Dean Cannon Releases First Round of House Allocations

House Speaker Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, released the first round of budget allocations to the various appropriations committees on Monday.

The Florida Legislature will be called to make difficult choices for the FY 2011-12 budget, insisted Cannon in a memo sent out to House members on Monday. The Revenue Estimating Conference has determined the gap between anticipated revenues and needs to be within a range of $2.9 billion to $4.6 billion. On Friday, the REC revised their General Revenue estimate downward by $215.8 million.

Over the last four fiscal years, the Legislature has reduced state expenditures, making it improbable that we will be able to yield large savings through modest actions and generalized efficiencies, added Cannon. This is especially true in the areas of health care and K-12 education, which comprise over 60 percent of the budget.Because of the Legislatures inability to enact comprehensive Medicaid reform, we continue to experience uncontrolled escalations in the caseloads and costs of this federal entitlement program.

As Cannon noted, a good deal of the allocations went to education. The PreK-12 Appropriations Subcommittee will have $8.2 billion in general revenue, as well as $1.7 billion from trust funds. The Higher Education Subcommittee will initially have $3.1 billion from general revenue and $822 million from trust funds.

The Health Care Appropriations Subcommittee will oversee $7.1 billion from general revenue, $393 million from the tobacco settlement trust fund and more than $90 billion from other sources.

The Justice Appropriations Subcommittee will oversee $3.3 billion from general revenue and $68 million from other sources.

Other subcommittees will oversee less than $300 million apiece from general revenue. Keep an eye on the Transportation and Economic Development Subcommittee which handles almost $270 million from general revenue but almost $529 million from trust fund sweeps.