Short-term vacation rental bill sponsor won’t pick up the mantle in 2025

Rep. Nick DiCeglie. Image via Colin Hackley.

Florida lawmakers may once again attempt to pass legislation tightening regulation of short-term vacation rentals next year but, if they do, the Senator who has sponsored those bills during the past two Sessions won’t be the one carrying it.

“No,” said Pinellas County Republican Nick DiCeglie when asked Monday night in St. Petersburg about sponsoring a similar measure next year.

“I did two years in a row. I haven’t heard anything. I don’t think there’s going to be any effort to change anything from a local standpoint, but I don’t know. I have no idea. But I will not have my name on it.”

DiCeglie resides in Indian Rocks Beach, a small coastal community in Pinellas that has been described as “ground zero” in the battle between vacation rental owners and their residential neighbors who resent such rentals. He sponsored a measure in the House in the 2023 Session that died on the last day of the Session when the House refused to pick up last-hour changes made by the Senate.

The measure went further in 2024, successfully getting though both chambers, although its nine-vote margin of victory in (60-51) was one of the closest tallies of any bill in the House during the entire Session. But it was vetoed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in late June, just days before the legislation would have gone into effect.

In his veto message, the Governor noted objections raised by the many critics of the bill, saying that it would have created “new bureaucratic red tape” preventing local governments from enforcing existing ordinances or passing any new ones exclusively applying to vacation rentals.

DiCeglie said he has no idea whether any other legislator would try to carry the bill next Session. Similar proposals have been introduced virtually every year for a decade, yet the Legislature has failed to act since 2014, when it voted to allow local governments to regulate matters like noise, parking, and trash, but prevented them from prohibiting or regulating the duration or frequency of short-term rentals.

He said certain provisions in this year’s bill garnered buy-in from most of the engaged parties, including “data transparency” provisions such as requiring that platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo submit quarterly reports to the state identifying all units listed on their sites, as well as their vacation rental license numbers and locations.

The Department of Business and Professional Regulation would have created and maintained a vacation rental database for all those businesses across the state.

‘Good, sound policy’

“I think that was all good, sound policy,” DiCeglie said. “The minute we started getting into the local stuff, that’s when things got a little hairy.”

DiCeglie noted that in Indian Rocks Beach, the City Commission last month voted down a compromise that short-term rental operators and city staff negotiated to settle a lawsuit filed by seven vacation rental owners after the city passed an ordinance in 2023.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out,” he said. “What are the courts going to ultimately decide? Did they go too far? Was it a balance? Who knows?”

‘Out of step’

Kelly Cisarik, a resident of Indian Rocks Beach who has been critical of the state preemption of local governments regulation of short-term vacation rentals, said DiCeglie was “out of step with the majority of his constituents” regarding his 2023 and 2024 bills.

“Voters living in residentially zoned areas want local control of Short Term Vacation Rentals businesses,” she said in an email. “Tallahassee can’t help us with problems at 2 AM.”

In his veto message of SB 280, DeSantis wrote, “Under this bill, any such measure would apply to all residential properties. The effect of this provision will prevent virtually all local regulation of vacation rentals even though the vacation rental markets are far from uniform across all the various regions of the state.”

“When Gov. DeSantis vetoed SB 280, he acknowledged that local governments should be able to continue to regulate Vacation Rental businesses,” Cisarik wrote. “That veto should have sent a clear message to any potential bill sponsor in 2025, and that message is: One size does not fit all.”

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Mitch Perry reporting. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: [email protected]. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.