The Loxahatchee Groves Town Council got an update Tuesday, Feb. 1 on the progress in Tallahassee on town funding requests and other local bills.
Legislative Liaison Mary McNicholas informed the council that the bills for the North Road trail and the Okeechobee Blvd. improvements have cleared the Infrastructure & Tourism Appropriations Subcommittee favorably and are on their way to the Appropriations Committee. Two bills for canal rehabilitation and stormwater repairs have cleared the Agriculture & Natural Resources Appropriations Subcommittee.
“Right now, all four of these have gone on to appropriations,” McNicholas said.
Another bill for funding to repair the town’s public works building and a bill for road improvements have gone through first reading but have not advanced as far as the other four bills.
“The last bill I have is the local bill for fireworks,” she said. “We had our first reading on this, but Southwest Ranches also filed a very similar bill. We were very smart in watching what Wellington did and, therefore, didn’t want to recreate the wheel.”
Wellington’s bill, which passed last year, placed restrictions on fireworks in the village’s equestrian areas.
McNicholas said there is potential opposition from the fireworks lobby.
“We are working very hard trying to get it through committees,” she said. “There is a lot of back-channeling going on right now.”
The other bills that are on the Appropriations Committee docket have only two committees to go through. She noted that three of the bills had been funded last year but were vetoed.
Appropriations requests from Loxahatchee Groves for 2022-23 include:
• House Bill 3421, North Road equestrian/multiuse trail. The requested amount from the state is $45,000, with local funds of $50,000 available. This request was funded last year but vetoed.
• House Bill 3431, canal system rehabilitation. The requested amount is $1.1 million with local funds of $368,000. It was funded last year but vetoed.
• House Bill 3427, stormwater system repair. The request is for $1.8 million with local funds of $1.4 million.
• House Bill 3423, Okeechobee Blvd. improvements. The requested amount is $1.2 million (33.8 percent) with federal funding of $1,990,991 (56 percent) available, state DOT funding other than amount above of $53,352 (1.5 percent) and local funds of $310,000 (8.7 percent).
• House Bill 3425, public works equipment facility rehabilitation. The town has requested $800,000 with no local funding.
• House Bill 3429, road improvements. The requested amount is $6,625,920 with local funds of $3,309,780 available. This was funded but vetoed last year.
• House Bill 1425, a local bill on fireworks, would request to create a partial exemption for the town from the Florida Statutes to permit the town to regulate fireworks within its agricultural residential zoned areas on certain designated holidays.
“We put a big ask in here, and I had recommended that perhaps we pare it down a bit,” McNicholas said. “We have six appropriations bills, and that’s more than $11.2 million for a 12-square-mile area with 3,200 residents.”
She pointed out that the bills that progress more quickly are those that have matching funds or are related to issues that are a higher priority this year, such as water-related bills.
“Two of our water-related items have progressed,” McNicholas said. “This a little bit of a different year in that, one, it’s a huge re-election cycle at the state level. On top of that, there is a lot of federal funding coming down the pike, which is, of course, helping us locally, but everybody in the state is also fighting for the same money.”
She said that if the bills make it through the Appropriations Committee, they must then pass both houses of the legislature and escape an executive veto after the legislative session ends in March.
“It doesn’t mean that each one of these is going to get the actual amount that’s up there,” she said.
Funding, if approved, would become available July 1.
