Local community planning has a double standard in Florida

By Haley Busch, 1000 Friends of Florida

In the 2026 regular session, the Florida Legislature passed one bill affirming the local community planning authority communities use to decide how they grow — and left untouched another that would have restored the same authority, which was suspended following the 2024 hurricanes. Taken together, they describe a Legislature that trusts local comprehensive plans in some instances but overrides them in others.

The contradiction is already playing out. On April 15, the DeSantis administration’s Department of Commerce Secretary wrote Fort Meade’s mayor that the city’s approved hyperscale data center — a facility with the power draw of a small city — was “’fundamentally flawed in its public facility planning”’ and defended the community’s right to “total transparency” and “public input” before a major land-use decision is finalized.

Those are the values Senate Bill 180 stripped in 2025 — a law that, under the guise of expediting hurricane recovery, suspends local comprehensive planning statewide for three years, reaching well beyond rebuilding, into stormwater management, environmental protection and recouping the costs of growth.

Senate Bill 484, a response to the hyperscale data center proposals now targeting Florida passed 92-16 in the House and 31-6 in the Senate, with broad bipartisan support behind sponsor Sen. Bryan Avila (R-Miami-Dade). Among SB 484’s provisions is a new section of Florida statute, 163.326, that reads, in plain law: “Local governments shall maintain the authority to exercise the powers and responsibilities for comprehensive planning and land development regulation granted by law with respect to large load customers.”

Companion water-permit provisions require large data center water allocations to be consistent with local zoning and comprehensive plans.

That is a notable affirmation of local land-use authority — notable because, for at least the past decade, the Legislature has steadily moved in the opposite direction. Under SB 484, counties like Palm Beach, St. Lucie and Martin, where proposals are already under discussion, can plan for these industrial uses with the tools Florida has relied on for generations: their comprehensive plans, their land development regulations, their zoning maps.

That’s the 2026 Legislature’s record on data centers. Its record on community planning is different.

SB 180, enacted in 2025 and in force through October 2027, prohibits counties listed in the federal disaster declarations for hurricanes Debby, Helene, and Milton — which turned out to be every county in Florida — and their municipalities from adopting any “more restrictive or burdensome” comprehensive plan amendment, land development regulation, or review procedure. The statute applies retroactively to August 1, 2024. It restarts those restrictions for another year for any county and its municipalities within 100 miles of a future storm.

Local governments across Florida have received letters from the state Department of Commerce declaring their comprehensive plan amendments since August 2024 to be null and void, have been sued or have backed away from planning changes to avoid legal peril.

A narrowly tailored fix to SB 180 — Senate Bill 840, filed by Sen. Nick DiCeglie (R-Pinellas) — passed the Florida Senate unanimously during this year’s session. It would have ended the statewide planning suspension in July, narrowed future limits to hurricane-rebuilding matters only, preserved local authority over floodplain standards, and shrunk the geographic reach from 100 miles to 50. It’s a partial fix — rebuilding-related limits would remain — but the fix the Senate already supports. The House never gave it a hearing.

Enactment of SB 484 will leave a Florida statute book that says two opposite things about local comprehensive planning. In St. Lucie County, where Project Jarvis — a data center that could demand the electric load of a city of a million people — is under consideration, the county’s comprehensive plan is, per the Legislature’s own 2026 language, a fitting governing framework. In Manatee County, where leaders had hoped to adapt their comprehensive plan to guard against the storms that have battered the coast year after year, the same Legislature has declared that strengthening it is unlawful.

If Florida is serious about letting local governments regulate land-use decisions — including the siting of AI data centers — then fixing SB 180 is just as important.

Haley Busch is communications and outreach director for 1000 Friends of Florida, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization advocating planning for sustainable communities. This opinion piece was originally published by the Orlando Sentinel, which is a media partner of The Invading Sea. Banner photo: An aerial view of a data center facility in California (iStock image).

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