By JONI JAMES and JENNIFER LIBERTO
Published April 19, 2004
TALLAHASSEE - There's more than money at stake as Florida lawmakers secret themselves away in state budget negotiations.
Fundamental policy questions - such as who will oversee the state's private prisons - also are on the table.
More than usual this year, legislative leaders, particularly in the House, have used the budget, rather than legislation, to change how Florida conducts its business.
Among the substantive policy issues that likely will be decided in closed-door meetings:
- The Senate wants to shut down the state board that oversees Florida's five private prisons and hand oversight to other state agencies.
- The House wants to prohibit state agencies from awarding contracts to companies who don't employ Floridians to do the work unless the state Cabinet grants a waiver.
- The House would create a new appeals court for Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, contrary to Florida Supreme Court wishes.
- The House proposes significant changes for state employees, including a mandatory 10 percent cut in average salary for new employees and an overhaul of the health care plan that would allow some workers to opt out of full-benefit coverage.
Budget conference committees, where negotiations began Friday, are open to the public, but practice and tradition dictates that big decisions are made behind closed doors among key leaders, leaving the public and other lawmakers in the dark.
For example, one committee surprised observers Saturday, when the Senate abruptly agreed with the House to continue funding programs for the chronically ill and low-income pregnant women.
But, deciding policy issues under the guise of budget negotiations has prompted consternation among rank-and-file lawmakers, who have just begun to realize what their colleagues are contemplating.
"It seems like every year we've eroded the protections that members have been afforded in the rules," Sen. J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales, a former House member, complained from the Senate floor Friday. "This seems like a precedent that's moving further down that track and into some very dangerous waters."
The reason some members are upset: It's nearly impossible to kill a policy change once it makes it into the 375-plus-page budget compromise that will be crafted during the next nine days. To strip language from a compromise budget plan would require nothing short of extending the legislative session past its April 30 scheduled adjournment, a highly unpalatable idea to Republican leaders anxious to hit the campaign trail.
The strategy was most noticeable in early April when House members amended their budget plan on the House floor with ideas that would have been killed by the Senate as standalone bills.
Senate President Jim King, R-Jacksonville, told senators Friday that Senate budget negotiators would seek to kill any issues the Senate has not debated. But King also gave no guarantees, maintaining that this budget process is no different from past years.
"It would be virtually impossible to say that everything that's in the (budget compromise) is going to be something that every one of us has ever seen," he said. Members can always vote the budget down, he said. But several senators said they are uncomfortable with this year's process, and a few, including Alexander, voted against measures that sent budget bills to negotiations Thursday.
"The fear is perhaps ... something is going to suddenly get onto a bill at the last minute of what we're doing and we might not catch it," said Sen. Evelyn Lynn, R-Ormond Beach.
