A Times Editorial

Weighing the turkeys

The process Gov. Jeb Bush uses to evaluate what budget items he will veto should be improved next year to cut down on the political dealmaking.

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 4, 2000

Of the nearly 300 special appropriations totaling $313-million that Gov. Jeb Bush vetoed the other day, many if not most probably deserved it. He deserves credit for insisting, to the extent that he did, that legislators' individual pet projects square with some consistent criteria and priorities, and for refusing to let the Legislature buy out the school impact fees of 15 counties at the cost of $50-million to taxpayers at large.

But it was almost comical for him to claim moral high ground for a "process" that spared four of the fattest, ripest-for-plucking turkeys ever to take wing in Tallahassee: a medical school, a chiropractic school and two law schools that the Board of Regents had not recommended and did not want.

Those decisions had nothing in common with "process" except the letter p, as in "politics."

House Speaker John Thrasher, the governor's main man, was determined to get the medical school for Florida State University, his alma mater. Black and Hispanic legislators seized their chance to trade votes for the law schools, which they expect, more on faith than on fact, to endow Florida with more minority lawyers. Unable to contain his joy, Thrasher also gifted retiring Speaker Pro Tem Dennis Jones, R-Seminole, a chiropractor, with the nation's first public chiropractic school, also to be situated at Florida State, which may forfeit some of the prestige it hoped to gain from training doctors of medicine.

In no way did any of those fit Bush's idealized concept of a "budget process that is taxpayer-friendly, policy-based, accountable and priority-driven." The political dealmaking contrasts vividly with Bush's veto of other higher education projects, including demonstrably needed new clinics at the University of South Florida medical school, for not having the Board of Regents' seal of approval.

The Legislature had exhaustively discussed and justified the $25.5-million that Bush cut, without warning or explanation, from funds for scholarships, training, counseling and transportation to implement the new Workforce Innovation Act. This was a priority of Senate President Toni Jennings, who suffered insult upon injury when the governor's office left her to learn about that veto when everyone else did.

As the governor conceded, the budget-vetting process is still a work in progress. Water and sewer projects aren't ranked by priority, as they should be. The governor's budget office evaluated health and human services projects without sufficient input from legislators. In many cases, what passed muster and what didn't recalled Justice Potter Stewart's memorable line about obscenity: They couldn't define a turkey, but they thought they knew it when they saw it.

What the governor didn't see when he should have also included a highly questionable $720,000 earmarked directly to a private company that is developing a window film to save on energy costs. If that deserves a subsidy, Florida already has a variety of tax concessions that could have been applied. A cash grant is terrible precedent.

Bush and the Legislature have much to talk about before next year, such as expanding the secretary of state's cultural review to include costlier grants. His veto of $1.1-million for the Florida International Museum, because it hadn't been through a process, was a Catch-22. There is no process for cultural requests that large.

There also needs to be a meeting of minds on Bush's assumption that the state shouldn't advance construction money to nonprofit organizations that provide services under contract. The $200,000 that he denied to a proposed drug treatment center in St. Petersburg turns out to be nonessential, but the policy is worrisome for its potential to favor private corporations that have easier access to startup capital. Bush and the Legislature's presumptive new leaders should start promptly to improve and expand the project review process for next year. It can never be any better, however, than his own commitment to it. Considering the fat turkeys that flew the veto coop this year, the extent of Bush's commitment remains in doubt.

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