Florida may have outgrown part-time Legislature, experts say

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — With a diverse population of 23 million people, a $115 billion budget and a long list of complicated, unsolved problems like housing affordability and high property insurance costs, Florida may have outgrown its part-time citizen Legislature.

“It is structurally set up to fail,” said Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale. “That’s the problem with a 60-day session. Florida is too big, its problems too complex, to have a part-time Legislature.”

Florida also pays its lawmakers as if they are truly part-time, weeding out state residents who can’t afford to serve.

By law, the Florida Legislature must meet for two months beginning in January or March to take up the state’s business, passing bills and ultimately approving a balanced budget.

But for the second year in a row, lawmakers this month failed to pass a budget by the time the regular 60-day session ended, forcing them into overtime to approve a budget by July 1, the beginning of the new fiscal year. If they don’t meet that deadline, the state will face a partial government shutdown.

Last year, the Legislature required an extra 45 days, at a cost of nearly $260,000 on top of the regular session’s tab, to get a budget approved in time for the governor to sign it before the new budget year began.

Senate President Ben Albritton said lawmakers would return after Passover ends April 9 to hash out the budget, but he hasn’t sent out an official proclamation yet. On April 20, the Legislature is already set to reconvene for a special session called by Gov. Ron DeSantis to take up redrawing congressional maps. And there is likely to be a third special session on property taxes — another issue lawmakers discussed but failed to agree on during the regular session.

All those extra innings add up. Since 2000, the state has spent $4.85 million on the Legislature’s special sessions.

“The antiquated sixty-day session limit no longer provides lawmakers with sufficient time to devise, deliberate, and determine solutions for most of the complicated issues they are asked to address,” said Peverill Squire, a political scientist at the University of Missouri who co-wrote the book on state legislatures, “State Legislatures Today: Politics Under the Domes.” “The need to call special sessions indicates that regular sessions no longer meet the state’s needs.”

Only 10 states have full-time legislatures, where lawmakers put in at least 80% of a full-time schedule, are paid a livable wage that doesn’t require outside employment and have large support staffs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Those states tend to have larger populations and include California, New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania. California, New York and Pennsylvania pay their state legislators more than $100,000 a year, and their sessions can last anywhere from six months to a full year.

Another 14 states have part-time legislatures, where lawmakers put in about half of the equivalent of a full-time job, are paid very little and have smaller staffs. They include Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Kansas.

That leaves about half the remaining states — including Florida, Texas and New Jersey — running what are considered hybrid legislatures, where lawmakers work up to two-thirds of a full-time week doing legislative tasks, and may still not get paid a living wage, requiring an outside source of income.

The New Jersey Legislature in 2024 voted to give its members their first raise in 25 years — a 67% increase that boosted salaries from $49,000 a year to $82,000 a year, almost three times what Florida lawmakers earn.

Florida’s tradition of having a part-time citizen legislature goes back to before the Civil War, when the state was a sparsely populated outpost with an agrarian economy spread out over 66,000-square miles.

For over 100 years the Legislature met every other year, and only made the shift to meeting once a year in 1969, after voters approved a new constitution sparked by a budget crisis.

Back then the state population was 6.6 million, the Magic Kingdom had barely begun to rise out of the swamps of western Orange County and citrus was a billion-dollar industry.

Nearly 60 years later, Orlando bills itself as the “theme park capital of the world,” Florida has nine major professional sports teams, 12 state universities, housing developments built on former citrus groves, and a population that trails only California and Texas.

But high housing, property insurance and medical care costs plague many Floridians, and the Legislature has made only modest stabs at tackling those and other key issues. And lawmakers’ constituents seek their help year round.

“The job doesn’t end when you leave Tallahassee,” said Sen. Lori Berman, D-Boca Raton. “It starts when you get home to the constituents. They’re the ones who elected us.”

Florida’s 40 state senators each represent more than 500,000 constituents. The 120 members of the House represent close to 200,000 each.

With those responsibilities, she said, state lawmakers deserve a living wage, and not the $29,697 they receive each year — an amount that hasn’t changed since 2010. But past efforts have met with resistance.

“I’ve been in the Legislature 15 years, with no raise,” Berman said. “We are severely underpaid for the work we do.”

That is a recipe for discouraging people from serving in the Legislature, Squire said.

“Combining low salaries with high time demands means that most Floridians, particularly those in their prime working years, cannot contemplate serving in the legislature,” he said.

Once elected, Florida lawmakers must take a two-month leave of absence from their regular jobs to attend the annual legislative session, in addition to managing seven weeks of committee hearings during the fall, which makes it difficult for the average Florida worker to run for the Legislature, said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando.

And it creates a situation where most state lawmakers run their own business or work for law firms that are happy to have someone with political clout on their roster.

“Unless you are personally wealthy or married into wealth you really have to have another source of income, and I am in that bucket,” Eskamani said. “I am fortunate to have a day job outside of the legislature to pay bills, and I have a perspective that is outside of the process.”

Eskamani works for a nonprofit agency and takes time off to attend session and committee hearings in Tallahassee. “It is a constant balancing act where I will miss meetings on the legislative side or schedule meetings with constituents around other responsibilities,” Eskamani said.

State financial disclosure records show at least half the Legislature has a net worth of $1 million or more.

Berman, an attorney, introduced legislation three years in a row to have state budget analysts conduct a study on lawmaker raises. But the bills died in committee.

“People are afraid they won’t get reelected if they ask for a raise,” she said.

Rep. Bruce Antone, D-Orlando, filed companion bills in the House and saw the same results. “It’s just a decision people don’t want to have to make,” said Antone, whose day job is advising nonprofits.

He first introduced a bill to raise lawmakers’ salaries to $50,000 a year in 2005. Allan Bense, the House Speaker at the time, called Antone to the rostrum, told him it was a great idea, but said he was not going to make his members vote on it, Antone said.

Going back to colonial times, Americans have rarely supported raising lawmaker pay, Squire said.

“But there are occasions when lawmakers can make a defensible case that a raise is warranted,” he said. “One is when their pay has not been increased for many years. Another is during or after a period of significant inflation. Voters can be persuaded at such moments, but both parties have to buy into the effort.”

Squire said Florida might want to look at Alabama’s decision more than a decade ago to set legislative salaries at the state median income.

“Doing so would allow more people from a broader range of occupations to consider running for office,” he said. “Moreover, it would tie legislative compensation to the performance of the state’s economy. If it grows, lawmakers get a raise; if it goes into recession they take a cut.”