Even many of the lawmakers who voted for the new state budget admit that it provides only a short-term fix to problems that demand more serious attention.
Published May 29, 2003
To appreciate what has gone so wrong in Tallahassee, one need not rely on legislators who voted against the new budget Tuesday. What some of its leading supporters said was damning enough.
Sen. Tom Lee, for one, said it would be the last time he voted for a budget "where we put Band-Aids on cancers and ignore the reality of long-term problems that we have."
Lee's concern: looted trust funds, excessive borrowing, relying on one-time revenue sources for perpetual expenses such as education and health, and above all, the absence of any long-term plan. (A substantial extract of his speech appears on this page today.)
Lee, R-Brandon, is chairman of the Rules Committee, so he had a duty to help pass the budget to which Senate negotiators and President Jim King had agreed. However, his remarks were not so much an apology as a warning to Gov. Jeb Bush and the House of Representatives. Lee is King's likely successor in November 2004, and he doesn't mean to be as accommodating as King has turned out to be.
On that note, even King's chosen majority leader, Dennis Jones of Treasure Island, made King wince. For 2003, Jones said to King, "I would encourage you not to draw a line in the sand; draw a ditch. Let's not give up so quickly next year."
"Does it fall short?" said the chief budget-writer, Sen. Ken Pruitt, R-St. Lucie. "You bet it does."
At a press conference, King said the Senate budget team had done the best it could in the face of House Speaker Johnnie Byrd's refusal to consider new revenue beyond tuition increases and assorted fees. That was true. But even King was unsparing in listing needs that remained unmet, such as the 11,000 children with autism and other developmental disabilities who will not get state aid to which they are legally entitled, and the Supreme Court's request for 56 new judges.
But the governor didn't get it. Speaking with reporters Wednesday, Bush praised the Legislature for "the cleanest" budget of all he's seen and that "rather than wringing hands, people ought to be proud of what they've done." He complained that "there was a little too much whining going on given the good work that was done by the Senate and the House."
There was little reason for pride in the contents of the massive workers' compensation bill and none at all in the way it was passed. The Senate let the House drive the train, leaving Senate sponsors who had wanted a better bill to claim a hollow victory in the few marginal changes to which the House agreed.
Gone, for example, is the language requiring a worker to lose any combination of two eyes or limbs to qualify for permanent total disability payments. But the bill still makes it practically impossible for anyone to actually collect these benefits; a claimant would have to prove inability to "engage in at least sedentary employment within a 50-mile radius" of his or her home. As a Democratic spokesman put it, "it still makes blind people drive 50 miles to work." No matter how much they had earned before their disabling accidents, they could be left with only minimum wage - or no wage at all if a judge ruled them capable but no such job were available.
Also still in the bill: a $1,500 ceiling on what lawyers can be paid, if they win, to wring immediate medical benefits out of a tightfisted insurance company. When there appeared to be enough votes on the House floor for an amendment to raise that to a more reasonable $5,000, Republican leaders cut off debate.
The bill (SB 50A) passed despite 11th-hour concerns in the Senate that it might accidentally make criminals out of employers who unknowingly hire undocumented aliens. That alone should have been reason enough to put the bill aside until the special session on malpractice insurance, tentatively scheduled for June 16-19. But they passed it anyhow, relying on King's promise to conduct a study and correct any defects in a "glitch" bill next year.
Why were the insurance lobbyists smiling? Because they can kill any corrective legislation with a lot less trouble than it took to pass their bill this year.
"We went from doing nothing to doing anything," complained Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach.
The urge to do anything badly damaged the Senate's noble tradition of bipartisanship. When Sen. Walter G. "Skip" Campbell, D-Fort Lauderdale, came up with a parliamentary tactic to block the worker's compensation bill, King asked for his resignation as chairman of the Finance and Taxation Committee. King withdrew the demand after Democrats abandoned the scheme, but Campbell quit anyway.
