A special session meant to bridge differences between House and Senate leaders over education funding and economic development instead seemed Wednesday to be driving the two chambers further apart.
In a dizzying day of developments at the Capitol, House Speaker Richard Corcoran and Senate President Joe Negron feuded over whether they had reached an understanding with Gov. Rick Scott last week about how the session would unfold.
Negron, R-Stuart, said he was not part of negotiations that paved the way for the session, which is scheduled to last three days and expected to increase school spending by $215 million while boosting funding for economic development and tourism marketing.
The Senate president said he showed up at a joint press conference with Corcoran and Scott on Friday --- where the deal was announced --- to honor a request from the governor's office.
"It was very clear to the governor in my communications with him, also through our staff, that any particular details of how the special session would unfold had not been agreed to by the Senate," he said. "In fact, we were never even approached about those particular details."
Corcoran flatly denied that Negron had not been a part of the negotiations.
"The polite way of saying that is, that's just not true," he told reporters Wednesday.
Instead, he accused Negron of breaking the deal.
"You don't come up here until you have a discussion on those nuances between the leadership teams, between the presiding officers, between the governor," he said. "All of that took place, and all of it was absolutely understood, where we were going to head during the special session. All of it is being absolutely violated by the Senate president."
Democrats pointed to the bickering in arguing that Republicans, who have dominated Tallahassee for two decades, had become incapable of governing.
"They made a secret backroom deal, now they can't even agree on the secret deal they made, and they're costing taxpayers with a chaotic special session filled with dysfunction and devoid of any leadership," said former Democratic Congresswoman Gwen Graham, a candidate for governor in 2018. "This is what happens when you strike secret deals that only help special interests."
Throughout the day, the Senate repeatedly took actions that appeared designed to show that it didn't feel bound by any deal Corcoran and Scott thought they had struck.
"We want to do what we think is right for the people we represent, and we're not going to be told what to do by somebody else," said Senate Appropriations Chairman Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, when asked about the mood of the upper chamber.
Shortly after the special session started, senators voted overwhelmingly to override Scott's veto last week of the state's main public-school funding formula. Scott vetoed the formula as part of a plan to add more money for public schools during the special session. But Latvala said the Senate override of the veto was a backup plan to make sure there was an education budget on the July 1 start of the state's fiscal year in case lawmakers can't reach agreement.
"What we're doing here is just making sure that we have this in place as an insurance policy if everything else falls apart," he said.
Later in the day, the Senate also voted to override a slate of Scott's budget vetoes targeted at higher education projects. Scott and the House have argued that money from his line-item vetoes should be used to bankroll new spending in the special session.
The Senate wants to use increased local property-tax revenues, reportedly from new construction, to pay for part of the increased public-school funding. House leaders reject that as a tax increase.
Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs, floated a new idea late Wednesday. Simmons, who chairs the chamber's education budget-writing subcommittee, proposed gutting many of the provisions of HB 7069 --- a wide-ranging and controversial education measure passed during the regular session --- and using the funds contained in that bill to boost school spending across the board.
One of Simmons' proposals would take $100 million from the "schools of hope" program, which would in part aid charter schools that open close to academically struggling public schools, and instead devote it solely to provide more services at the struggling schools.
Another would take $389 million from HB 7069, essentially defunding everything except a program for students with disabilities dear to the Senate. Simmons said some of the money in HB 7069 couldn't logistically be spent in the next year. He suggested it could take the place of the property tax money.
"If the speaker is opposed to (using the property tax funds), then we have the opportunity to find another source --- fallow, unused funds that are recurring funds that are in 7069," Simmons said.
Despite the friction between the two chambers, Corcoran said he was confident lawmakers would resolve their issues before the state was essentially left without a school budget.
"I think that we'll absolutely get to a point when the better judgment of all will prevail, and the funding for K-12 education will happen, and it will happen without a massive tax increase," he said.
But there was increasing skepticism that a deal could be reached by Friday. Simmons said the three-day timeframe was "an artificial deadline for all of us."
"They (the three days) are a real deadline, but it's one that we can work around," he said.
READ MORE FROM SUNSHINE STATE NEWS
