Florida is the Sunshine State.
But as Senator Jeff Brandes accurately pointed out Tuesday, the actions of local governments may soon find shade from the state’s Sunshine Law.
Read that again - shade from the Florida Sunshine Law.
The Florida Senate will hear HB 7049 today, legislation that would no longer require government agencies to publish public notices in local, legal newspapers and those newspapers’ free websites.
The bill passed the Senate’s Rules Committee by a 9-6 vote Tuesday despite serious concerns brought forth by both members of the committee as well as business representatives and members of the Florida Press Association and its member papers that it would hinder the public’s ability — your ability — to know just what your government is doing.
Under the proposed legislation, governments — cities, counties, school boards and other taxing authorities like the Lake Shore Hospital Authority or the Suwannee River Water Management District — would only be required to post public notices on a publicly-accessible website. Or, realistically, hide them on a government website with the hopes that few will notice.
Proponents of the bill have claimed that it will expand the public’s right to know by moving them online.
Except public notices already are online, both on local newspapers’ free websites and www.floridapublicnotices.com, a free and independent state-wide site operated by the Florida Press Association.
The online option that already exists combined with print editions of legal newspapers offers the most robust system for ensuring that the government’s actions remain in the public’s view.
Bill supporters also insist giving government control of public notices will save you, the taxpayer, money.
That also isn’t true.
Instead, governments will have to reinvent the wheel, creating their own systems at taxpayers’ expense to implement the technology and infrastructure to document the publication of the notices. A system that already exists and works, operated by the private sector.
And that doesn’t even get into the potential litigation that will surely follow — again with money from the public’s purse — when people aren’t property notified of a pending government action.
Under the current system, legal newspapers charge a small fee to publish the public notices in print, on their own neutral, third-party websites and a statewide website as well as providing a notarized affidavit that documents it was published and the public was informed.
Which is what this issue is all about, the public’s right to know. Your lawmakers, the Florida legislature, should be protecting that right.
Instead, they are attacking that right by, as Brandes said, attempting a “solar eclipse on the public” with a bill that is “designed to block out the sunshine.”
Reach out to your Senator Jennifer Bradley or Senator Loranne Ausley and ask them to vote “No” on HB 7049. Let them know that you want your right to know to remain in the sunshine. Bradley can be reached at bradley.jennifer@flsenate.gov. Ausley can be reached at ausley.loranne@flsenate.gov.
May 26, 2026
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