House vote pushes vacant school land bill near finish line

A bill that would require Florida’s School Districts to document their vacant land and its value to the state is gaining momentum in the Legislature.

The House passed SB 824 with a vote of 84-27 on Monday. The amended bill goes back to the Senate, where it was adopted on the Senate floor last month, 28-9.

Republicans said the purpose of the bill is to make it easier for the public to know how much land School Districts are amassing.

“We’ve had people in our community that have come through … that said, ‘We’d like to know what the school owns because they’re sitting on a lot of property,’” said Rep. Danny Nix Jr., who sponsored the House version, on the impetus of the bill. “As a commercial realtor, somebody who does this for a living, it was hard for me to find every parcel that the School Board owns. So this literally just puts it in one place for them to be able to give out.”

But Democrats questioned how that list could be used and what bills might come next from the Republican-controlled Legislature that pushed Schools of Hope last Session, giving charter school operators rent-free space in traditional public schools with declining enrollment.

Nix’s original House bill included a provision allowing charter schools to get first dibs on public schools’ unused land and to push School Districts with declining enrollment to sell. However, it got stripped out during a House Education Administration Subcommittee last month.

“That is the fear,” said Rep. Kelly Skidmore on Monday. “That is the actual intent of having this inventory so that other operators can have an advantage.”

Nix stressed that the current version of his bill does not require public School Districts to sell off the land.

“This is not a School is a Hope bill,” Nix argued. “It simply ensures that we have a clear, accurate, consistent picture of publicly owned unused school land across our state. Better data leads to better planning, better stewardship of taxpayer assets, and better decision making for future uses.”

Under SB 824, School Districts would be ordered to tally up their land that sits empty without any school buildings on it. Districts would be required to list the land’s address, how many acres, parcel ID numbers, state what the use is, as well as the fair market value, when it was acquired and more.

From there, the Florida Department of Education would report back and publish a statewide report on the findings by Dec. 1 and every three years after. But what won’t be in the statewide report is how districts are using the land. That language was stripped out of the bill in an amendment that Democrats argued takes away the context and explanation for why districts have unused land.

Some local school officials pointed out that there are reasons they are banking up parcels of unused land, for instance, to prepare for future growth projections and build a new school.

“We do it for the interest of our tax dollars and our residents,” said Marquise McMiller, Senior Director of Government Relations at Orange County Public Schools (OCPS), told lawmakers during a House Committee last month. “We procure land to ensure we have it at the time that we need it because if we went the eminent domain route, it’s a far more expensive method to procure land in the state of Florida.”