The home inspectors and mold remediators bill (SB 2234) bill has been signed into law.
With Gov. Charlie Crist’s signature last month, the home inspector, mold remediator and mold assessor professions will now be regulated by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
While he approved the home inspectors bill, Crist vetoed two additional bills that were deemed important to the Florida Home Builders Association.
Crist vetoed HB 7183, the Administrative Procedures Act, and SB 900, the petition reform legislation. Prior to vetoing the APA legislation – appropriately titled the Open Government Act – the bill had received unanimous support in the Florida Senate and House of Representatives, and had received the appropriate support by state agencies and staff for the Governor.
The APA bill focused on limiting non-rule agency policy, an area of growing concern to industries regulated by state agencies. Major provisions of the bill included, among other things, increasing the cap on attorneys fees in challenges to proposed and existing rules, providing for attorneys fees in challenges to non-rule policy, and substantially expanding the role of the legislative Joint Administrative Procedures Committee’s in objecting to agency non-rule policy.
According to FHBA General Counsel Keith Hetrick, there was never any indication that the APA bill was in jeopardy of being vetoed. The bill had been worked out by all parties involved, and was done so weeks before the end of session.
The APA bill wasn’t the only piece of FHBA-supported legislation that saw its demise last week.
A bill designed to strengthen the process for collecting signatures for ballot initiatives was also vetoed. SB 900 would have required signature-gatherers to regularly turn in their collected signatures to elections supervisors for systematic vetting, rather than waiting as late as possible in an election cycle and then dumping all the signatures at once on elections officials for hasty verification in time for ballot approval and the election itself.