When one hears the word “bill,” most people will think of the electric or telephone payment we all make every month. But, in the legislative world, we think of a bill as an idea for a proposed law sponsored in Tallahassee.
Although state senators can sponsor unlimited bills per year, state representatives in Florida are allotted sponsorship of only six “regular bill” slots per legislative session. There are a few other categories of bills, however, other than regular bills. One of those is category in which we are allowed to sponsor as many as bills we would like — as long as they delete a current section of the Florida Statutes. We call these “repealer bills.”
Throughout the history of our great state, we have been effective at passing a lot of bills into law, but we have not often taken as good of a look at our statutes to see what laws we have created in our past that may be superfluous, outdated or just unnecessary.
According to the Florida House rules, the category of repealer bills was created in the Legislature to serve the purpose of repealing or deleting “without substantive replacement, provisions of the Florida statutes or laws of Florida.” Different than a regular bill — in which you may change a word or two in a particular statute — a repealer bill strikes through the statute to eliminate it completely.
During the 2013 legislative session, we took full advantage of our ability to propose repealer bills, and we sponsored six during this past session, with one of those bills passing through the entire legislative process to repeal a law.
The idea for our successful repealer bill, House Bill (HB) 4045 , also known as Senate Bill (SB) 1700 by Sen. Jack Latvala, came to us from the newly formed Department of Economic Opportunity in the executive branch. The DEO agency actually developed from a merging of other executive agencies into one, and as a result, certain duplications of functions had resulted in statute which HB 4045 aimed to repeal.
In the case of HB 4045, we repealed s. 604.006, F.S., which provided for DEO to develop a program for mapping and monitoring the agricultural lands in the state. That purpose in itself isn’t a bad idea; agricultural lands are an important part of Florida’s industry, identity and history. But, this specific section of law was adopted in 1984, and never was implemented by DEO or its predecessor agency, the Department of Community Affairs.
When we looked into the issue, we found the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in Florida already was mapping and monitoring the agricultural lands of our state, and we could not find a just reason why DCA/DEO was given the duplicative purpose of monitoring these lands. Additionally, DEO actually did not have the equipment or trained personnel necessary to map the state lands that DACS already was monitoring.
HB 4045 was assigned to be heard and vetted in three committees in the House and two in the Senate. It passed all committees unanimously, with the support of all agencies involved, as well as various agricultural groups in our state. It went to the floor of the Senate first to be voted on and passed April 11, with a 40-0 vote. It then passed the House May 1, 117-0. Gov. Rick Scott approved the bill June 28.
We plan on refiling the repealer bills that did not pass the legislature this year, but we also always are looking for new repealer ideas to sponsor in the upcoming session. If you have an idea for a repealer bill, feel free to contact my office at (813) 757-9110 to let me know your thoughts. It truly can be said I have the zeal to repeal in Tallahassee, and I look forward to giving you an update again next summer regarding which of our repealer bills we were able to eliminate from our statutes in 2014.
State Rep. Dan Raulerson represents District 58.