Florida Shut Down Two Hidden Taxes This Session. One on Carbon, One on Construction.

Florida passed two bills this session that name that pattern and close it, one for climate policy, one for land use.

H1217, now Chapter 2026-45, effective July 1, 2026, bars state and local governments from adopting net-zero greenhouse-gas policies, using public funds to advance them, imposing carbon-related taxes or fees, joining emission-trading programs, or conditioning contracts on climate compliance, unless a separate general law authorizes it. Covered entities must file an annual sworn compliance affidavit. The bill expressly preserves existing utility functions, Public Service Commission authority, and pollution-control programs already authorized by law, so ordinary energy and environmental regulation keeps operating.

The mechanism here matters more than the politics. A local government adopting a net-zero policy doesn’t usually pass a visible tax to pay for it. It embeds the cost in procurement preferences, membership dues to climate coalitions, permitting requirements, or fees dressed up as environmental review. H1217 says that kind of policy needs an actual vote in Tallahassee, not an administrative decision buried in a budget line or a sustainability plan nobody outside city hall ever reads.

H0399, now Chapter 2026-7, limits county and municipal development-application fees to the actual direct and indirect cost of processing the application, bars fees tied to project value instead of processing cost, and requires public fee schedules. It also creates a temporary expedited approval pathway for minor resort variances through 2031, restricts local conditions on compost facilities, narrows compatibility-based permit denials, and requires equal zoning treatment for manufactured and off-site constructed homes.

The core fee provision is the same move as H1217, aimed at a different target. A “development review fee” that’s actually priced off what the project is worth, not what reviewing the paperwork costs, is a value tax wearing a permit’s clothing. H0399 says the fee has to match the work. If a county wants to raise revenue from development, it has to do that openly, through a real tax or assessment that goes through the normal process, not through a fee schedule nobody outside the permitting office ever checks against actual cost.

Both bills answer the same underlying question: when government wants money or compliance it can’t get through a straightforward vote, does it get to collect it anyway through a fee, a mandate, or an administrative program instead? Florida said no twice this session, once for the left’s preferred mechanism, carbon policy, and once for a mechanism local governments of any political stripe use constantly, development fees. That consistency is worth noticing. This isn’t a bill picking one political target. It’s a principle applied in two different directions.

Neither bill is a finished, self-enforcing rule. H1217’s real test is how “support” for a net-zero policy gets defined in practice. Drawn too broadly, it could sweep in legitimate energy-efficiency or disaster-resilience work that has nothing to do with a carbon mandate. H0399’s resort-variance pathway is a narrow, time-limited exception that hands well-capitalized operators faster approval than everyone else gets, through 2031. That’s a real preferential-treatment risk sitting inside an otherwise sound property-rights bill, and it should sunset on schedule rather than get quietly renewed without anyone asking whether it worked as intended.

Government shouldn’t get to charge you for a policy goal by dressing the bill up as something else, whether the goal is climate compliance or development revenue. Florida wrote that principle into law twice this session. The job now is making sure both agencies implementing these laws actually hold the line, instead of finding a new label for the same old fee.

This is our read of the bills. We encourage you to read them yourself and reach your own conclusions.