One of the best ideas the Florida Legislature will consider in 2025 has already been filed, and so have two of the worst, fed by the gun lobby’s insatiable demands.

The good one, Senate Bill 80, puts Florida’s award-winning state parks off limits to the sort of scheming and exploitation that brought out thousands of protesters last summer.

Fortunately, they didn’t have to chain themselves to trees to block construction of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposed golf courses, pickleball courts and 350-room hotels.

Instead, overwhelming and bipartisan outrage forced DeSantis to pull the plug on the Department of Environmental Protection’s “Great Outdoors Initiative,” for which it had scheduled brief, inconvenient hearings with scarcely any public notice.

But he didn’t say never.

The bill, filed by Sen. Gayle Harrell, R-Stuart, the “State Parks Preservation Act,” puts a stake through the scheme.

For conservation only

SB 80 stipulates that parks are strictly for “conservation-based” public outdoor uses and must be managed to minimize “impacts to undisturbed habitat.”

The bill permits “fishing, camping, bicycling, hiking, nature study, swimming, boating, canoeing, horseback riding, diving, birding, sailing, jogging and similar conservation-based public recreational uses.”

Those, the bill says pointedly, do not include  “golf courses, tennis courts, pickleball courts, ball fields and other similar facilities.”

Camping cabins would be allowed, if limited to six guests each, and would have to be sited to avoid impacts to critical habitats and natural and historical resources. The bill explicitly bans hotel and motels as defined by law. DeSantis’ plan euphemized the 350-room hotels as “lodges,” but the public wasn’t fooled.

New bill language requires any use or construction “to the maximum extent practicable, be conducted in a manner that avoids impacts to a state park’s critical habitat and natural and historical resources.”

Another important new safeguard requires at least 30 days’ notice before any public hearing on proposed park projects.

Last summer, the DEP gave less than a week’s notice for eight brief, inconvenient hearings at which it apparently did not intend to take public comment. Thanks to a courageous state worker, a whistleblower who was subsequently fired, the agency rescheduled them and then cancelled the whole thing.

One of the worst proposals would have been at Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Harrell’s home of Stuart, where there would have been two 18-hole golf courses and a nine-hole layout disturbing more than 1,000 acres of habitat.

A Broward park targeted

Another target was Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park at Dania Beach, named for two civil rights leaders, where there would have been pickleball courts.

How the scheme became so large and so commercial remains a mystery. Subsequent news coverage by the Tampa Bay Times and others led to a fundraising project for a veterans’ charity involving golfer and course designer Jack Nicklaus.

The charity’s representatives had talked to Harrell early on about Jonathan Dickinson State Park, and she told them the park was not a good place for it. They found a warmer welcome at the office of the governor, an avid golfer, and at DEP. How it metastasized to bulldozing eight parks is a question legislators should pursue.

The bill doesn’t have a House sponsor, and we urge every South Florida member to sign on.

As for those two dreadful gun bills:

House Bill 31 by Rep. Joel Rudman, R-Navarre, would allow the open carry of firearms that are now legal in public only if concealed. The NRA and its allies have lobbied for this tirelessly, unsatisfied even with the Legislature’s insane decision last year to abolish Florida’s concealed weapon permit requirement.

Orlando police cited that 2023 law (HB 543) to explain why there were no checkpoints before two people were killed and eight hurt in a mass shooting on Halloween.

Undoing a Parkland reform

Senate Bill 94, by Sen. Randy Fine, R-Melbourne Beach, would allow youths 18, 19 and 20 to buy rifles and shotguns again. (Federal law has long prohibited them from buying handguns.)

The Legislature raised the minimum age to 21 after a 19-year-old used a legally acquired assault weapon to murder 17 students and staff at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in 2018. The gun lobby has been trying ever since to repeal the law in court and at the Capitol.

HB 31 and SB 94 belong in the trash can, not on the Legislature’s agenda. Floridians are tired of being sacrificed to the gun lobby’s fanaticism and to the cynicism of its Tallahassee handmaidens.

The bills are parting shots — pun intended — by legislators running for Congress in multi-candidate special elections where the gun lobby’s money and votes could be decisive.

Both sponsors had to resign to run. Fine and Rudman will be gone before the legislative session ends, but someone else will gladly do the NRA’s work. Just watch.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.