People or pork? Decision time for DeSantis with state budget

TALLAHASSEE – Gov. Ron DeSantis sure sounded like he would protect Florida taxpayers from politically-motivated porkbarrel spending by state lawmakers in the new $91 billion state budget.

Was he serious, or was it all talk? We’ll soon find out. The new fiscal year begins July 1. DeSantis received the budget Friday and will soon flex his line-item veto muscle for the first time.

“If there are things that I consider to be extravagant or pork projects, you probably would end up O.K. to place wagers that I’ll veto that,” DeSantis said in April. “The more you can make the argument that something is benefiting a wider constituency, that’s something that is probably going to be better for me. But if it’s just something because you’re trying to deliver a pork project home, that’s going to be tougher to sustain.”

Don’t expect DeSantis to engage in the kind of theatrics that accompanied Gov. Rick Scott’s first round of vetoes in 2011. The new guy is smarter than that.

Scott, fresh from his first victory boosted by tea party members, headed off to the Republicans’ favorite echo chamber, The Villages, to blast the legislature for “short-sighted, frivolous, wasteful” spending and knocked $615 million out of the budget (though about half of that was land-buying authority). It was seen by many lawmakers as a stunt at their expense, and it set the tone for eight years of tensions.

The talk lately around Tallahassee is DeSantis will veto between $100 million and $200 million in projects, a relative pittance in a budget this size. That would be enough to send a message to the legislature that he’s being a fiscal cop, but not enough to make people really angry.

The trick for him is to appear evenhanded in a year when he got just about everything he asked for from the House and Senate, including nearly $700 million for a series of environmental programs.

Scores of projects are sprinkled throughout the budget. In Broward, for example, there’s $500,000 toward the replacement of a Pembroke Pines fire station that the city says can withstand only a Cat 3 hurricane; $450,000 for a fiber-optic communications system in Tamarac; $425,000 for Deerfield Beach to acquire beach lots; and $375,000 for safety guardrails in Southwest Ranches.

Elsewhere, there’s $13.3 million to four-lane a Citrus County road, a project outside the DOT’s five-year work program and in the district of Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, who likely will be Senate president in 2020. It’s part of an $85 million pot of projects that includes $2.5 million for the Tampa Bay Regional Transportation Authority — all courtesy of you, the taxpayer.

Every year, lawmakers insist they know their local needs better than state bureaucrats, but it’s bad policy to let individual politicians set transportation priorities, such as Senate President Bill Galvano’s three new toll roads.

Florida TaxWatch, in its annual “turkey report,” lists $133 million spent on 109 projects it said deserve to be vetoed because legislators approved them at virtually the last minute “with no debate or explanation.”

Many projects surfaced as late-session “supplemental” lists known as “sprinkle lists,” in what has become a routine horse-trading exercise between the two chambers.

Tucked inside the nearly 500-page budget is $8 million to convert a former YWCA into an privately-owned workforce housing complex in downtown Jacksonville known as the Lofts at Cathedral.

The city-backed project would bypass the Florida Housing Finance Corporation’s selection process at a time when the state faces a severe affordable housing crisis in a year when lawmakers raided $115 million from a local housing trust fund.

In the budget, the project is known as “Jacksonville Urban Core Workforce Housing Project.”

As Florida Trend and the Florida Times-Union have reported, the developer is The Vestcor Companies, whose chairman, John Rood, has deep Republican ties. Rood, who gave $25,000 to DeSantis’ campaign last fall, was U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under President George W. Bush. The firm gave $25,000 more to DeSantis’ PAC in February.

Like every urban center in Florida, Jacksonville has a workforce housing shortage, and the project has drawn cheers from the Times-Union editorial board.

The only question now is whether DeSantis will go along.

“I’ll tell you this,” DeSantis said in April. “I’m in a much better place to engineer good outcomes for the taxpayers of Florida having the line-item veto … (and) I’m not afraid to wield it.”