Gov. Rick Scott signed a law Wednesday that bans Internet cafes across the state, but local officials say the law’s impacts on Gainesville are still uncertain.
The bill, which originated from the Florida House, passed in the Florida Senate last week with a vote of 36-4.
Mayor Craig Lowe said the law’s objective to stop gambling coincides with the city’s legislative agenda.
“Due to the various associated problems with these establishments, including crime and disturbance in neighborhoods … it is something that the City of Gainesville has been advocating for,” he said.
Art Forgey, spokesman for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office, said ASO received a copy of the signed law Wednesday morning.
He said legal advisers are analyzing it to calculate the ramifications for Gainesville.
“We’re kind of at a standstill on it,” Forgey said. “They’re reviewing it to see what action we’ll take and how it affects us.”
Because most of the county’s Internet cafes are within Gainesville city limits, he said, Gainesville Police will be more involved in implementing the law.
“We don’t have near as big an issue as they’re going to have,” Forgey said.
GPD Spokesman Officer Ben Tobias said after GPD legal advisers review the bill, the next step may be to reach out to Internet cafe owners.
“Once we figure out the intent of it, we’re going to be visiting the businesses that may fall under this and do some education with them,” he said.
Tobias added the response would resemble how GPD enforced Attorney General Pam Bondi’s emergency ban on spice and synthetic cannabis last year.
Officers met with store owners who sold the banned products to explain the mandate and gave them a reasonable amount of time to pull the products from the shelves, Tobias said.
“We’re probably going to do something similar with the Internet cafes,” he said. “From what we understand preliminarily, it’s going to be a complete shutdown. We just need to figure out exactly how its going to affect us.”
Meanwhile, Tobias said, GPD officers have been working to locate the Internet cafes in the city limits and figure out which ones are still operating and which ones have closed.
“In response to the governor signing the law, we’ve noticed a lot of these places have already closed on their own,” he said. “From what we understand, it was in anticipation of the bill being signed.”
Contact Kelcee Griffis at kgriffis@alligator.org.
