florida law

DeSantis originally called the session to produce new maps for the U.S. House in an unusual mid-decade redistricting in January and it's scheduled to start Monday.

Aspiring attorneys taking the Florida Bar exam for the first time in February passed at a rate 3% lower than last year’s winter administration of the exam.

Florida Republicans have promised for nearly a year to provide meaningful property tax relief to Floridians in the form of a constitutional amendment they could vote on this November. Despite that hype, no such proposal has received the three-fifths support in both chambers in the Legislature that is required to get a legislatively backed constitutional amendment on the ballot.

Florida’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee was created two decades ago to investigate why Florida moms are dying during and after pregnancy – and to stop preventable deaths from happening in the first place. But the secretive panel housed within the Florida Department of Health hadn’t publicly released any annual findings in years until a Florida Trib reporter asked agency officials last week about the committee’s apparent lack of action.

Last year’s extended session that featured a lengthy standoff between the Florida House and Florida Senate over spending and taxes cost slightly more than $259,000, according to figures compiled by the Office of Legislative Services.

For more than a century, Miami-Dade’s public servants — from teachers to transit operators — have shaped the county’s labor landscape through collective bargaining. Now, local labor leaders say that foundation faces an existential threat.

The Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund can’t be used to purchase any more boats, aircraft, or motor vehicles, but they can be leased for a “short-time,” SB 7040 says. The Republican-dominated Legislature approved these new guardrails after the state’s emergency managers spent more than $573 million on immigration enforcement in three years.

Florida is finally eligible for a $608 million federal grant to help pay for the state’s migrant lockups after the Trump administration lifted an environmental funding hold that had stalled the dollars for months.

Florida will soon be able to legally designate groups as “domestic terrorist organizations” under a bill headed to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ desk. The Republican-controlled House voted 80-25 on Thursday on the measure (HB 1471) which backs up DeSantis’ executive order in December that named two Islamic groups as terrorist organizations.

As concern over e-bike crashes surges across the state, the Florida Legislature passed a bill to collect data on and create a regulating body for micromobility, an umbrella term for small, human and electric-power vehicles like e-bikes and e-scooters.

Florida has a population of over 22 million residents, and more than 13 percent of those residents receive SNAP benefits monthly to buy groceries.

A bill that would expand vaccine exemptions for public K-12 schools is headed to the Senate floor. The bill (SB 1756) would create a new “conscience” category for parents to opt their children out of immunizations typically required for students to attend public K-12 schools.