What's pending
HB 927 takes effect July 1, 2026. It became Chapter 2026-64 when Governor DeSantis signed it May 6, 2026; it passed the House 110-0 and the Senate 33-0 — unanimous, consensus housekeeping rather than contested preemption. The law directs local governments above a threshold to establish and maintain a registry of at least four qualified contractors or two qualified contractor firms — engineer, surveyor, architect, or landscape-architect — for a pre-application review pathway a developer may elect to use.
The mechanism is worth stating precisely, because the early corpus framing overstated it. HB 927 does not let a developer hire a private engineer to review plans instead of city staff. The process is optional — the developer chooses whether to invoke it. If they do, the reviewer comes from the local government's own registry, not the developer's own pick. The certified-element affidavit must be accepted and the permit decided within existing timeframes without further review of the certified elements. It supplements staff review; final approval stays local.
The watch resolves on which cities build robust, local-familiarity-gated registries versus perfunctory compliance, and on whether developers actually use the opt-in.
Why this matters
Building the registry is the state-mandated compliance. The discretion that distinguishes one city's posture from another lives in how the registry is gated. Altamonte Springs is the first corpus exhibit: Ordinance 1844-26 (second reading June 16) requires registry members be familiar with City development requirements and carry local track records, and pairs that gating with fee-recovery for staff processing time (Resolution 1477). That converts a mandated pathway into one a city still shapes — who qualifies, and at what cost.
The genuinely sharp Altamonte move sits beside the registry, not inside it. The same June packet codifies a recordable developer's-agreement instrument (Ordinance 1841-26, Chief Planner Jacob Lujan) — defining when commitments on infrastructure, transportation, mitigation, and maintenance must be captured in a recorded agreement running with the land. That is the Surface Migration: as the state loosens the review surface that HB 927 touches, the city hardens the contract surface that no current Florida preemption statute reaches. A recorded agreement is far harder to preempt than a discretionary approval.
This watch tracks the registry side of that migration across the corpus. The registry-building requirement is uniform; the response is not. A city that gates for local familiarity and recovers staff cost is exercising the discretion the statute leaves open; a city that lists four names to satisfy the mandate is not. Whether developers use the opt-in at all is the second test — a registry no developer invokes is a different signal than one that reroutes the review of significant projects.
Resolution criteria
This watch resolves as cities adopt their registries after the July 1, 2026 effective date and as the first developer-elected reviews (if any) move through them. The outcome assessment will capture:
- Which cities built robust local-familiarity-gated registries with track-record requirements and fee-recovery versus minimal name-listing compliance
- Whether developers actually invoke the opt-in pathway — the volume of certified-element affidavits submitted versus conventional staff review
- Whether registry-gated reviews change outcomes or timelines relative to ordinary pre-application consultation
- Whether cities pair registry adoption with a counterweight surface — recordable developer's agreements or land-disposition standards, the way Altamonte did
- Whether the corrected SB 180 window (active to mid-2028) shapes how aggressively cities gate, given that registry ordinances themselves sit inside the freeze