Legislature must go into OT over budget

TALLAHASSEE — The Republican-dominated Legislature will need extra time to finish work on the state budget for the second time in three years, as lawmakers ended Tuesday with no agreement on an $83 billion spending plan for the year beginning July 1.

Ne go t i a t i o n s b e t wee n Hou s e S p e a ke r R i c h a r d Corcoran, Senate President Joe Negron and their budget chiefs failed to work out a final deal that would allow the annual legislative session to end on Friday, as scheduled.

Because of a constitutionally required 72-hour “cool- ing off ” period, an agreement on the budget needed to be finished Tuesday for the session to wrap up on time.

Instead, Negron stood on the Senate floor around 6:30 p.m. and conceded what had become increasingly clear: The House and Senate would miss the deadline.

“We will definitely not complete the budget work prior to the end of Friday,” said Negron, R-Stuart. “So we’ll continue to work diligently. ... I think given the current schedule, it’s improbable we’d be able to finish before Friday.”

Instead, legislative leaders will now try to work out a deal by Friday at the latest, which would allow the bud- get to be voted on as soon as Monday. It seemed unlikely that lawmakers would meet over the weekend, when Florida State University is scheduled to hold its graduation ceremonies and fill up hotel rooms across Tallahassee.

Negron’s concession came less than a week after lawmakers had confidently predicted that they would be able to hammer out differences in their competing versions of the budget despite a tight timeline for negotiations.

Negron blamed “the number of issues that we were confronted with,” from his own plans for higher education funding and a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee to Corcoran’s push for extra money for charter schools a n d t e a c h e r b o nu s e s t o what little lawmakers did to accommodate Gov. Rick Scott’s agenda.

C o r c o r a n a n d Ne g ro n s t e p p e d i n t o t a ke ove r t he ne got i at i ons Sunday afternoon following talks bet ween their respec tive budget chairs. But there have been no public meetings since then.

The final stumbling block appeared to be over how to distribute $651 million in Medicaid cuts to hospitals. The House and the Senate have different formulas for how to hand out those reductions.