Bill
SB 1264
Florida SB 1264 creates a geography-based program shifting focus to certified rural or urban businesses, expanding oversight, and boosting economic development in distressed areas.
Note: The materials provided include multiple, unrelated bills all numbered SB 1264 from different states. The most detailed packet concerns a Florida Senate committee substitute (CS/CS/SB 1264) titled “Rural and Urban Business Enterprises.” Below is a focused summary of that Florida bill (primary content), followed by brief notes on the other SB 1264 materials included.
Status: Committee substitutes approved; recorded as referred to Rules. Effective date in bill: July 1, 2025. Fiscal impact: indeterminate, potentially significant.
Purpose and intent
- Reframe and expand state programs and definitions that target disadvantaged businesses to focus on geography-based rural or urban economic distress, strengthen state oversight of workforce eligibility and foreign ownership of property, and promote venture capital and economic development in underserved areas.
Key provisions and changes
- Replaces statutory references to “minority business enterprises (MBE)” with “certified rural or urban business enterprises,” defined as businesses located in areas where either:
- per-capita income is less than 80% of Florida’s per-capita income, or
- the area’s unemployment rate exceeds Florida’s unemployment rate by more than 1% over the prior 24 months.
- Renames and restructures state supplier/advocacy offices:
- Office of Supplier Diversity → Office of Supplier Development (Department of Management Services).
- Florida Advisory Council on Small and Minority Business Development → Florida Advisory Council on Small, Rural, and Urban Business Development.
- Creates/adjusts economic development programs:
- Requires Department of Commerce’s Division of Economic Development to create an Office of Secure Florida to administer/enforce E‑Verify, employment authorization compliance, and restrictions on purchase/registration of Florida real property by foreign principals.
- Adds business development in rural/urban areas to department programs.
- Creates a RISE (Research, Innovation, Science, and Engineering) Investment Tax Credit program to boost venture capital investment in Florida.
- Creates a Rural Accelerator Program and raises population thresholds for “rural community” designations (e.g., 75,000 → 85,000; contiguity threshold 125,000 → 135,000).
- Procurement and workforce changes:
- Revises the Law Enforcement Recruitment Bonus Payment Program eligibility: removes continuous full‑time employment requirement, extends allowable break in service from 15 to 180 days (such breaks do not count toward the 2‑year full‑time employment requirement), and removes program expiration.
- Expands the definition of “managerial employees” to include personnel executing statewide business/economic development projects, thereby classifying them as Selected Exempt Service.
- Other items:
- Eliminates sunset of a sales tax exemption for certain data centers (previously set to expire June 30, 2027).
- Requires the Department of Emergency Management to identify general locations and square footage of special‑needs shelters annually through 2030 and directs state funds to be maximized/targeted to regional planning council regions as they existed Jan. 1, 2025.
- Repeals statutory regional planning councils; instead permits local governments to enter agreements to form regional planning entities.
- Provides a limited exemption from reversion-to-state ownership for land conveyed below appraised value to specified federal agencies so long as land continues to serve as a military installation buffer.
- Specifies limited procurement treatment for Space Florida under s. 287.055, F.S.
Who is affected
- Small businesses and newly categorized “certified rural or urban business enterprises” (businesses in designated economically distressed areas).
- Department of Commerce, Department of Management Services, Department of Emergency Management, regional/local governments, and state procurement processes.
- Law enforcement recruits eligible for recruitment bonuses.
- Data center operators (tax treatment).
- Federal agencies receiving state land conveyances as military buffers.
- Space Florida and certain state managerial staff (personnel classification).
Timeline / procedural
- Effective July 1, 2025.
- Budgetary/fiscal impacts are described as indeterminate and potentially significant to state and local government; committees highlighted amendments and substitutes through April 2025.
If you want, I can:
- Produce a side‑by‑side table showing which Florida statutes would be amended,
- Extract the exact statutory citations and proposed language changes,
- Or prepare a one‑page explainer focusing on fiscal implications and likely stakeholders. Which would be most useful?
Compiled from official sources — confirm details with the bill’s official record.
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