Florida Bar Affiliation’s Household Legislation Division Says It No Longer Helps Baby Assist Reform Invoice It Helped Draft Orlando Space Information | Orlando

Near the end of its 2016 session, the Florida Legislature approved a bill to Gov. Rick Scott that has left the Florida Bar in a strange bind: The Bar Association’s family law division is now asking the governor to veto a bill to insert the z for the most part, she wrote, she committed to this year and wanted to see it off.

The bill, alimony reform, is probably the most quietly controversial bill to make its way through the statehouse this year. It wasn’t big news like fracking or gambling was, but it was acrimoniously debated in legislative committees and on social media, and people on both sides of the debate – those in favor of maintenance reform and those against – have a lot at stake in battle.

On one side are dependents, many of them women, who have stopped working for years to raise children and help their ex-husbands succeed in their careers. On the other hand, there are alimony payers – mostly men, although there are some women among them – who feel they don’t have to pay their ex-spouses for the rest of their lives and that the current system is bleeding them dry.

If the reform measure is signed into law, the bill would change the way courts determine alimony — it would give judges guidelines for deciding alimony, limit how long alimony can be paid to recipients, abolish “lifetime” alimony, and spell out specific circumstances under where alimony payments are possible may be changed or terminated. That’s something Tom Sasser, a West Palm Beach attorney and former chair of the Florida Bar Association’s family law division, who is serving as the bar association’s alimony spokesman this year, says Florida has long needed it.

“There are no guidelines for child support payments today,” he says. “There is a list of factors for the court to consider, but they are not arithmetic. We say that certain types of alimony are available for a specific length of marriage, but we make no policy. It’s very discretionary in Florida, and that’s what the bill wants to change… It sets a framework within which to negotiate, so you’re not dealing with extremes. That was really the biggest driving force behind it. You used to be dealing with a high degree of variability, and it varied from county to county, courtroom to courtroom.”

However, the bill also contains problematic provisions. Among them, Sasser says, is a last-minute addition that eliminates guidelines for marriages that have lasted more than 20 years, and in those cases encourages judges to “equalize” the incomes of the two ex-spouses. Sasser says the whole point of the bill was to prevent child support payments from being arbitrary and utterly contradictory, and this clause defeats its intended purpose. The other stressful part deals with parenting, asking judges to assume that when children are involved in a divorce situation, both parents are equally qualified to raise them and should have 50:50 custody. Sasser says the Bar Association’s family law division strongly disagrees with that provision.

“The court should look at the children and decide what’s best for them, regardless of what’s best for the parents,” he says.

Some alimony recipients — many of them women who say they’ve spent their prime working years supporting husbands and families — also see other problems with the bill. Take Ann Dwyer of Longwood, for example. She is 71 years old, has been married for 20 years and moved around the country when her husband got a new job. She worked a bit, she says, but her main job was taking care of the family so her husband could focus on work.

“We married in 1967 and both had bachelor’s degrees,” she says. “He left in 1988, and it took me four years to get a good job. … Between 1988 and 1992 I had to go back to school because my degree meant nothing.”

Even worse, she says, is that she worked so little during her marriage that she didn’t earn much Social Security, so she can’t count on it. Child support recipients also get half of their ex-spouse’s Social Security when they retire, but Dwyer says she still works 25 hours a week to make ends meet and she doesn’t think she’ll ever have enough money to retire to go. The new child support law eliminates so-called “permanent” child support and allows pension-age payers to demand that child support payments end when they are ready to stop working — a luxury Dwyer says she will never enjoy.

“I’m 71 and I’m still working, even though I’m getting my keep,” she says.

One provision of the Child Support Act in particular irks her, she says, and it’s a clause that states that an increase in income of just 10 percent may be enough for a child support payer to seek a modification of a child support agreement. For example, if a woman who makes $10 an hour gets a $1 an hour raise for the job she takes to get back on her feet after the divorce, her ex-husband could take her to court, to reduce their alimony.

Sasser and supporters of the bill say this law is not retroactive — it says it only applies to child support agreements in process or made after the bill went into effect on Oct. 1, 2016, and does not automatically change existing child support agreements. The language of the bill also states that its passage may not be the “sole basis” for child support payers to request changes to child support agreements, which Sasser says are still governed by the laws in effect at the time the original child support agreement was signed, since the bill does not itself constitute a “material change in circumstances” necessary for a change. Concerns that the law would change existing agreements are unfounded.

However, Dwyer says the language in the bill is difficult — it says a party is entitled to request an “immediate change” in child support if the recipient receives that 10 percent increase, because the bill defines it as a “substantial change.” ‘ might be considered.” She worries that lawyers and judges could interpret the 10 percent clause as a reason to take ex-spouses back to court in order to reach a better settlement.

“I make $15 an hour working for a divorce attorney,” says Jan Killilea, a Boca Raton woman who divorced in 2009 after 25 years of marriage. She says she has moved nine times over the course of her marriage to pursue her husband’s career. “Now if I get a 10 percent raise, my ex-husband, who made $365,000 last year, can invite me on a change.”

Killilea, who founded an organization called First Wives Advocacy Group to support women receiving child support, has spoken out very openly against the law. She has been interviewed by NPR, testified before the Legislature and started Facebook groups where women like her can meet and talk about their situation. In return for speaking out, she faces cyberbullying on social media — a search for her name on Facebook yields posts in which a group called First Husbands Alimony Group posts photos of her and criticizes her for dating, traveling and skiing moves. In one of their posts, the First Husbands group calls lifelong support recipients “parasites with entitlement issues.”

Killilea says she’s not opposed to alimony reform outright, but says when it comes to it it must be comprehensive and fair to all parties. She points out that although some child support payers refuse to pay child support (or even child support payments), this bill does not strengthen enforcement. It also changes the law so that alimony payments can be challenged if the recipients are involved in a so-called “supportive” relationship — the current law requires cohabitation or marriage for alimony payments to end — but it doesn’t really define what alimony payments should be means that the courts are left to decide based on a variety of factors.

Sasser says many of the concerns that alimony had about the bill were premature. He says judges’ decisions can currently unfairly affect either alimony recipient or payer, and the new law gives both sides some reasonable expectations of the process.

“A lot of people have said, ‘Oh my god, this is going to leave women with no money,'” he says. “But these guidelines don’t do that. … What we’ve proposed is based on guidelines used in other states and countries, and they haven’t done all the horrible things that people say they’ve done. In other jurisdictions where these guidelines have been applied, people have made the same arguments, and you know what? It did not happen.

However, there is this part of the law on child care. A 50-50 parent agreement assumes that both parents are equally able to care for children and all costs are split based on the number of nights the children stay with each parent. If one parent chooses not to spend allotted time with their children, critics point out, the burden falls on the other parent to care for them while still paying their full share of the cost of caring for their children . Carey Hoffman, a divorced mother and advocate for women on child support, points out that the new law leaves children vulnerable to the whims of angry parents going through a contentious divorce.

“It starts at 50-50, then you have to show evidence why it’s not working,” she says, but it’s costly to go to court repeatedly, and most working parents can’t afford it. So, in the end, the children suffer. “The system is already not working and this legislation only creates more shortcomings. There are many family court matters that need to be dealt with and they have to deal with the other matters first.”

Sasser agrees that the bill’s childcare clause is burdened, and even if the Bar Association’s family law division could get past the 20-year marriage amendment, it can’t overlook the childcare part. He says it puts the Bar Association’s family law division in the “unenviable position of opposing the legislation it supports.”

“It’s very frustrating because the section has worked very hard on the entertainment piece and they really want it to go through,” he says. “But it’s also very much about children. Rule #1 in the family court system is: kids come first. So [the Family Law section of the bar] is willing to fight its own child support legislation to protect the best interests of the children.”