The Legislation That Locked the Door

Florida did not abolish home rule in 2025 and 2026. It left the name in place and removed the contents. Two laws, eleven months apart, took the decisions that govern Palm Coast’s growth two hundred and fifty miles north.

Article VIII, Section 2(b) of the Florida Constitution grants municipalities the authority to conduct municipal government and to exercise any power for municipal purposes “except as otherwise provided by law”; the Legislature implemented that grant in the Municipal Home Rule Powers Act, Section 166.021, Florida Statutes. The qualifying clause has always carried the weight. Home rule in Florida is therefore a grant the Legislature may narrow, and the principle beneath it — that the government nearest a problem is ordinarily the government best situated to address it — holds only so long as Tallahassee declines to legislate the matter for itself. Every impact fee schedule Palm Coast has adopted, every comprehensive plan amendment it has transmitted, and every zoning decision it has rendered rests on that grant.

In the span of eleven months, the Legislature exercised the qualifying clause twice. Both exercises concerned land-development regulation. Both narrowed the discretion of the body the Constitution presumes competent. Neither repealed home rule; each conditioned it.

What SB 180 Did

Senate Bill 180, signed June 26, 2025, and codified as Chapter 2025-190, Laws of Florida, was presented as hurricane relief. It passed both chambers with near-unanimous support. Its land-use provisions, however, reached every one of Florida’s sixty-seven counties, because the federal disaster declarations for Hurricanes Debby, Helene, and Milton named all sixty-seven.

Section 28 of the act prohibits any county or municipality so situated from adopting a comprehensive plan amendment, land development regulation, or review procedure that is “more restrictive or burdensome” than the standards in effect before the storms. The prohibition applies retroactively to August 1, 2024, continues through October 1, 2027, and renews for an additional year within one hundred miles of each future storm. The statute supplies the enforcement: residents and business owners may sue, and prevailing plaintiffs may recover attorney fees. A measure described as a tool for rebuilding is, in its operative sections, a constraint on regulating — and a private cause of action placed in the hands of the parties the regulation would govern.

More than two dozen local governments sued the state, and 1000 Friends of Florida filed its own constitutional challenge in Leon County Circuit Court on October 7, 2025. The Palm Coast City Council, on October 28, 2025, declined to join the opposition, on the expectation that the 2026 session would amend the law. The remedy on which that expectation rested, Senate Bill 840, passed the Senate unanimously and then died in a House subcommittee on March 13, 2026, without a hearing. The suits have fared poorly: four of five counts in the primary complaint were dismissed in late February 2026, and 1000 Friends was ruled to lack standing. The law remains in effect.

What HB 399 Added

House Bill 399, signed March 27, 2026, and codified as Chapter 2026-7, Laws of Florida, addressed what SB 180 had not. Where SB 180 froze the substance of local regulation, HB 399 reached the machinery — the fees, the findings, and the discretion exercised in routine review. It passed the House by a vote of seventy-three to twenty-seven, a margin notably narrower than its predecessor’s.

Effective January 1, 2027, the act requires that application fees for development permits and development orders relate reasonably to the direct and indirect costs of reviewing and processing them, and it forbids calculating those fees as a percentage of construction cost, site value, or project valuation. It directs that comprehensive plans and land development regulations specify objective factors for assessing compatibility, and it constrains the grounds on which a local government may deny an application as incompatible. It further requires administrative — rather than discretionary — approval of certain minor variances sought by large destination resorts. Each provision withdraws a judgment that the elected body, or the staff answering to it, had previously made.

The Combined Effect on Palm Coast

The two statutes operate on Palm Coast in tandem, and the city’s particular circumstances make the operation visible. SB 180 forecloses tightening the development regulations that a documented infrastructure deficit might otherwise warrant. HB 399 forecloses pricing development review by the city’s own measure of cost. The municipal toolbox is not empty; the two instruments most responsive to the present problem have been removed from it.

That problem is not abstract. The November 2023 Stantec rate study found the city’s water capacity fee set 44 percent below full cost and its wastewater fee 52 percent below — the shortfall behind a 36 percent rate increase, a $292 million bond, and a July 2024 consent decree from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (documented here). In June 2025 the council invoked the extraordinary-circumstances exception and adopted the largest impact fee increases in the city’s history. In October 2025 the Flagler Home Builders Association sued to challenge those increases, citing SB 180 among its grounds.

The next development wave is already at the line. The Master Planned Development agreement for the Westward Expansion would, by a single recital, set aside two development orders carrying approximately $97.5 million in developer road commitments, even as the state appropriated approximately $126 million for the road the developer had committed to build. The agreement arrives at a water and wastewater system the city’s own staff has stated, on the record, cannot serve what is already approved. The statutory means of managing that arrival have, in the interval, been narrowed by Tallahassee.

The constraint is not solely external. On the November 2026 ballot, Palm Coast voters will consider a charter amendment raising the threshold above which unfunded multiyear contracts require a referendum and extending the permissible term of such contracts — a measure that, if adopted, would enlarge the council’s latitude to obligate future revenue without a direct vote of the electorate.

What Home Rule Looks Like After These Two Bills

Home rule, as a phrase, remains in the Constitution. A Florida municipality may still convene, deliberate, and vote. What it may not freely do, after June 2025 and March 2026, is tighten a development regulation or price the review of a development application — the two functions tied most directly to who pays for growth and who absorbs its cost.

The authority to set Palm Coast’s growth trajectory now sits substantially in Tallahassee, where the residents of Palm Coast cast no votes and the development industry maintains a permanent presence. The door was not removed. It was locked, and the key was carried north.

— Charles G. Pennyfeather IV  ·  PalmCoastStorylines.com