Cities and counties can ban gas leaf blowers, thanks to DeSantis veto

Some budget vetoes come with broader consequences.

Photo credit: Cbaile19

This is Seeking Rents, a newsletter and podcast devoted to producing original journalism — and lifting up the journalism of others — that examines the many ways that businesses influence public policy across Florida, written by Jason Garcia. Seeking Rents is free to all. But please consider a voluntary paid subscription, if you can afford one, to help support our work.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the new state budget last week, but not before removing nearly $1 billion worth of projects from the state spending plan — denying funding for everything from tampons in public schools to street drains in flood-stricken Miami.

One of the sillier line items the governor struck from the budget was $100,000 for a study of leaf blowers, the loud yard tools that are irritatingly familiar to anyone who has ever tried to sleep in on a Saturday morning.  

But that little line-item veto has big consequences: Because by blocking the money for that study, DeSantis also blocked a last-minute attempt by the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature to tie the hands of any local community wishing to limit the use of leaf blowers that run on gasoline — the nosiest and dirtiest kind.

The backstory here is unbelievably stupid.

The city of Winter Park, a wealthy enclave just outside of Orlando, is preparing to implement a local ordinance that would prohibit the use of gas-powered leaf blowers within the city limits. City commissioners unanimously approved their gas blower ban way back in January 2022. But it was not scheduled to go into effect until June of this year, in order to give landscaping companies time to replace their old gas blowers with new electric ones.

But as the effective date drew nearer, it touched off a small controversy in the city and a debate about whether the ban should be delayed even further. And that apparently caught the attention of the Republican legislator who represents the area in the Florida Senate — Sen. Jason Brodeur (R-Sanford), who you might recognize from Florida’s ghost-candidate scandal.

In the middle of this year’s legislative session, Brodeur briefly threatened to push legislation stripping every city and county in Florida of their power to restrict gasoline-powered leaf blowers. Brodeur agreed to back down after Winter Park city commissioners agreed to put their gas blower ban up for a citywide vote, according to the Winter Park Voice.

But then Brodeur decided to handcuff cities and counties anyway. And he did it via a last-minute maneuver during the largely secretive final budget negotiations between the state House and Senate.

Now, Florida lawmakers aren’t supposed to put policy legislation into the budget. But to get around that, they will sometimes shoehorn some kind of fig leaf line item into the spending plan — and then add all the new policy they want in a separate piece of legislation known as the “budget implementing bill.” (The bill is called that because it, uh, implements the budget.)

The $100,000 study was the fig leaf. Buried on page 301 of the 523-page budget, the public purpose was to pay for a study by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection comparing the life cycles of gas-powered leaf blowers versus electric or battery-operated versions.

But the actual purpose was so that Brodeur and legislative leaders could add language to this year’s budget-implementing bill (House Bill 5003) that would have prohibited any city or county in Florida from restricting to use of gas blowers at any point over the next year.  

As some readers may recall, this is the very same process that a lobbyist for lawncare giant TruGreen used a year ago when he got Florida lawmakers to temporarily stop local governments from imposing new limits on lawn fertilizer. That preemption was also enacted through a budget-implementing bill. And it was tied to a $250,000 fertilizer study that lawmakers had snuck into that year’s budget.

But it turns out that when you remove the fig leaf, you also remove the policy it was covering for. That’s because of a separate provision in the implementing bill that says any section is void if the corresponding appropriation in the budget is vetoed by the governor.

You know, I’ve been writing about the Florida Legislature for 20 years now, and I never knew this until now.

It’s not entirely clear if Ron DeSantis knew it, either. His office declined to say whether DeSantis intended to eliminate the protections for gas leaf blowers that were in the implementing bill. Then again, the governor generally seems to be avoiding offering substantive explanations for any of his budget vetoes — like his decision to gut funding for arts and cultural programs across the state.