By Steve Plunkett
A half year after 10 coastal elected officials from southern Palm Beach County resigned their seats rather than be forced to fill out a more-detailed inventory of their wealth, a federal judge has stepped in and put the new state requirement on hold.
U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian issued a preliminary injunction on June 10 barring the Florida Commission on Ethics from enforcing the new requirement.
Prior to the ruling, mayors and elected officials of Florida’s towns and cities were facing a July 1 deadline to file for the first time the state’s probing Form 6 financial disclosure.
Members of the Florida Commission on Ethics “failed to show that (the) requirement that Plaintiffs file Form 6, as opposed to the previously required and less comprehensive Form 1, is the least restrictive means of addressing the government interests at stake,” Damian said.
More than 170 elected officials filed suit seeking to have the Form 6 rule, also known as Senate Bill 774 or SB 774, declared unconstitutional. It alleges a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment right to free speech for compelling them to make “non-commercial, content-based” speech by saying, among other things, that “My net worth as of Dec. 31, 2023, was $________.”
Damian agreed that the plaintiffs “satisfied their burden of establishing a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits of their claim that SB 774, as applied to them, impermissibly compels content-based speech in violation of the First Amendment.”
“Therefore, Plaintiffs are entitled to an injunction enjoining enforcement of SB 774,” she wrote.
The judge’s ruling came too late for Briny Breezes Town Council President Liz Loper, who submitted her Form 6 on May 30. But she has no regrets about filing early.
“I don’t have a lot,” said Loper, who is listed first of the 170-plus plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “My husband and I don’t own a lot. We don’t have a lot of liabilities, so for me it was actually very, very easy. It was very simple to fill out.”
Other elected officials who joined Loper in filing Form 6 early included former South Palm Beach Vice Mayor Bill LeRoy, Ocean Ridge Vice Mayor Steve Coz, Briny Breezes Alderman Keith Black, Gulf Stream Mayor Scott Morgan, former Delray Beach Mayor Shelly Petrolia, former Delray Beach City Commissioner and current candidate for public defender Adam Frankel, and former Boca Raton Deputy Mayor Monica Mayotte.
The state Ethics Commission advised them that because they had filed Form 6 they would not have to also file a Form 1, Loper said. The commission extended the deadline for city and town officials to file Form 1 until July 15.
Form 6 requires the disclosure of net worth, earnings and tangible assets and has been applied to the governor, state legislators, county commissioners and other officers at the state and county levels since Florida’s Sunshine Law was enacted in 1978. Form 1, on the other hand, lists much less detail of a person’s finances.
Jamie A. Cole, the lead attorney in the federal lawsuit and in a similar lawsuit in a state court in Tallahassee, lauded Damian’s decision.
“This is the most intrusive form of financial disclosure that I am aware of in the entire nation, requiring more disclosure of quintessentially personal financial information than is required of the President of the United States, members of Congress and elected officials in every other state,” Cole, the longtime city attorney of Weston in Broward County, said in a statement.
“Most municipal elected officials receive little to no compensation for their public service, yet they are being asked to disclose their precise net worth, income and assets. This legislative overreach has already resulted in the mass resignation of about 125 municipal elected officials and, if allowed, would discourage many others from serving their communities.”
Richard Radcliffe, executive director of the Palm Beach County League of Cities, said a total of 34 elected officials across the county resigned because of Form 6 — affecting about a third of the local elected boards.
So, the lawsuit “worked out very, very well for everybody,” he said in a June 18 appearance before the Town Commission in Manalapan, which saw five resignations but is not taking part in the lawsuits.
Elsewhere in South County, Briny Breezes had three resignations and Ocean Ridge and South Palm Beach each had one.
Judge Damian took a dim view of the process by which Form 6 was made law, noting multiple times in her order that state senators and representatives cast votes without having researched the need for a change.
“A review of the Committees’ Analyses reveals that neither includes empirical data nor evidence suggesting that either Committee investigated, studied, or solicited reports on the need for municipal elected officials to comply with the more comprehensive requirement of Form 6,” she wrote.
“Nor does either Analysis demonstrate that the Committees considered alternative, less burdensome means that would have addressed the interests at stake or the purpose or intent of SB 774.”
Despite the injunction, Radcliffe said he thinks the Form 6 requirement will reappear for local elected leaders.
“I’m sure it’s not going to go away. This is something that passed almost unanimously in both houses,” he said. “I think we got a reprieve.”
Anne Geggis contributed to this report
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