Florida Gov’t Weekly Roundup: All About The Benjamins

April 9, 2017

In real 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 this week. The House and Senate will officially approve their spending plans next week, but little is likely to change between now and then.

http://www.northescambia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/floridaweeklly.jpgIncluding, 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 non-starters in the negotiations. Turns out, the budget is full of non-starters.

“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 plan for that, and the House doesn’t; whether the money appears will go a long way to resolving that.

But $4 billion is closer to reality than a bottom-line look at the chambers’ budget proposals. The House plan (HB 5001) is $81.2 billion, while the Senate proposal (SB 2500) is officially $83.2 billion. However, the Senate doesn’t include nearly $2 billion in university tuition that does show up in the House proposal.

Accounting sleights of hand were not the main topics of discussion as the House and Senate budget-writing committees met this week to discuss their competing proposals. Each side received an overwhelming vote in favor of its plan. The Senate Appropriations Committee signed off unanimously, while the generally more partisan House Appropriations Committee approved its blueprint by a 24-2 margin.

Not that there wasn’t some controversy. Senators were trying to figure out what to do about a proposed $1.3 million cut — currently in both budgets — to the office of State Attorney Aramis Ayala, elected last year as the top prosecutor in Orange and Osceola counties.

Ayala recently announced she would not pursue the death penalty in capital punishment cases, drawing criticism from state Republican leaders and prompting Scott to shift 22 cases away from her office.

“State Attorney Ayala’s complete refusal to consider capital punishment for the entirety of her term sends an unacceptable message that she is not interested in considering every available option in the fight for justice,” Scott said Monday, as he removed Ayala from 21 of the cases.

Lawmakers say the budget cut would account for the fact that Ayala’s office wouldn’t be handling those cases.

But Kamilah Perry, Ayala’s chief of staff, told the Senate committee that her office is covering many of the costs of the transferred cases. And she said the cut would actually affect efforts to combat human trafficking.

“Less than 1 percent of all of our cases are death penalty, so the caseload is not going to be (reduced) that much,” Perry said.

An amendment that would have restored the money — proposed by Criminal Justice Chairman Randolph Bracy, D-Orlando — was withdrawn after Senate Appropriations Chairman Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, promised to look for a compromise.

“I think one thing that’s clear is, none of us really know 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 Gov. Rick 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 the Senate 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 told reporters Thursday.

A key philosophical difference remains: whether to increase state debt through bonding voter-approved money. The House has resisted that idea throughout the talks over Negron’s bill.

“We’re not bonding. Bonding is an issue,” Corcoran said. “I didn’t say we’re going to go along with it. I said it’s getting better and better.”

The same day, Negron insisted that the project needs to include bonding to bulk up funding for the work.

“I think we need to have bonding authority in Senate Bill 10 to accomplish the goals in a short period of time,” Negron said. “And I think that issue of bonding for environmental purposes, I think that’s a settled question by the voters.”

The bill proposes $64 million for the water-storage project next fiscal year, delaying for a year plans to increase the state’s share through bonding.

Money for Negron’s water project would come from the state’s Land Acquisition Trust Fund, funded through a portion of an existing real-estate tax. Voters in 2014 approved setting aside money from the fund for land and water conservation.

“We’re all entitled to our points of view on bonding, but when the voters speak and send us a directive to do bonding for environmental land purchases, I think we’re obligated to honor that constitutional imperative,” Negron said.

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 pre-trial 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,” Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart, told reporters on 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, told reporters the clear-and-convincing-evidence 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.

Lawmakers were also working on two more symbolic but still weighty measures. One would apologize to victims of decades-old beatings and sexual abuse at the now-shuttered Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, a state reform school that operated from 1900 to 2011.

Another would apologize to and urge the consideration of a pardon for four black men accused of raping a white woman in June 1949. Two of the men were killed by law enforcement, while two more were convicted. Many of those who have studied the case seriously doubt or outright dismiss the men’s guilt.

“This resolution is us simply saying we’re sorry, understanding that we will never know nor be able to make up for the pain we have caused,” said Rep. Bobby DuBose, a Fort Lauderdale Democrat and sponsor of the House version of the proposal (HCR 631).

The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the Dozier apology; the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved both measures.

STORY OF THE WEEK: Key budget-writing committees approved both the House and Senate budget plans, setting up the next stage of the critical negotiations aimed at closing out the 2017 legislative session.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “”It’s been said that this workers’ compensation issue and the bill that we have before us today in general is an egg on a spoon on a tightrope over a whole bunch of molten lava.” — House Insurance & Banking Chairman Danny Burgess, R-Zephyrhills, who is spearheading the proposal.

by Brandon Larrabee, The News Service of Florida

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Written by William Reynolds · Filed Under News