We elect the Florida legislature to represent “…we the people…” and pass laws that should be in the best interests of the citizens they represent and Florida as a whole. The elected governor then signs the bills passed by the legislature if he or she agrees it to be for the common good and that legislation then becomes the law of the land, otherwise known as the Florida Statutes (F.S.). That’s how our representative democracy works, right? Well, not exactly… Some would argue that that is the ending of the commonly recognizable democratic process and the beginning of the very complex bureaucracy, where a multitude of regulatory agencies interpret the laws, create regulations, policies and procedures to implement the will of the people, as expressed through their democratically elected representatives. It begins to sound like the old gossip game where a message is told to one child in a group of children and each child must listen to it and pass on the message, or rather their version of the message. By the time the message is spoken about by the last child, the original meaning is lost.
Each section of the Florida statutes has a regulatory enforcement agency established to implement and enforce the law through regulations or rules that the agency creates through rulemaking authority granted to them. These REGULATIONS, or rules which are found in the Florida Administrative Code (F.A.C.). These rules govern almost everything we do and while the entrusted administrative agencies themselves are made up of many hardworking civil service employees that truly want to serve their fellow citizens and communities, the complex web of often overlapping regulation can all too often seem to do more harm than good.