Little room for compromise amid budget talks
House and Senate leaders see plenty of nonstarters.
TA L L A H ASS E E — I n r e a l estate, it’s “location, location, location.” In the legislative session, it’s “budget, budget, budget.”
And the all-important budget process — the one thing lawmakers are constitutionally required to complete every year — started moving from the outline phase to the endgame last week. The House and Senate will officially approve their spending plans this week, but little is likely to change between now and then.
Including, apparently, the attitudes of those responsible for hammering out a compromise allowing everyone to go home. Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart, and House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’Lakes, were among the leaders already laying out what they considered to be nonstarters in the negotiations. Turns out, the budget is full of nonstarters.
“It’s $4 billion, so there’s plenty of starting points,” said House Appropriations Chairman Carlos Trujillo, R-Miami, of the differences between the budgets. “We just have to pick the right one.”
Finding it and following through will be the story that shapes the rest of the regular session.
What’s $4 billion among friends?
The $4 billion amount is a bit inflated, as it includes things like federal payments to hospitals that might not materialize. The Senate has roughly $600 million in the spending icism from state Republican plan for that, and the House leaders and prompting Gov. doesn’t; whether the money Rick Scott to shift 22 cases appears will go a long way to away from her office. resolving that. “State Attorney Ayala’s com
But $4 billion is closer to plete refusal to consider capirealit y than a bottom-line tal punishment for the entirety look at the chambers’ budof her term sends an unacget proposals. The House ceptable message that she is plan (HB 5001) is $81.2 bilnot interested in considering lion, while the Senate proevery available option in the posal (SB 2500) is officially fight for justice,” Scott said a $83.2 billion. However, the week ago. Senate doesn’t include nearly Lawmakers say the budget $2 billion in university tuicut would account for the fact tion that does show up in the that Ayala’s office wouldn’t be House proposal. handling those cases.
The House and Senate budBut Kamilah Perry, Ayala’s get-writing committees met chief of staff, told the Senate last week to discuss their comcommittee that her office is peting proposals. Each side covering many of the costs received an overwhelming of the transferred cases. And vote in favor of its plan. The she said the cut would actuSenate Appropriations Comally affect efforts to combat mittee signed off unanimously, human trafficking. while the generally more par“Less than 1 percent of all of tisan House Appropriations our cases are death penalty, Committee approved its blueso the caseload is not going print by a 24-2 margin. to be (reduced) that much,”
Not that there wasn’t some Perry said. controversy. Senators were An amendment that would trying to figure out what to do have restored the money — about a proposed $1.3 million proposed by Criminal Juscut — currently in both budgets t i c e C h a i r man Ra n d o l p h — to the office of State AttorBracy, D-Orlando — was withney Aramis Ayala, elected last drawn after Senate Appropriyear as the top prosecutor in ations Chairman Jack Latvala, Orange and Osceola counties. R-Clearwater, promised to look
Ayala recently announced for a compromise. she would not pursue the “I think one thing that’s death penalty in capital punclear is, none of us really know ishment cases, drawing crit- exactly how these costs are going to break down, and how we can correctly apportion them. … I don’t want to be responsible for lessening our enforcement in human trafficking,” Latvala said.
But Latvala conceded after the meeting that he didn’t know exactly what that compromise might include.
Meanwhile, Democrats in the House were trying to decide whether or not to vote strategically. All of them had misgivings about the plan, but Rep. Jared Moskowitz, the ranking Democrat on the committee, suggested his vote was about keeping leverage in a potential standoff between Scott and the Legislature.
“I would also remind my Democratic colleagues and my Republican colleagues that, should what we’ve been reading about for the last couple of months happen, where the governor decides to send our budget back with a veto, the override of the veto runs through the Democratic caucus in the House,” said Moskowitz, D-Coral Springs.
Spring often brings to Tallahassee as much talk of Scott vetoing the budget as it does pollen in the air, and so far there’s been no such standoff.
Water, water everywhere
One potential stumbling block got a little smaller — even if it didn’t go completely away — when t h e S e n a t e Appropriations Committee approved a scaled-back version of Negron’s plan to create a water storage project south of Lake Okeechobee.
The $1.5 billion measure (SB 10), which relies on federal money to cover half the costs, is designed to reduce polluted water discharges from Lake Okeechobee that have been tied to toxic algae in the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries east and west of the lake.
Negron, who has made the issue one of his top priorities, agreed to reconfigure the proposal after the House and some area residents balked at a $2.4 billion version that targeted farmland south of the lake for a reservoir.
Acquiring farmland remains on the table, but the plan now first would use a smaller amount of state-owned land to construct a deeper storage area.
“We’re not done yet, but this is his vision,” bill sponsor Rob Bradley, R-Fleming Island, said of Negron. “He’s put it all on the line, and the political courage he has shown is something we can all emulate.”
The proposal has faced strong criticism from Glades- area residents, politicians and landowners since being proposed last year.
Opponents have included powerful players in the sugar industry.
That doesn’t mean that the House is now copacetic to the plan, even if Corcoran sounded positive about the changes so far.
“The more the Senate works on it, the happier we are,” he said Thursday.
In other news
Not everything was about the budget — or at least not directly. The House and the Senate remain divided over what to do with a measure to shift to the state the burden of proof in some self-defense hearings.
The proposals would force prosecutors to carry the day in pretrial hearings involving the state’s controversial “stand your ground” self-defense law. The House wants prosecutors to overcome the self-defense immunity through “clear and convincing evidence.”
The Senate version of the proposal (SB 128) sets a higher standard known as “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“I’ve said from the beginning, if the government wants to convict you of a serious crime and send you to prison, they should have the burden of proof at every stage of the proceeding beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt,” Negron said Thursday. “It’s the highest legal standard in the world. It’s served us well. And in order for the government to prevail in the underlying criminal case they’re going to have to prove beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt.”House sponsor Bobby Payne, R-Palatka, said the clear-and-convincingevidence threshold was a “reasonable and fair place to land” after hearing from numerous groups regarding how the 2005 law should be interpreted.
“We need to consider the opportunity for encouraging victims to come forward in those particular situations,” Payne replied when asked why he supported the “clear and convincing” language.