Tampa Bay Times by Langston Taylor
Updated August 27
After 62 days in Tallahassee during the 2018 session, Florida’s Legislature passed 196 bills. That’s the fewest number in at least 21 years, according to state records.
The Senate passed just 85 of its bills, 10 fewer than it did in 2017 and hundreds less than it regularly passed in the early 2000s. The House passed 286, an above-average number for sessions during Gov. Rick Scott’s tenure that reflects the relatively more activist nature of House Speaker Richard Corcoran.
But getting bills through both houses proved difficult. Forty-six percent of bills that passed one house (excluding one-house resolutions) failed to get out of the other. That’s the highest failure rate since 1998, the earliest year for which records were available.
