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FLORIDA’S ANTI-REGULATION LAW HAS FATAL FLAW: IT ASSUMES TRUTHFUL REGULATORS
VENTURA, Calif. (October 4, 2024) – A regulatory board within Florida’s sprawling Department of Business and Professional Regulation has knowingly submitted false information to the Florida Secretary of State’s Office year after year. It hopes citizens of the Sunshine State won’t notice.
The petty lawbreaking isn’t sexy. It’s not click-bait material. No headline containing the word “regulation” will draw many eyeballs. The rogue regulator violates the state’s Administrative Procedure Act. The tiny board has banked on no one getting too excited about the misfeasance.
So far, no one has.
First some background: In 2010, the Florida legislature voted to override then-Governor Charlie Crist’s veto of House Bill 1565. A provision in the bill attempted to rein in the creation of new regulation that is hostile to small business. The provision received a great deal of attention at the time. It required special “legislative ratification” of any regulation created by a state agency that would have an adverse economic effect or regulatory costs exceeding a cumulative dollar threshold.
Since 2010, the threshold has been $200,000. If a new rule will cause more than $200,000 in cumulative cost to the public, it must be ratified by the state Legislature before it can take effect. It’s not unreasonable. But the law assumes state agencies will act in good faith. Big mistake.
In a recent
rulemaking to incorporate the 2024 version of a continually changing set of private standards that govern how real property in Florida is appraised, the regulator provided false information about the aggregate cost of the proposed regulatory change – this to avoid the purgatory of filing a so-called “Statement of Estimated Regulatory Costs” and seeking legislative ratification for the change.
Members of the state agency’s Real Estate Appraisal Board, which signed off on the new regulation, knew for starters that each of Florida’s
6,204 active appraiser licensees would have to purchase a copy of the standards at a nonprofit publisher’s
web site for $35. Although the price for the fluid standards has come down, this alone is more than $200,000 in the aggregate. That’s just the beginning. It doesn’t include the mandatory refresher courses, which eclipse the cost to purchase the standards. The courses can cost each licensee hundreds of dollars, and hundreds more for the work time lost to attend. This sends the aggregate cost of adopting each new edition of the fluid standards easily above the $1 million mark in Florida each time the regulation is changed to incorporate the new version of the standards.
Too much trouble. It’s easier to lie and omit. It’s not like Florida citizens have time to browse through the Florida Administrative Register to see what state agencies are actually up to. But they should.
The Florida Real Estate Appraisal Board of the state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation did the same thing in
documents from the rulemaking in 2019 and in the adoption of the 2020-2021 edition of the continually changing standards. These proposed rules contain versions of the same false information.
Not to belabor the point, the regulator did the same when it
adopted the 2012-2013 version, claiming the privately owned standards were available online as a free document and would not have to be purchased. For the 2014-2015 version of the standards, the rogue regulator
did the same. It did the same in its
adoption of the 2016-2017 version of the standards, as well.
The name Juana Watkins is on the proposed rules that first began openly violating the provision of House Bill 1565. She was the director of the Division of Real Estate at the time. Her LinkedIn page shows she’s now the general counsel and vice president of law and policy at Florida Realtors.
The $200,000 aggregate threshold is an important safeguard for the Sunshine State’s small businesses. But sometimes complying with state law interferes with an agency’s important mission of enforcing hostile, anti-business regulations on hapless others.
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Jeremy Bagott, a licensed appraiser and former newspaperman, sends up a warning flare in his 2019
book “Dispatches from the Cosmic Cobra Breeding Farm.” He takes the reader deep inside a tiny Washington, D.C., foundation that has managed to have its copyrighted code of conduct enshrined in federal and state law. All 50 states, even the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, now enforce it. The nonprofit, known as the Appraisal Foundation, has parlayed the arrangement into a lucrative publishing cartel. In his journey, the author uncovers a troubling trend deep in the plumbing of government.
