Special to the Daily Record
Affordable housing has become such an issue across the state that the Florida Legislature will take up it during next year’s session.
House Speaker Allan Bense has appointed 10 members to the House Interim Workgroup on Affordable Housing. Bense asked Rep. Mike Davis of Naples to lead the group. Locally, Rep. Jennifer Carroll is on the committee.
The bipartisan panel is charged with researching affordable housing issues to make recommendations to the 2007 legislative session.
Towson Fraser, communications director for Bense, said naming Davis to lead the committee was the direct result of Davis’s work last year on the issue.
“(Davis) did a phenomenal job,” said Fraser. “He took a hugely complex issue and got a lot done. There’s more that needs to be done and that’s why he chose him.”
Davis’ bill, HB-1363, was the first major housing reform legislation to be signed into law in two decades. Among other things, it appropriated $433 million from Florida’s housing trust funds for affordable housing, including $50 million for Davis’ program, which provides financial incentives to public-private partnerships that find innovative solutions to the affordable housing shortage for service workers.
As Florida’s real estate prices skyrocketed during the past two years and wages failed to keep up, public and private employers alike began clamoring for solutions to the affordable housing crisis.
Under Davis’ leadership, lawmakers began addressing the issue in earnest last session.
However, even though the 2006 Legislature had nearly $940 million available for appropriation in the state housing trust funds, lawmakers only spent $433 million. The year before, they spent $10 million more than that. The Legislature expects to have $1 billion in state funds to appropriate for the 2007 session.
One of the issues for the session, which begins March 6, will be whether to remove the pending cap on the Sadowski Act Trust Fund, the fund generated by a tax on real estate documentary taxes. If the cap is not removed, it will limit to $243 million the amount of money going into the affordable housing trust fund beginning July 2007. Lawmakers in the 2005 session approved the cap, setting it to kick off next year. The fund has been receiving $500 million to $600 million from the tax, which a coalition of leaders from a broad spectrum of civic and business interests lobbied to get passed in 1992.
“The cap issue will be coming up. We are going to have to address that,” said Davis, who already held the first meeting of the task force last week in Tallahassee.
After that, he wants the location to move around the state, stopping in Jacksonville, Orlando, West Palm Beach and Southwest Florida.
“It will give us a variety of viewpoints. The whole world’s not like Naples,” said Davis, joking.
One of Davis’ top priorities is to tap the stakeholders around the state to find out what challenges they are facing.
“I want to get everybody up to speed on the existing programs and what the issues are,” he said.
He expects to hear from industry leaders, housing advocates and anyone affected by Florida’s housing crisis.
“I think the preservation of affordable housing is important. We’ve lost a lot of affordable housing and we are trying to prevent more loss,” said Davis.
Bense, who represents Panama City, said Florida’s families are continuing to have housing problems despite the recent commitment of resources.
“We have committed significant resources over the past decade to addressing housing problems facing low-income residents of Florida,” he said in a prepared statement. “However, due to increases in housing costs, many Florida families continue to face difficulties in obtaining safe and affordable housing.”