by Lilly Rockwell and
Michael Peltier
The News Service of Florida
After 42 years, the Department of Community Affairs, which is charged with monitoring housing and commercial development in Florida, will cease to exist.
Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill (SB 2156) Tuesday that dismantles the growth management agency and merges it with several other agencies, such as the Agency for Workforce Innovation, to form a new state agency.
The Department of Economic Opportunity will officially be created on Oct. 1. Preparations are already under way to dissolve the Department of Community Affairs to form the new agency. That means dozens of employees could find themselves out of a job by the end of the month.
The major overhaul of state agencies was a prominent part of Scott’s legislative agenda. It is the first major reshuffling of state agencies since the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services was dissolved into four different agencies in the early 1990s in response to scandals and an effort to cut costs.
“The bill I signed today provides us flexibility to seize opportunities created by developing markets and effectively respond to the changing needs of the businesses that grow our economy,” Scott said in a prepared statement.
The bureaucratic shuffle is intended to help create jobs, he said. The growth management agency is being eliminated in concert with a new law that drastically reduces the agency’s power to supervise development decisions, which will now be made largely at the local level. The agency, established in 1969, was designed to help prevent sprawl and congestion.
The massive 838-page bill also implements other bureaucratic changes, such as shifting millions of dollars that would have gone into a trust fund for affordable housing and transportation projects into a new fund supervised by the Department of Economic Opportunity dedicated to incentivizing businesses to come to Florida.
For the people who worked at the Department of Community Affairs, the changes to the growth management law and the transformation into the new agency means they might lose their jobs.
The agency is currently staffed at about 220 people, about 150 of whom will retain their jobs. The people responsible for overseeing what is left of the gutted growth management law will be transferred to the new Department of Economic Opportunity. Those jobs are shrinking from more than 60 to a little more than 30 positions.
Other positions, such as the 16 people responsible for overseeing the Florida Forever land preservation program, will be shifted to the Department of Environmental Protection. There will also be about 15 jobs involved in regulating Florida building codes shifted to the Department of Business and Professional Regulation.