Legislative Team Update

Dear FAC members, your input is key to our continuous improvement and successes with legislative actions and their results.  Please don’t hesitate to email or call to join the legislative team or to provide input.

This year we are focused on communications to change the narrative around people labeled as sex offenders.  Information through speaking at county legislative delegation meetings, through meeting with legislators in Tallahassee and through targeted national efforts is allowing those who are naïve about the registry to understand what it really is.

2025 Legislative Delegation Meetings by the numbers:

1. The legislative delegation meeting presentations have provided heart-warming results.  More than 90% of Florida’s state legislators have heard from 2 to 7 people informing about registry matters.
2. We had at least 50 people giving presentations covering 22 counties!

Tangible outcomes of our presentations:

1. Due to the interest and legislator support for a bill on the topic of “consideration of neurocognitive disease (dementia) in court”, we plan to develop house and senate sponsors in June/July for a 2026 session bill.
2. The Orange County Mayor’s Office called an FAC member after his presentation and invited him to participate in the Orange and Seminole Counties Veterans’ Advisory Council.

Preparing for the 2026 legislative session:

1. From September through November 2025, county legislative delegation meetings will be held for the 2026 session (Jan – Mar 2026).  Thus, we are beginning to organize speakers for those meetings.
2. In addition to presentations supporting “dementia consideration,” the decision was to focus on one, or at the most, two topics going forward.  The importance of telling personal stories tied to an ask was stressed. We discussed focusing on either elderly (nursing home care) or homelessness (residency restrictions) as the second topic.
3. Broward County is planning to invite their legislators to their Meet and Greets.  Other counties may wish to do it also.  
4. We met with 18 Florida legislators in their Tallahassee offices.  The discussion was either “dementia consideration” or “registry violation corrections without prosecution and reduction to misdemeanor rather than felony”.  Most were surprisingly empathetic. A couple were not, as expected.
5. Please contact us with additional potential speakers for delegation meetings.  Let’s bring in 100 speakers!

Other communication initiatives this month:

1. An FAC member who is also a member of AARP wrote a letter to AARP’s VP, litigation and the person for Veteran and Family Matters.  The topic was lack of nursing home care for registrants, including veterans.  He received a positively responsive call from AARP with ongoing discussion.
2. Testimony was provided to the US Senate Special Committee on Aging about the lack of nursing home care/long term care for registrants in the US including Florida. US Senator from Florida Rick Scott is chair of this committee.  The document was delivered to him as well as the vice chair of the committee.