Weekly State Roundup: Legislature’s Turn To Get To Work

January 15, 2011

If last week was about Gov. Rick Scott fulfilling his campaign slogan and getting to work, this week it was the Legislature’s turn.

Lawmakers came back to Tallahassee for the first really substantive committee meeting in preparation for the 2011 session, and while they were here, they dove head first into a host of controversial issues, including immigration, pension and tort reform and gambling. It was all against a backdrop a budget shortfall that crept up to $3.6 billion this week, leaving them with plenty of work to get to.

That news was enough to make even Senate President Mike Haridopolos, who made clear this week he is running for U.S. Senate, declare that always-popular tax cuts were likely off the table this year.

“If we see some opportunities for tax relief that we feel absolutely confident will create more jobs and actually grow the economy, we’re open to them,” Haridopolos said. “At this point, we are struggling so much with a $3.5 billion shortfall that tax cuts are not part of our equation.”

Gov. Rick Scott disagreed, providing the first glimmers of daylight between the more conservative governor and the more conservative legislative leaders. Scott campaigned on cutting the state’s property taxes by $1.4 billion and phasing out the corporate income tax over seven years – with a first-year reduction of $835 million.

“We’re going to deal with the deficit,” Scott told reporters during a visit to the state’s emergency operations center. “But…the way to get the state back to work is to cut property taxes and phase-out the corporate income tax, and we’re going to get that done.”

It wasn’t clear, though, just how to do that, even to the Senate’s long-time budget chief, Sen. J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales.

“We have 300,000 homes in Florida that the power is turned off on, we have 23 percent of all residential mortgages are not current. These are very challenging times for the people of Florida….we’ve got to live on what we have,” he said.

Meanwhile, on the first floor, Gov. Scott was settling in as his regulations office was beginning to work through the 900 or so agency-drafted rules it now must vet before they can go into effect. Scott has kept hims promise to slow down rule making, and his office has cleared about five of the regulations to go ahead and get to work.

The governor’s office signed off on about $80 million in road and bridge projects that were held up, and cleared new rules for Lottery scratch-off games. Another rule that is now free to go is one affecting Medicaid reimbursement for hospitals. Contracts and grants were also starting to come unfrozen, with hundreds of millions in environmental projects and local grants allowed to resume.

Also this week, the Senate waded into the controversial immigration debate, which figures to be a hot topic in several state legislatures as they look to replicate an Arizona law that inflamed national debate last year.

But the Senate only stuck its toe in the water, holding a three hour meeting to gather information from homeland security officials, the state Department of Education, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Highway Safety on how both legal and illegal immigration affects the state. Sen. Anitere Flores, R-Miami, who chaired the meeting and is Hispanic, said it was just intended to get people talking.

And it did.

“If they bring something similar [to Arizona's law], it will be a good sign that they are ignoring Floridians,” Juan Chavez, a membership organizer for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said. “And that’s basically a good sign to destroy the economy of the state. So we’d be basically legalizing racial profiling if they bring something similar.”

Sen. Mike Bennett, who so far is the sponsor of the Senate measure to give police additional powers to check immigration status, also did some interesting talking. He said after hearing from interested parties, he’s not even sure he could vote for his bill in its current form.

Later this week, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, whose office promotes and regulates an industry that depends in part on immigrant labor, urged caution.

“Florida policy makers have to be very thoughtful about this issue,” Putnam said. And simply “cutting and pasting” the Arizona law is not very thoughtful, he said.

Not only is the ag industry concerned about how immigrants perceive the state’s attitude toward them – the whole state depends on having a good image among foreigners. “We are an international tourist destination,” Putnam pointed out. And, he said, a business magnet for Latin America. Hostility doesn’t go over well when trying to get people to invest here, he said.

“We have to be very careful about the messages that we send,” cautioned Putnam, who bemoaned the fact that he was unable to get the federal government to come up with a solution to the immigration problem while he was in Congress.

Gaming was also in the cards this week as lawmakers began playing their hands after Scott played his last week – though he quickly tried to pick them back up. Doing the dealing this week was the same panel of lawmakers that helped orchestrate the Legislature’s gaming compact with the Seminole Indian Tribe. They’re shuffling the deck to see if authorizing non-Indian, Vegas style casinos or online poker might increase the state’s winnings.

Senate Regulated Industries Committee Chairman Dennis Jones is betting on it. He told reporters this week he is in the process of drafting legislation to allow more gambling options if the committee decides to proceed. Inviting Las Vegas style gaming to the state could be appealing because it would allow cities to attract big convention business, Jones said.

WHICH WAY IS THE TRAIN GOING?

Senate President Mike Haridopolos had to explain this week why he was for rail before he was against it.

First, members of a committee that Haridopolos created made it clear they’re more interested in a high speed rail connecting Tampa and Orlando than he is. Haridopolos has said recently that even if the state has to pay $280 million instead of the $2.6 billion the train is projected to cost – the feds have offered to pick up most of the tab – it still would be too expensive.

But Sen. Paula Dockery, a member of the Senate Tourism and Commerce Committee, noted that Haridopolos supported another train that the state is paying to buy the tracks for: SunRail.

Haridopolos explained the difference by saying the trains themselves were different.

“(SunRail) is something I chose to support because it is a mixture of funds,” he said. “It’s federal, state and local. This is a project that has been worked on in Central Florida for over 10 years. It is supported by Republicans and Democrats alike and the local governments and that particular DOT region chose to use some of their road money for rail because they thought it would be very important to that region.”

Many of the same things could be said of the high speed rail project, but Haridopolos said a key difference is that voters have weighed in on the high speed train twice. One time they were for it, one time they were against it, which is what critics were saying of his position this week.

Associated Industries of Florida, one of the state’s major business lobbies, announced it was forming a high-speed rail coalition, which it said would include “private-sector companies that want the jobs, the work and the prestige that will come from being a part of Florida high speed rail.”

“Decisions to abandon the project can always be made further down the road if the conditions are not ideal,” AIF said in a statement. “Right now, we have an opportunity to leverage private investment to secure billions in federal dollars for a project that will have an incredibly positive impact on our state. Let’s not derail high speed rail.”

Elsewhere, Attorney General Pam Bondi likely surprised some of her supporters by asking a federal court to dismiss a case filed by two members of Congress that attempts to strike down a recently passed amendment to the Florida Constitution changing the way congressional districts are drawn. Those amendments, 5 & 6, are widely presumed to help Democrats, making it odd that a new Republican AG would object to the lawsuit.

Bondi didn’t come out against the effort, she merely said the plaintiffs were in the wrong court. The voting rights act issues should be before the D.C. federal circuit.

STORY OF THE WEEK: The issues that will shape the 2011 legislative session continued taking shape this week, with lawmakers taking issues such as immigration, pension and tort reform and gambling. But looming in the background on all those issues is a budget deficit that got a little bit bigger this week, increasing to $3.6 billion.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “We have some significant work ahead of us. Our first priority will be to make a budget work,” Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman J.D. Alexander, though it wasn’t immediately clear this week how.

By Keith Laing
The News Service Florida

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Written by William Reynolds · Filed Under News