Lawmakers begin to piece together Florida’s budget
TALLAHASSEE — Lawmakers began to put the pieces of the budget together Saturday, a process that has taken longer this year than anytime over the past 23 years.
House and Senate negotiators traded offers on spending plans, but major disagreement remains on spending for health care, education and the environment.
Republicans in the House and Senate failed to come to an agreement during the regular session and now have until June 30 to reach a budget deal to avert a government shutdown. The House voted down a Senate plan to use federal Medicaid funds to expand health coverage Friday, paving the way for budget negotiations.
The Senate’s $80.4 billion budget passed in April will likely be cut, coming in closer to the House’s $76.2 billion spending plan.
The broad outline of a health-care deal is in place. Lawmakers will use $400 million in state funds to boost funding for hospitals bracing for a $1.2 billion cut in a federal Medicaid program. How those funds will be meted out to hospitals throughout the state and for which programs is yet to be determined.
“[We] are committed to working through the policy of how we get to those numbers, and we can certainly get there,” said Rep. Matt Hudson, R-Naples, the House’s top health-care budget writer.
Although the chambers are close on total education spending, the Senate wants to include bills that died in the regular session. Among the bills included are Senate President Andy Gardiner’s plan to boost learning accounts for disabled students.
The chambers are far apart on spending for the environment, as House leaders want to put less money into buying conservation land and more funds for land management, in opposition to Senate desires. The Senate budget includes $20 million for restoring Lake Apopka, which isn’t in the House budget.
Environmental groups that pushed for Amendment 1 passed by voters last fall say lawmakers aren’t putting enough money into new land buying, instead using it to pay for staff and ongoing projects and operations. House leaders, though, say they’re in compliance with the amendment because it allows for funding for other environmental projects.
Whether to borrow money to pay for more land is another point of contention between the House and Senate. The House has more than $200 million in bonded funding to pay for projects related to Amendment 1, whereas the Senate has none.
“As long as the Senate’s opposed to any bonding we’re going to have a hard time getting that part of the budget resolved,” said Rep. Matt Caldwell, R-Lehigh Acres, lead environmental-policy writer in the House.
Lawmakers are committed to completing the budget and avoiding a government shutdown, but parts of the deals being struck are already clashing with Gov. Rick Scott’s priorities.
His $673 million tax cut has been trimmed to $463 million over two years and his push for record per-pupil K-12 education funding falls just short in the latest Senate offer, which comes in at $7,097 per student, or 3 percent more than the current year.
Scott has vetoed bond projects in prior years and has written to the federal government saying he won’t support using state funds to replace federal hospital dollars. Yet legislators say they think Scott is keen to get past Florida’s budget crisis.
“I know that the governor wants to see us get a budget done. He wants to see done what’s right for Florida,” Hudson said.