in the town of Surfside, half of the 41-year-old Champlain Towers South, a 12-story oceanfront condo, abruptly collapsed. Ninety-eight people died.

“It began with a loud boom, boom. Then, a thunderous throoom, punctuated by the crash of concrete,” the Miami Herald wrote in its Pulitzer-winning coverage of the disaster.

Unlike the collapsed condo in John D. MacDonald’s classic Florida novel “Condominium,” it didn’t take a Category 5 hurricane to knock down the Champlain Towers South. One headline from the Herald’s coverage spells out what went wrong: “Surfside tower was flawed from day one. Designs violated the code, likely worsened collapse.”

“This is a piece of junk, this building,” said one of the many engineering and contracting experts the Herald consulted.

Investigators from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, brought in to find the cause, reported something similar last year. They examined the original building codes from when it was built in 1980. They found that the design failed to meet the codes and standards of the day.

Surfside officials have been unable to find any records that the building was ever inspected back then by anyone employed by the town. Perhaps their inspectors were just too busy and ran out of time. (In MacDonald’s novel, some illegal practices were involved in approving the shoddy building construction, but that just happens in fiction, right?)

The fact that we don’t have similar building collapses all the time in Florida is because we have stringent building codes. We also have competent inspectors who take the time to check whether buildings comply with those codes.

Changing that system just to save developers some money seems reckless at best and heartless at worst.

This is Esposito’s second year pushing this silly bill. Fortunately, it failed last year. If it makes it through this year, or one of the others with similar hurry-up language passes, we are all in danger of injury or death from the next Surfside.

Here’s my suggestion: Everyone who’s opposed to these bills tell Esposito and her colleagues that you’ll support it, but only if the sponsor adds one new provision: Every time a new condo is built in Florida, the sponsors of this bill have to spend a minimum of 24 hours on the topmost floor.

Then we’ll find out if they really intend to go through with this weakening of standards. My bet, though, is that they won’t. I bet they’ll crack like a peanut from Maria’s.

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