Scott goes light on vetoes as he signs his last state budget
TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Rick Scott signed an $88.7 billion election-year budget Friday, but vetoed more than $64 million, the lowest amount he has wiped from a spending plan in his eight years in office.
The budget includes $21.1 billion for K-12 schools, a $485 million increase from the prior year, or a nearly $102 jump in per student funding. But nearly all of that will go to school-safety measures lawmakers approved after the mass shooting last month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida that left 17 dead. The money will pay for school resource officers, mental health counseling and “hardening” measures such as metal detectors, bulletproof windows and secure locks.
Scott ignored pleas from school administrators that funding for education wasn’t enough to keep pace with costs. The overall increase for operating costs was 47 cents per student.
The Florida Association of District School Superintendents wrote Scott a letter Thursday asking him to veto the education budget and call lawmakers back to work to find more money.
But Scott, who’s expected to run for the U.S. Senate this year, touted the “record funding” for education in the budget and the money for school safety.
“Following the tragedy in Parkland where 17 died, we came together as a state, and I was proud to recently sign the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act which invests nearly $375 million to keep our schools and communities safe so this never happens again,” Scott said in a letter announcing the signing.
The budget only received a smattering of no votes — 12 in the House, and five in the Senate — from Democratic lawmakers.
Democratic candidates for governor, however, slammed it as short-changing schools.
“The budget a governor signs is a statement of their priorities — [Gov. Scott’s] are dead wrong,” gubernatorial hopeful Chris King, a Winter Park businessman, posted on Twitter, echoing statements by former U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham, Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum. “Our students and teachers deserve better than a paltry 47-cent increase, but nothing will change in Tallahassee until we change the types of leaders we send there.”
GOP lawmakers in charge of the Legislature also passed a $170 million tax cut package, which includes a sales tax holiday on back-to-school items from Aug. 1-3, although computers aren’t included in the holiday as in previous years. Other cuts will go toward a sales tax holiday on hurricane readiness items July 1-7, a reduction in business rent taxes and a cut in sales taxes on agricultural equipment to help farms hurt by Hurricane Irma.
Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith voted against the budget in part because the money used for tax cuts could’ve been used for other things such as the education budget or preventing a $182 million raid on the affordable housing trust fund to pay for other things.
But he also was upset that 21 positions dedicated to combating human trafficking and domestic violence weren’t restored to the office of Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala. The jobs were cut last year because of Ayala’s stance against the death penalty. Ayala set up a committee to review potential death penalty cases to comply with a state Supreme Court order.
“Those positions have still not been filled, which hurts the efforts of the Ninth Judicial Circuit to keep our community safe from human trafficking and domestic abuse,” said Smith, D-Orlando. “That’s wrong.”
There were other parts of the budget Democrats did favor, though, such as $100 million for Florida Forever, a state land conservation program severely cut in the years after the Great Recession.
After a vocal political battle last year over tourism spending, the issue largely flew under the radar this year. Lawmakers agreed to fund Visit Florida at $76 million, the same as the current year but short of the $100 million Scott requested. Lawmakers also approved $85 million for a growth fund for job training and road projects, another top priority for Scott.
In Central Florida, the list of vetoed projects includes $2 million that would’ve been used to expand the Lynx operations center to aid disabled passengers; $1 million to extend Harmon Road in Apopka; and $282,366 for pedestrian improvements on Quail Pond Circle in Casselberry.
In his veto letter, Scott said he eliminated funding for the projects because they were not reviewed by the state Department of Transportation.
The largest veto this year was $10 million that Scott prevented from being removed from a trust fund intended to pay for investigations into organized crime and consumer fraud.
Scott also vetoed $5 million that would have gone toward maintenance at charter schools because there was already $145.3 million for such projects in other parts of the budget. Another $1.5 million for a feasibility study of expanding the Suncoast Parkway to the Georgia border to aid hurricane evacuations was axed by Scott, who said the Department of Transportation could conduct the study with its existing budget.
Scott has vetoed more than $2 billion in his eight years in office. The highest was $610 million in 2011, his first year, but this year he used his veto pen sparingly as he considers the Senate run, just as he did in 2014 when he ran for reelection and vetoed only $69 million.