APA: the practitioner's "road maps" to the revised APA.

• Author: Kearney, Deborah K.
• Position: Florida

The legislature substantially revised Florida's Administrative Procedure Act (APA) during the 1996 regular session. In addition to the many substantive changes in the 1996 law, the legislature enacted a comprehensive reorganization of the APA. Many felt that this reorganization was long overdue as the APA had been amended frequently since its enactment in 1974 and had become disorganized.

The organizational rewrite of the APA was prompted by Gov. Chiles' desire to make the APA more readable, more understandable, and more logically organized, not so much for administrative law practitioners, but so that the ordinary citizen, legislators, and those with only the occasional need to understand the APA might be able to do so. The Governor's APA Review Commission endorsed the simplified APA, as did the Administrative Law Section of The Florida Bar. In fact, many members of the section's executive council were involved in the early drafting and review process of the rewrite.

To those familiar with the organization of the "old" APA, the "revised" APA may initially resemble the cards in a game of "52 pick-up." A more cynical commentator described this first impression as follows:

If someone does me a favor and cleans up my office and clears my desk, it may look to all the world like I am more organized. However, if I do not know where everything is placed, that cosmetic cleanup will be a hinderance, not a help. I will need to search high and low for things that used to be right at my fingertips. Even if it is well-intended, the Governor's technical revision of the APA is precisely that type of cleanup. It has put familiar things in unfamiliar places. The people who work with the APA already know where everything is. If the Act's requirements are extensively rewritten and reorganized, the people who work with it will have difficulty finding even the most familiar things. This will create confusion, inefficiency, despite the neatness of the draft.(1)

To which one of your authors responded:

You may well have a disorganized desk, Steve. Mine is almost certainly in greater disarray than yours; but then very few others are affected by the height of the piles of paper on my desk. What is clear from your many writings is that you understand the need to write in a clear, orderly manner. This is because the purpose of your articles, Steve, like the purpose of the Florida Statutes (and unlike your or my housekeeping habits), is to inform others.(2)

The revised...