Florida TaxWatch said Tuesday that $203 million in "turkeys" are ready for Gov. Rick Scott to pluck from this year's state budget.
The list of 105 questionable appropriations, the most since 2007, was announced by Florida TaxWatch President and CEO Dominic Calabro at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.
Targeted outlays ranged from $12 million for a National Veterans Homeless Support Group in Brevard County to a $5 million "International Regatta Sports Center" in Pinellas County.
Scott, who proposed a $66 billion budget, has been poring over the Legislature's $69.7 billion spending plan in search of line-item veto opportunities.
The governor has promised to make "significant" cuts in the budget after lawmakers failed to deliver on the $5 billion in reductions he proposed.
"Turkeys" are a logical place to start, TaxWatch says, because they bypassed the normal committee-approval process. In some cases, the projects weren't even requested by the agencies that would administer them.
Last year, TaxWatch identified 41 such projects totaling $60.6 million.
Though both houses of the Legislature are controlled by Republicans, and Senate President Mike Haridopolos called his chamber the "most conservative" in Florida history, lawmakers cooked up a conventional budget seemingly at odds with the state's precarious fiscal condition.
Calabro cautioned that the "turkey" designation doesn't necessarily mean the intended expenditure isn't worthwhile. But like congressional "earmarks" or pork-barrel projects at the federal level, the means may not justify the ends.
"The budget turkey label does not condemn a project's worthiness, but instead focuses on the budget process, including instances where the Legislature has not followed its own policies and procedures to ensure the highest standards of accountability and government efficiency," Calabro said.
For example, the $12 million for the Brevard veterans' project was added in conference and not requested by any agency. Likewise, the $5 million Pinellas rowing center grant was inserted by Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton, with no accompanying request by any agency.
Other big-ticket "turkeys," dominated by higher-education construction projects, included:
- $10 million for the University of South Florida pharmacy school;
- $7.5 million for the Brevard Community College Public Safety Institute;
- $7.3 million for a Palm Beach State College administration building;
- $5 million for a Glades County Community Operations Center.
Regarding several other projects ranging from $100,000 to $5 million, the TaxWatch study determined that they "noncompetitively benefit a very limited special interest or local area of the state."
"In one of the toughest budget years on record, our leaders should have been as disciplined and consistent with taxpayer money as Florida families are forced to be with their own budgets," Calabro said.
Calling turkeys the product of "political preferences" that overrode good government, the TaxWatch report noted that the resulting $203 million in allocations could offset cuts in other areas. For example:
- Student funding -- $138 million could increase per-student funding for K-12 by $53.
- Medicaid cuts -- $163 million would have eliminated most of the 6.5 percent Medicaid reimbursement rate cut to nursing homes.
- Saving transportation jobs -- using the savings from general revenue alone, the sweep of the State Transportation Trust Fund could have been cut almost in half, savings thousands of jobs.
- Florida employers -- $91 million could have paid the interest due in 2012 on the federal loans the state took to prop up the Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund.
Scott is scheduled to sign the fiscal 2012 budget Thursday at The Villages, the sprawling retirement community in Central Florida.
Calabro said that though the "window of opportunity is very limited," he was hopeful that the governor would take the TaxWatch recommendations into account.
The following are pertinent TaxWatch pdfs:
- Open the full report here.
- Open the turkey list arranged by county here.
- Open the turkey list arranged by bill number here.
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Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
