- “Lawmakers and governors have used a broom to balance Florida’s budget during the Great Recession, sweeping out $2.8 billion from 95 dedicated pots of money and using it to keep the state in the black.”
Legislators admit it’s fundamentally dishonest. They say it’s necessary to deal with contingencies in bad years.
“We’ve swept these trust funds. We’ve done the bait and switch. We have violated the trust and we’ve done it to keep the lights on, keep the critical services moving in the state of Florida,” said state Sen. Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican, at the start of committee meetings considering the budget that’s now final.
On Thursday, Gov. Rick Scott signed a 2011-12 spending plan that relies on $524 million taken from 31 trust funds and thrown into general revenue, the big pot of discretionary money lawmakers use to pay state expenses.
The decisions have drained dollars from trust funds as diverse as the one filled with permit money required of tobacco and alcohol retailers and distributors ($275,240 in this year’s proposed budget) to hundreds of millions collected from the state’s tax on real-estate transaction filings that paid for affordable-housing projects (four separate raids taking a total of $571 million from the Local Government Housing Trust Fund) and the fight against invasive plants (a pair of sweeps netting $118 million).
Instead of the narrow aims of trust-fund spending, $2.8 billion since 2008 has gone into general revenue to pay the state’s bills. Without the sweeps, lawmakers could not have balanced Florida’s budget without more severe cuts or raising taxes even more than the billion in fee increases enacted in 2008. But that redirection comes at a cost.
- FLAPolitics/ 05/30/2011
- Florida Latin Connection/ Arnoldo Varona, Editor
- Florida: Budget is “fundamentally dishonest”
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