The Vertiport Question: What Florida's HB 1093 Actually Does to Local Government Authority

The one-paragraph version

Governor DeSantis signed HB 1093 on April 20, 2026. It became chapter 2026-35 and takes effect July 1. The enacted law does three things: it adds vertiports and charging systems to the list of projects eligible for public-private partnership funding; it adds vertiport pads and charging systems to the definition of airport infrastructure that commercial service airports have to maintain; and it authorizes the Florida Department of Transportation to fund up to 100 percent of a public vertiport's cost when no federal money is available, or up to 80 percent of the nonfederal share when it is. That's the whole enacted bill. It does not preempt local zoning. It does not give vertiport operators sovereign immunity. It does not create a state model siting code. All three of those provisions were in earlier versions of the bill, and all three got stripped out in a House subcommittee two months before the governor signed anything. If you read a write-up that describes HB 1093 as preempting local control over vertiports, it's describing a version of the bill that never became law.

What the enacted bill actually says

Strip away the committee history for a second and just look at what's on the books. HB 1093 amends two statutes.

First, it amends the public-private partnership law to add vertiports and charging systems to the list of qualifying projects, the same list that already covers airports, seaports, mass transit, and rail. That matters because it means a city or county can now structure a vertiport deal the same way it would structure a rail project: a private developer builds and operates it, and the public entity brings land, permitting, or a funding contribution to the table.

Second, it amends the aviation funding statute in two ways. It expands the definition of airport infrastructure to explicitly include vertiport pads, safety zones, charging systems, resilience energy systems, and the grid upgrades needed to support them. And it gives FDOT new funding authority: up to 100 percent of the project costs of a public vertiport when federal funding isn't available, or up to 80 percent of the nonfederal share when it is.

That's it. Three sections, an effective date, done. I want to say that plainly because most industry coverage of this bill was written off earlier drafts, and those earlier drafts were a lot more ambitious.

The preemption fight that didn't survive

Here's where it gets interesting, and where I think most of the coverage missed the real story.

The bill that first cleared the Economic Infrastructure Subcommittee on January 28 looked very different from what eventually passed. That version classified vertiport operators collocated with a public airport as a state agency for sovereign immunity purposes, giving them the same tort protection public airports get, set to expire in 2036 unless the Legislature renewed it. It also preempted state regulation of vertiport design, aircraft charging, aeronautical operations, and aviation safety, with an exception preserving local land use, zoning, and reasonable noise ordinances as long as they didn't effectively block FAA-authorized operations. It also required FDOT to write a model vertiport siting code and fast-track approval for any vertiport that adopted it, and mandated the establishment of vertiport demonstration corridors.

That's a real preemption bill. If it had passed as written, it would have meaningfully narrowed what a city or county could say no to when a developer showed up wanting to put a vertiport somewhere.

It didn't pass as written. The Transportation & Economic Development Budget Subcommittee took it up on February 18 and stripped all four of those provisions in one pass. The committee's own analysis documents the cut in plain language: it removed the sovereign immunity language, the preemption language, the mandatory siting code, and the demonstration corridor requirement. The bill that emerged from that committee, on a unanimous 13 to 0 vote, was the narrow funding and P3 bill described above. Nothing added those provisions back before the governor signed it. I checked the actual enrolled bill text section by section to confirm that, not just the summary.

As someone who watches this space closely, what strikes me isn't that the preemption language got cut. Legislatures trim ambitious bills all the time. What strikes me is how much confusion that created downstream. A bill sponsor gets to say they passed an advanced air mobility law. A committee gets to say it protected local authority. And several outlets covering the signing described the stripped provisions as if they were still in there.

Why the confusion happened, and why it matters

Some of the coverage around the signing described things like a sales tax exemption for eVTOL aircraft, sovereign immunity for collocated vertiport operators, and state preemption of vertiport design and aviation safety regulation as if they were part of the law. Every one of those specifics matches the January version of the bill almost word for word. None of them are in the law that passed. The Ways & Means Committee pulled the sales tax exemption on February 2. The immunity and preemption language was pulled on February 18. By the time the bill reached the governor's desk in April, none of it was there to sign. It's an easy mistake to make since the bill went through three committee substitutes in about three weeks, and it's a lot faster to write from the bill's stated purpose than to diff four committee analyses against the enrolled text.

If you're a city attorney or a county commissioner trying to figure out what changed under your feet, that distinction is the whole ballgame. Under the bill that got signed, your zoning authority over vertiport siting is exactly where it was before HB 1093 existed. Nobody preempted anything. The state didn't need to, because the preemption language never survived committee.

Why local authority still matters here, even without a preemption clause

Just because the state didn't take zoning authority away doesn't mean local governments get to sit this one out. A few things are worth planning around.

Local land use and zoning still govern where a vertiport can go. That was true before HB 1093 and it's still true now, since the law that passed never touched it. If a developer wants to build a vertiport on a parcel in your jurisdiction, your normal permitting and zoning process still applies, the same way it would for a helipad or a small airport expansion.

The FAA still owns aviation safety and airspace design. FDOT's new funding authority doesn't change who signs off on whether an aircraft can safely operate at a given site. That approval chain runs through the FAA, not through Tallahassee.

The money is real, but it isn't automatic. The bill authorizes FDOT to fund up to 100 percent of a public vertiport's cost, but the staff analysis makes it clear that this authorization doesn't require a dollar figure. Nothing in the bill appropriates money. If your city wants FDOT to help fund a vertiport, that's still a budget conversation, not an entitlement.

What this looks like next to Florida's broader AAM push

This funding bill doesn't exist in a vacuum. FDOT has been building toward an intercity Aerial Highway Network connecting Florida's major metros, and it designated SunTrax in Polk County as the research and development hub for that effort. The early phases at SunTrax involve a passenger terminal, at-grade vertiports, access roads, eVTOL parking and charging positions, and a research hangar, according to the same House committee analysis that tracked HB 1093 through committee. Florida was also part of one of eight proposals selected in March under the FAA's eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, which gives the state a federal on-ramp to pair with the funding authority HB 1093 just created.

Read together, the state's play is pretty legible. Fund the infrastructure, keep the FAA relationship moving, and leave local zoning and land use where it's always been. That's a materially different story than "the state just preempted your vertiport authority," and it's the story that's actually true.

What developers and local governments should do now

Whether you're a P3 developer eyeing vertiport deals or a city trying to plan for one coming into your jurisdiction, here's where I'd focus.

• Treat vertiports as a normal P3 qualifying project now, which means the same procurement playbook you'd use for a rail project or a vehicle parking facility applies. That's the concrete, immediate change HB 1093 makes.
• If you're a local government, don't assume anything about your zoning authority has changed. It hasn't. Your normal siting and permitting process is still the process.
• If you're chasing FDOT funding for a vertiport project, get in early on the tentative Work Program cycle FDOT builds this fall for FY 2027-28, since the bill authorizes funding without attaching a number to it and the current work program is already locked in.
• Watch for FDOT rulemaking under the amended aviation infrastructure statute, since the department still has to implement the certification and reporting requirements tied to the expanded airport infrastructure definition.
• Don't take secondary coverage of this bill at face value. Check the enrolled bill text yourself before you plan around a provision you read about somewhere.

Where I think this goes next session

I'll flag this as a forecast, not a fact: I expect the sovereign immunity and preemption language to come back in some form in the 2027 session. It cleared its first committee with only one dissenting vote, which tells me there's an appetite for it. It got pulled two committees later for reasons the public record doesn't explain, which tells me it was a strategic retreat, not a rejection on the merits. If a session goes by without vertiport siting fights showing up in the news, I'd read that as the industry still being too early stage for the fight to matter yet, not as the issue being settled.

Conclusion

Florida's vertiport law is a funding bill and a P3 eligibility bill. It is not a preemption bill, no matter what got proposed in January or what some of the coverage said in April. Local governments kept their zoning and siting authority through the entire process. The money FDOT can now put behind vertiport projects is real and worth planning around, but it comes with no guaranteed dollar figure and no change to who says yes or no to where a vertiport gets built. The bigger local authority fight didn't happen this year. Based on how close it got, I wouldn't assume it's over.