Rhian Tutson

Florida has over 1.5 million residents who have served their sentence and come home, but they come home without ID, without a driver's license, often without the right to vote, and with a checkbox on every job application designed to stop them before the interview. Jacksonville also sends thousands of service members home every year from Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Naval Station Mayport, and Marine Corps Blount Island Command, and the support often stops the moment the uniform does. This Act says: you did your time, or you served your country. Now come home for real.

• Automatically restore voting rights the day a sentence is complete, free of paperwork, fees, or delay
• Issue a Florida state photo ID on release day at no cost, so returning citizens can apply for housing and jobs immediately
• Create a Reentry Coordination Office in every Florida county, a single point of contact for housing, jobs, benefits, and services
• Establish a dedicated Veteran Reintegration Track inside every Reentry Coordination Office, Jacksonville is home to two major Navy installations, Naval Air Station Jacksonville and Naval Station Mayport, plus Marine Corps Blount Island Command, with Camp Blanding's Army National Guard base and Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base close by in the surrounding region. Thousands of service members retire out of this area every year, and there is no reason full support should end the day the uniform comes off
• Guarantee every retiring or discharged veteran a warm handoff from the military to state benefits, employment placement, and healthcare bridge coverage before their VA benefits fully activate, no gap in care, no gap in income, no falling through the cracks between two bureaucracies
• Give veterans and their families priority placement in state-supported housing and job training programs, with hiring credits for Florida employers who bring on veterans at a livable wage
• Ban the Box on all public-sector job applications, no felony checkbox before the interview
• Reinstate driver's licenses suspended solely for unpaid court fines and fees
• Automatically expunge a first-time nonviolent misdemeanor after 5 years conviction-free, and create a petition process to expunge a nonviolent felony after 10 years conviction-free, with free legal help and online filing through the Department of Legal Affairs
• Repeal mandatory minimum sentences across all offenses statewide, restoring full judicial discretion, with evidence-based drug treatment available as a sentencing alternative, an annual public report from the Florida Sentencing Commission on racial disparities, and retroactive review for anyone serving more time than the new law would impose
• Bar any juvenile under 18 from being housed in an adult correctional facility, bar trying anyone under 16 as an adult for a nonviolent offense, and eliminate the Intensive Delinquency Diversion Services fee
• Make officer disciplinary records public, build a searchable statewide decertification database so no agency can hire a decertified officer, require monthly use-of-force reporting broken down by race, age, and gender, ban chokeholds and neck restraints except where deadly force is already authorized, make failing to intervene in excessive force carry the same liability as using it, and eliminate qualified immunity for state civil rights claims
• Grow the Florida Highway Patrol to at least 3,000 sworn troopers and tie starting pay to Georgia, Arkansas, Ohio, and California every year, Florida currently patrols its roads with about the same number of troopers it had in 1995, despite 67% population growth since then
• Require every body camera in the state to include real-time AI translation, modeled on the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office's rollout, so language is never the reason someone doesn't get helped or understood

Florida mandated birth. That obligation doesn't end at the delivery room. No parent in this state should have to choose between keeping their job and being present for a new child. This Act holds Florida to the full weight of the "pro-family" position, convenient parts and all.

• Mandate paid parental leave at 80% of wages: 5 months for birthing parents (1 month prenatal plus 4 months postpartum), 3 months for non-birthing parents, and 4 months for adoptive and foster parents upon legal placement
• Pay for that leave through the Florida Family Security Fund, a state-administered insurance fund financed by shared employer and employee contributions on a sliding scale by employer size, with self-employed Floridians able to opt in and a required 6-month operating reserve
• Extend to all parents, biological, adoptive, same-sex, single, foster
• Make employer retaliation against a parent taking leave a third-degree felony
• Apply to employers with 15 or more employees statewide
• Extend Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to a full 12 months, with no-cost depression screening at 2 weeks, 6 weeks, and 3 months, mandatory implicit bias training for obstetric providers, a Maternal Mortality Review Committee with subpoena power, and a Community Doula Program with Medicaid reimbursement in every county
• Provide free childcare from 6 months through pre-K for families up to 300% of the federal poverty level, with sliding-scale costs up to 500%, a $20/hour minimum wage for childcare workers with a path to $30, and quality standards meeting national NAEYC benchmarks
• Protect providers who act in good-faith reliance on the medical standard of care from civil liability, professional discipline, and criminal prosecution, and bar the Department of Health from disciplining providers for referring patients to lawful reproductive healthcare outside Florida
• Remove the fixed 12-year age cutoff on a parent's right to bring a child of the opposite sex into a restroom to assist them, and require a changing station in every restroom, men's rooms included

Florida law recognizes a family by its paperwork. This Act says Florida law should recognize a family by its fruit, the care that's actually given, the love that's actually present, the commitment that's actually kept. A tree is known by what it produces, not by what form it filed.

• Grant full legal recognition to de facto parents, people who have functioned as a parent for 2 or more years, regardless of biology or paperwork
• Recognize common law marriage after five years of continuous cohabitation, with the full rights of legal marriage
• Establish equal parental rights from birth for both parents, married or not
• Protect children in blended families when a primary caregiver dies, becomes incapacitated, or separates from the family
• End the requirement that only "legal" parents can make emergency medical decisions for children in their care

Florida ranks 50th in teacher pay relative to cost of living. We lose hundreds of talented educators every year to Georgia, North Carolina, and the private sector, not because they stopped caring, but because Florida stopped paying. "American exceptionalism" requires exceptional schools. Exceptional schools require teachers who can afford to stay.

• Set minimum salary floors for certified teachers, $65,000 to start, $75,000 at 10+ years, $85,000 at 20+ years
• Set a $25.00/hour minimum for paraprofessionals and classroom aides, with an advancement pathway to $30+
• Tie salaries to the Consumer Price Index annually, they can never erode below inflation
• Fund up to $10,000 per year in student loan forgiveness for teachers in high-need subjects, capped at $50,000 total after five continuous years in Florida public schools
• Bar adverse action against a teacher for using age-appropriate, curriculum-aligned materials that reflect the accurate history of any racial, ethnic, religious, or social group, and bar school districts from prohibiting library books that have already cleared an established professional review process
• Protect educators from being disciplined or losing their certificate over personal political, religious, or social opinions posted as a private citizen, off the clock, with real due process before any certificate action

Redlining blocked Black families from building wealth and deliberately concentrated environmental hazards, flooding risk, underinvestment, and infrastructure neglect in those same communities. This Act starts to undo that by law. Property rights and community investment, for every neighborhood, redlined ones included.

• Create Community Investment Zones for neighborhoods identified by federal and state historical redlining maps, through a public process: every county or city over 10,000 residents must complete an equity assessment within 180 days, followed by a 60-day public comment period and two public hearings in the affected community before any zone is finalized
• Establish mandatory infrastructure equity standards, every neighborhood in Florida receives equivalent road quality, drainage, and utility access
• Require public flood modeling to be published for all historically underserved areas, giving residents the data to advocate for themselves
• Fund green stormwater infrastructure in areas with highest flood risk and lowest prior public investment
• Require equity impact assessments before any state or county infrastructure project is approved
• Cap dollar stores at one per 15,000 residents and payday lenders or check-cashers at one per 20,000 residents in these zones, with required distance buffers between locations
• Require any large-format retailer over 50,000 square feet to sign a Community Benefit Agreement: 40% local hiring, a county living wage, and 1% of gross revenue into the Community Investment Fund
• Give full-service grocers, credit unions, and community development financial institutions priority permitting and a 10-year property tax abatement to move into these neighborhoods
• Fund the work through a 0.5% surcharge on commercial real estate sales over $5M, a 1% surcharge on residential sales over $1M, and a $250 million minimum annual state appropriation, with 40% of all labor hours on funded projects reserved for residents of the zone or the next census tract over
• Give residents of these zones civil standing to sue their own city or county for noncompliance, with cities that drag their feet subject to state infrastructure receivership

Every year in Florida, people who have built decades of committed life with someone, without a marriage license, find out at the worst possible moment that the law doesn't recognize that commitment. They're turned away from a hospital room. They're left out of an estate. They're forced out of the home they shared. This Act says: a 3+ year committed partnership is real, and Florida law will treat it that way.

• Recognize a committed partner of 3+ years cohabitation as a healthcare surrogate equal to a spouse, no hospital may deny visitation, information access, or presence at medical consultations
• Resolve disputes between a committed partner and biological family using a "best interest of the incapacitated person" standard, with the patient's documented wishes given paramount weight
• Grant a surviving committed partner the same intestate share and elective share rights as a surviving spouse under the Florida Probate Code
• Protect a surviving partner's homestead, they may not be dispossessed for at least one year following their partner's death
• Allow a surviving committed partner who was a joint occupant to assume the lease and continue occupancy; landlords, homeowners associations, and condo boards may not deny continued residency
• Create a Florida Domestic Partnership Registry, any two unmarried adults with 3+ years of committed cohabitation may register by sworn declaration with the Department of Health for a maximum $25 fee, creating a rebuttable presumption of committed partner status for all purposes under Florida law

"Law and order" collapses when whole communities are afraid to call the police. Florida has 4.7 million immigrants who work our fields, staff our hospitals, build our houses, and pay our taxes. When they live in fear of deportation for calling 911, every Floridian is less safe. The Preamble says "We the People", not some of the people.

• Repeal the state laws requiring mandatory 287(g) immigration enforcement agreements (SB 168, SB 1718, SB 2-C, and SB 4-C), remove the requirement that officers ask about immigration status in routine encounters, and remove the state criminal penalties for entry or re-entry that federal immigration law already preempts
• Bar any Florida agency or officer from detaining someone solely on a civil immigration detainer without a judicial warrant, treat an unlawful detention as an unlawful seizure under the Florida Constitution and federal civil rights law, and make agencies that keep doing it liable for attorney's fees and costs
• Protect immigrant workers from retaliation for reporting wage theft regardless of immigration status, bar immigration enforcement at active worksites without a judicial warrant, create 1,000-foot enforcement-free zones around every public school, hospital, clinic, and house of worship, and require the state to issue standard driver licenses and IDs to residents regardless of immigration status
• Bar a parent's immigration status, by itself, from being used as grounds for a dependency finding, termination of parental rights, or custody change, and bar the Department of Children and Families from sharing immigration status information without a valid judicial warrant
• Fund the Florida Immigrant Legal Defense Fund at a $75 million annual minimum, providing free and reduced-cost legal services with priority for removal cases, asylum applicants, labor trafficking victims, and parents in mixed-status families

Before there was a Florida, the Seminole and Miccosukee peoples were here. They fought the longest war in American history to stay on this land. They never surrendered. This Act requires Florida to act on that history. Representation. Restoration. Recognition. Written into law, permanently.

• Enter a formal acknowledgment into the permanent legislative record of the thirteen documented pre-contact Indigenous peoples of Florida, the Pensacola, Apalachee, Timucua, Guale, Mayaimi, Calusa, Potano, Ocale, Tocobaga, Jeaga, Matecumbe, Tequesta, and Ais, whose descendants carry lineage through the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes today, alongside formal acknowledgment of the Three Seminole Wars, including forced removal and search-and-destroy operations
• Create full voting Tribal Legislator seats in the Florida House, modeled on New Zealand's Māori Parliament seats, which have carried full voting rights since 1867, reserved for the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, the state's two federally recognized sovereign tribes, each selected by that Tribe's own governance process, with full rights to introduce legislation, serve on committees, and vote on the floor like any other member
• Fund the Florida Indigenous Restoration Fund at a $250 million annual minimum, paid for by a 2% surcharge on commercial development on historically Seminole and Miccosukee territory, and governed jointly by the Seminole Tribe, the Miccosukee Tribe, and the state, for land restoration, language revitalization, housing, healthcare, and economic development, with no expenditure made without the affected Tribe's approval
• Require documented tribal consultation, with a 90-day response period, before any water permit affecting Seminole or Miccosukee lands can be issued, and no permit over a Tribe's objection without a written finding of compelling public interest and no alternative
• Mandate Indigenous history curriculum co-authored with both Tribes, covering all thirteen original peoples from pre-contact history through contemporary sovereignty, beginning in the 2028-2029 school year, with the Tribes holding veto power over any content that misrepresents them

After World War II, Germany made a choice: confront the atrocities honestly, remove hate symbols from public life, and mandate the full truth in every classroom. Florida has made the opposite choice, banning accurate history, displaying symbols of racial terror on government property, erasing entire peoples from the curriculum, and quietly keeping an 1865 Reconstruction-era vagrancy law alive under new names like loitering, panhandling, and camping bans. The Reckoning Act reverses all of it. Not to make anyone feel guilty. To make sure no one can claim they didn't know.

• Repeal the Stop WOKE Act (HB 7), restore full academic freedom for Florida K-12 teachers and restore accurate history to the curriculum without fear of termination
• Mandate comprehensive, standards-based instruction in African American, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous history, with assessment, accountability, and tribal input on Indigenous curriculum
• Mandate accurate teaching of Confederate history: the documented reasons for secession (named in each state's own declaration), when and why Confederate monuments were built (mostly 1920–1965, as tools of racial intimidation during the Civil Rights era), and the post-war revival of Confederate imagery by the KKK and segregationists
• Remove all Confederate symbols, flags, seals, monuments, insignia, from Florida government buildings, state vehicles, and the uniforms of state and county employees
• Ban Confederate flag display in Florida public schools as a hostile environment violation, consistent with existing anti-harassment doctrine
• Strengthen Florida's bias-motivated intimidation statute: any symbol, slogan, or display used in a documented pattern of targeted racial, ethnic, or religious intimidation constitutes criminal harassment, regardless of its political framing, with racial slurs used in that pattern enumerated as sufficient evidence, while leaving isolated speech untouched
• Repeal Florida's 2024 public camping and sleeping ban (HB 1365) in full, restoring local control over homelessness policy to the counties and cities that actually have to govern it
• Reform the loitering and prowling statute so presence alone, without specific facts showing real danger, can never justify an arrest, and require officers to give a person a chance to explain themselves first
• Protect the right to peacefully ask another person for help in public, no city can criminalize panhandling itself, only aggressive conduct like blocking someone's path
• Require the state to publish annual public data on loitering, trespass, jaywalking, and panhandling enforcement broken down by race, so patterns can no longer hide
• Create the Florida Historical Truth Fund, permanent educational installations at historical sites statewide, modeled on Germany's documentation centers, built in partnership with affected communities

Germany's §86a law prohibits Nazi symbols on government property and in schools. Germany built documentation centers, not to celebrate the past, but to make it impossible to deny. Stolpersteine brass plaques are embedded in sidewalks across the country in front of homes where Holocaust victims once lived. You walk over history every day. You cannot pretend you don't know.

Florida's Confederate monuments were not built by grieving veterans. The data is public: the vast majority were erected between 1900 and 1965, during Reconstruction backlash and the Civil Rights Movement, as deliberate assertions of white supremacy and warnings to Black Floridians. That's intimidation, not heritage. And Florida law has been protecting it.

Florida gets more usable sunshine than almost any other state, and yet Florida families pay some of the highest electricity bills in the country. Utilities have tried more than once to gut net metering, the policy that lets homeowners with solar panels sell power back to the grid at a fair rate. This Act protects net metering by statute, puts solar to work on parking lots, schools, and utility-owned property, and makes sure the families who need help with their power bills most are first in line for the savings.

• Lock full retail-rate net metering into Florida statute, no utility commission can reduce, suspend, or eliminate it without an affirmative act of the Legislature
• Require solar canopies with battery storage on large commercial parking lots, hospital lots, and big box retail at permit renewal, with a 10-year property tax abatement in exchange
• Create Community Solar and Storage Hubs on state-owned land in every county, operational within 3 days of a grid outage
• Require FPL, JEA, and every Florida utility to install solar and storage on utility-owned rooftops and lots, with the savings returned to ratepayers by law, not absorbed into shareholder returns
• Fund the Florida Homegrown Power Grant Program: up to 60% state cost-share for solar and storage for income-qualified families, households with elderly or disabled members, storm-impacted areas, and small businesses with refrigeration or medical equipment
• Require solar and battery storage on every Florida public school that serves as a hurricane shelter, with at least 3 days of self-sufficiency and energy savings directed first to teacher pay and classroom resources
• Stand up solar and storage workforce training programs at Florida state colleges and technical centers, with hiring priority for residents of Community Investment Zones

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." This chamber quotes the second half of that sentence constantly. It almost never quotes the first half. A Florida law enforcement officer completes 80 hours of firearms training before they're certified to carry on the state's payroll. A concealed weapon license applicant is currently required only to be observed firing one round, one time, by an instructor. This Act does not touch a single law-abiding gun owner's right to buy, own, or carry a firearm. It closes the gaps that let firearms reach people who have already shown they're a danger, and it asks Florida to finally read the whole sentence.

• Raise the concealed weapon license training standard to a real 10 hours, 8 hours of classroom instruction on Florida use-of-force law, de-escalation, and safe storage, plus a minimum 2-hour live-fire proficiency component with demonstrated marksmanship, replacing the current standard of a single observed discharge
• Create a confidential statewide firearm registry maintained by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, recording make, model, caliber, and serial number by owner, accessible only to law enforcement, never a public list
• Integrate registry data into FCIC so that when an officer runs a license, roadside or at a residence, they know whether firearms are registered to that person before the situation escalates, not after
• Hold owners accountable: if a registered firearm is used in a crime, the registered owner is presumed responsible, unless they filed a lost or stolen report within 48 hours before the offense
• Close the private-sale loophole with a matched buyer-seller filing: the seller files "sold to," the buyer files "purchased from," and both must match on serial number before the transfer is legally complete
• Expand standing to petition for a Risk Protection Order beyond law enforcement alone to family members, household members, and treating mental health professionals
• Require firearm surrender within 24 hours upon issuance of a final domestic violence injunction, with law enforcement verification
• Require safe storage, locked container or trigger lock, in any household with a minor, with a state-funded device distribution program so cost is never the barrier
• Create a felony firearm rights restoration pathway after five years of law-abiding conduct for non-firearm-related convictions