Opinion: The hole legislators are digging

When the Florida Legislature finally enacts a budget, members might want to mark the occasion by wearing hard hats to symbolize the huge hole into which they're digging themselves. Some $1.3-billion in proposed spending is to be financed by what lawmakers call "nonrecurring" revenue -- unspent appropriations, idle trust funds and other available cash balances. Senate Majority Leader Jim King candidly compares it to "paying off your Visa with your Mastercard." Eating your seed corn would be another apt analogy.

This would not be a concern if it were paying for brick-and-mortar projects that need to be built only once. But most of it is assigned to ongoing educational and human service programs that few if any legislators would care to stop. As they try next spring to figure out how to continue these programs in the 2003-2004 fiscal year, they will be starting, in effect, with a $1.3-billion deficit.

And that's before reckoning with inflation, higher enrollment in the schools, inexorable (and unavoidable) Medicaid cost increases attributable to an aging population, and a constitutional requirement that by July 1, 2004, the state assume the full cost, now shared with the counties, of operating the court system. The court issue alone carries a price tag of at least $300-million to $500-million.

Normal revenue growth may suffice to cover some of that, especially if the economy accelerates, but even the optimists in Tallahassee do not expect it to stretch much beyond the programs that are being continued with nonrecurring dollars in the budget now under debate.

In that light, the legislators who are leaving this year may be entitled to consider themselves the lucky ones.

King, who is in line to succeed John McKay as Senate president, says there's "not a day that goes by that I don't worry about this." The Legislature's presiding officers and budget staffs, as he puts it, "are really going to be fiscally challenged." Still, he says, "no one wants to tax -- not the governor, not the House, not the Senate."

But if no one wants to, everyone seeking the public's votes this fall should be prepared to say what services they would cut. The medically needy, yet again? Prison guards? Teachers' aides? Bright Futures scholarships, yet again?

It's not unusual for the Legislature to tap the cash drawer as it's doing now. In every year at least some nonrecurring revenue is available to be earmarked to the next year's budget. What makes the venture so risky now is that lawmakers propose to appropriate so much of it with no reason to hope that similar amounts will still be unspent this time next year.

Budget-writers have sought prudently to safeguard the basic school financing formula by using the reserves elsewhere. But this only postpones the day of reckoning for such other programs as the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, which would continue to receive state assistance only from nonrecurring funds.

The depth of the hole legislators are digging calls into even greater question how any of them could intelligently intend to vote for the $396-million corporate tax break that the Senate Finance and Taxation Committee approved Monday night. King predicts the vote on the floor will be as close as the 5-4 margin in committee. That would be good news, but only if the vote goes the other way.

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