The Florida House and its speaker continue to sacrifice the future of the Sunshine State - especially its higher education system - to negotiate a budget.
Published May 25, 2003
Proportionally, it is one of the smaller cuts, barely a blip in the $52.3-billion appropriation bill that the Legislature finally will enact Tuesday, but the significance is great. The Tobacco Pilot Program, budgeted at $39.1-million this fiscal year, will have only $1-million in the next, just enough to go around shuffling papers and begging, likely in vain, for public service advertising time. The nation's most successful effort to keep teenagers from smoking is effectively out of business. The results are certain: shortened lives and, in the long run, vastly more spending on health care.
That was just one of many ways in which budget negotiators compromised Florida's future for the sake of compromising the budget at hand. There was money to spare to cut taxes for corporations and investors, but not to pay for enrollment growth in the universities and community colleges, whose students will pay more in tuition for fewer available courses. Legislators scrounged a little money to expand prescription drug assistance for senior citizens, but there was none to shorten the waiting lists for autism and other childhood developmental disorders. Such money as was spared for the public schools was spread much too thin.
The blame goes not to the Senate, which did call for more money, but to Speaker Johnnie Byrd, to the lapdog majority in his House of Representatives, and to a conspicuous failure of leadership on the governor's part.
This time next year, however, Floridians may look back on this as the good budget. Once again, the Legislature is sowing thorns by paying for ongoing programs with some $1.3-billion from trust funds and other sources that can't be tapped again. Doing that last year is what got them in trouble this spring.
Meanwhile, Medicaid will continue to grow in cost and caseloads, public school enrollment will continue to increase by 50,000 a year, and there will be no more room for a "loose interpretation," as Senate Appropriations Chairman Ken Pruitt describes this year's effort, of the Legislature's obligations under the class size amendment.
Without new taxes, Pruitt acknowledges, it would have to be "another bare bones budget," for fiscal 2005, with no provisions for growth in higher education.
Florida's college students, then, would continue to be the victims of calculated neglect on the part of Gov. Jeb Bush, Byrd, and like-minded legislators who consider higher education less important, politically, than the public schools. This is a reckless miscalculation. A good higher education system is vital to meeting the needs of business and industry as well as to fulfilling Florida's moral obligations to its youth and to workers who need to retrain for a changing job market.
In presenting his budget proposal (which, as it turned out, overestimated present revenue) Bush said he could not promise a no-new-taxes recommendation for the succeeding year. However, there are few people in Tallahassee who believe that he would actually call for taxes in an election year, and even fewer who dare to hope that the House of Byrd would be as reasonable.
