Ron DeSantis is helping real estate developers exploit a hurricane relief law

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Photo credit: Bobrien12

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Ron DeSantis is actively helping some of the state's biggest developers — and Ron DeSantis donors — exploit a new state law that was supposed to ensure communities could rebuild after hurricanes.

There are a few places we could start this story. But let’s begin on July 18.

That’s when developers in southwest Florida sued Manatee County in an attempt to stop county commissioners from raising local impact fees — a type of tax on homebuilders that helps pay for all the roads, schools, water lines and other public infrastructure needed to serve new development.

The lawsuit was initially filed by a front group set up by the local homebuilding lobby. But it was done so on behalf of developers like Pat Neal, the founder of Neal Communities, and Carlos Beruff, who runs Medallion Home.

Both are big donors to Republican politicians in Florida. And both have since joined the suit against Manatee County — Neal in his personal capacity and Beruff through one of his development companies.

That lawsuit argues that Manatee County commissioners are not allowed to raise impact fees right now because of Senate Bill 180, a new law passed earlier this year by Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Senate Bill 180 was supposed to be a bill about helping communities rebuild after hurricanes. The Republican sponsors in the Legislature — Rep. Fiona McFarland (R-Sarasota) and Sen. Nick DiCeglie (R-Indian Rocks Beach) — called it, “an act relating to emergencies.” Republican leaders in the Florida Senate talked about how it would “bolster hurricane relief and recovery.” DeSantis said the point was to make sure Floridians can “restore their home to what it was like before the storm hits.”

But Senate Bill 180 contained a subtle provision that developers across Florida are now trying to stretch far beyond storm recovery.

Read aggressively, this provision forbids virtually every city and county in Florida from doing anything at all over the next two-plus years that would make their land-use rules or development regulations “more restrictive or burdensome.”

There’s more. That same provision also attempts to retroactively repeal new development rules that local governments have put in place since August 2024. And it gives developers legal ammunition to sue a city or county that tries to slow suburban sprawl, save rural areas, or protect environmentally sensitive places — or anything else that a developer can claim is “restrictive or burdensome.”

That’s the part of Senate Bill 180 that Pat Neal, Carlos Beruff and the homebuilding lobby are trying to use to stop Manatee County from increasing impact fees.

“The resulting increase in impact fees are restrictive and burdensome to plaintiffs and customers of plaintiff’s businesses,” their lawyers claim in the complaint, which has been filed in Manatee County Circuit Court.

Manatee is now defending itself. And one of the county’s main legal arguments is that the prohibition against “more restrictive or burdensome” land-use rules doesn’t apply to impact fees.

“Impact fees do not regulate or control the development of land in the county, but merely impose a fee to fund capital facilities needed to accommodate new development,” attorneys for Manatee County wrote in an Aug. 12 legal brief. “In short, impact fees do not control how an owner may use land.”

That’s when Ron DeSantis stepped in.

On Aug. 15 — three days after Manatee County submitted its legal brief — the head of the Florida Department of Commerce sent an entirely-out-of-the-blue letter to county leaders warning them not to go forward with their plan to raise impact fees

Why? Because the increase “appears to potentially violate” Senate Bill 180, the agency claimed.

In his letter, Florida Commerce Secretary Alex Kelly — a DeSantis aide who briefly worked as the governor’s chief of staff — specifically cited the “more restrictive or burdensome” provision in Senate Bill 180 that Pat Neal and Carlos Beruff have invoked in their lawsuit against Manatee County.

The DeSantis aide explicitly threatened Manatee County leaders with retaliation if they refused to back down — even hinting that the governor and his staff might withhold state funding for local road, parks and economic-development projects.

“If the Board chooses to continue down this path, the consequences are inevitable,” Kelly wrote.

By itself, this is an ugly abuse of executive power. One of the governor’s closest aides just thuggishly threatened to punish an entire community — all the people who live and work in Manatee County and drive on its roads and play in its parks — if its independently elected leaders refuse to bow down to a few developers with connections in Tallahassee.

But this was more than a threat. It was a tool.

Because just five days later, Pat Neal, Carlos Beruff and the homebuilding lobby in southwest Florida filed a new version of their lawsuit. And this time, they cited the letter from the DeSantis administration as evidence that Manatee County was violating Senate Bill 180 by raising impact fees.

The developers even appended a copy of the letter to their complaint.

“…As demonstrated by the accompanying affidavits and letter from the Secretary of Commerce, the public interest will be negatively and adversely affected by the assessment and collection of the increased impact fees…” their lawyers wrote in the revised complaint filed Aug. 20.

There’s more context. Ron DeSantis’ staff sent that letter just a few weeks after Neal wrote a $25,000 check to Ron DeSantis’ personal committee.

Altogether, Neal and his companies have made more than $370,000 in campaign contributions to DeSantis over the years. Companies connected to Beruff have also given the governor at least $185,000.

A sampling of Pat Neal campaign contributions over the years.

Neal, Beruff and a few other local insiders also recently had a private personal meeting with DeSantis during a stop the governor made in Manatee County, according to a local blog called the Sarasota Phoenix. And Neal delivered another batch of campaign checks to the governor during the visit, the Sarasota Phoenix reported.

And what makes all of this behavior even more disturbing is that it’s not the first time it’s happened.

Last month, Manatee County commissioners abruptly postponed a vote to bring back a popular local law requiring developers to preserve large buffers when building near wetlands.

A previous county commission had eliminated the local law, which enabled developers to dredge up and pave over more of the environmentally important ecosystems. That sparked an electoral uprising in which Manatee County voters completely overhauled their county commission during the 2024 elections, ousting and rejecting a slate of candidates backed by developers like Neal and Beruff — and by Ron DeSantis.

The new county commissioners had vowed to reinstate the wetland buffers. But they canceled the vote at the last minute — after receiving threatening letters from the DeSantis administration warning them that they were about to break the law under Senate Bill 180.

The commission chair said he feared DeSantis might even suspend any commissioner who voted in favor of the wetlands rule.

To their credit, local leaders in Manatee County are trying to find other ways to fight back. Manatee is one of around 25 cities and counties across Florida that have signed on to a soon-to-be-filed lawsuit challenging Senate Bill 180 as unconstitutional.

I don't want to be melodramatic here, but this could well be the last stand for home rule in Florida.

Land-use is arguably the one major policy area where cities and counties have lots of autonomy and power.

And if politicians in Tallahassee can strip locally elected leaders of even that power…there’s probably no bottom to this.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

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Florida’s KidCare expansion in limbo as number of uninsured children jumps 20% (Tampa Bay Times) ($)

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See also: Up, up, and away: 2026 health insurance premiums set to double for millions of Floridians (Florida Phoenix)

Florida’s property insurance ‘reforms’ are hurting homeowners

A Florida Home Insurer Was Allowed to Bypass the Courts During Claim Disputes. It Won More Than 90% of the Time. (ProPublica)

See also: Florida’s fix for its struggling insurance market hurt homeowners, data shows (Washington Post) ($)

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Millions of dollars for “cleaner technology” shouldn’t go to electric vehicles, says Florida proposal (Central Florida Public Media)

The Free-for-some State of Florida

Local leaders in Florida worry they could be suspended for opposing DeSantis (WUSF)

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See also: State removes $180,000 art crosswalks by Venezuelan artist in Coral Gables (WLRN)

A decision that will age like an avocado

New College of Florida Plans Statue of Charlie Kirk (Sarasota Magazine)

See also: Charlie Kirk in His Own Words (Zeteo)

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Perspectives

Florida’s insurance mess — big salaries, missing flood insurance, underfunded companies (Orlando Sentinel) ($)

Florida's appalling double standard on vaccines, gender-affirming care (Sarasota Herald-Tribune)

Waste, fraud, abuse and Florida’s immigration prisons (South Florida Sun-Sentinel) ($)