The committee Floridians for Housing has raised $13 million for the ballot initiative, with the money coming from the group Florida Realtors and the National Association of Realtors.
As of July 31, the committee had spent about $2.75 million, as it races to collect enough signatures to get on the November 2022 ballot. The Division of Elections website Friday afternoon showed that the state had received 33,486 valid petition signatures for the initiative. As a comparison, the division had received 106 valid signatures on July 7.
To reach the ballot, backers of the proposed amendment will need to submit 891,589 valid petition signatures by a Feb. 1 deadline. As a preliminary step, the committee needs to submit 222,898 signatures to trigger a crucial Florida Supreme Court review of the proposed ballot wording.
The proposed constitutional amendment comes after years of frustration in the real-estate industry and among other groups about decisions by lawmakers to use money from a state affordable-housing trust fund, known as the Sadowski trust fund, for other purposes.
If approved by 60 percent of voters, the proposed ballot measure would establish in the Florida Constitution the State Housing Trust Fund and the Local Government Housing Trust Fund.
It would require that the trust funds receive at least 25 percent of the revenue from documentary-stamp taxes — which are collected on real-estate transactions — and would detail how the money could be used to address affordable housing.
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This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2021.