LVU’s Chief Ambassador

The Florida League of Cities (FLC) started LVU in October 2020. We wanted a grassroots effort to empower citizens and community leaders. LVU helps them speak out and support local decision-making. We want to educate and engage business and community leaders and other residents. We give them the tools to engage their state legislators on issues that are important to them and their cities. And we help them do it quickly and effortlessly!

We even have a motto: Elevating Florida’s Voices from Sidewalks to the State Capitol. The ambassador program gives municipal officials like you the tools you need. You can help us educate and engage citizens so we add manpower to our grassroots advocacy. You know your community best. You know the local chamber leaders, the neighborhood activists and the local business leaders. With that in mind, the LVU ambassador program makes sure you have the resources to lead and inspire these citizens to help fight for local decision-making. We have lots of resources to share, including social media posts, a PowerPoint presentation, sample speeches, outreach materials and more!

Our municipal officials responded like we knew you would. You are up to the task, and a lot of you signed up as ambassadors. Not only that, but many of you scheduled hundreds of meetings around the state to speak to Rotary

Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs, chambers of commerce, neighborhood associations and more. We have many more meetings scheduled in different parts of the state. I’m looking forward to growing the number of ambassadors as well as citizen involvement in the LVU network!

The feedback has been great. The typical response from citizens is that they had little or no idea about how many ways the Legislature strips away their voice. People are busy with their lives. The legislative process is complex and happens “in Tallahassee” at a fast pace. Citizens mostly feel like they can’t keep up with what’s going on. When they learn there’s a way to keep informed about important issues that will impact their city and THEIR neighborhood through the LVU program, they’re eager to get involved.

People understand that local decision-making means they have more say in what goes on in their community. They don’t like the Legislature stripping that power away from them. Citizens want to be able to tailor regulations that allow them to keep the special, unique character of their city. And that applies whether it’s vacation rentals, height or density requirements, building design standards or even local regulation of water quality standards.

They know that a legislator, who may never have stepped foot in their city, shouldn’t be making decisions about that city. That applies to how the city collects the garbage, runs its building department or regulates where electrical or telecommunications structures are placed.

We have almost 50,000 people who are in the LVU network, and we continue to grow with the help of our LVU Ambassadors.

The League’s legislative team monitors around 500 bills every legislative session. Many bills deal with obscure issues that, while they do impact the way a city functions and operates, don’t necessarily directly impact citizens. However, each legislative session, there are a few bills that directly impact city authority in a way that also directly and adversely impact neighborhoods and the residents.

In the past dozen years, the Legislature has enacted almost 100 preemption bills. These bills limited citizens’ ability to govern themselves at the local level. These are the bills that Local Voices United focuses on. This past session, we engaged the LVU network several times. They helped us fight bills that limited local authority over vacation rentals, contracts for hauling municipal solid waste and unrealistic timeframes for expedited building permits. With their help, we succeeded!