A shifting wind in this troublesome budget storm

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By HOWARD TROXLER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 21, 2001

That screeching noise you hear from Tallahassee is the sound of gears being changed without a clutch.

Last week's low gear: Our state budget will be tight this year, but we'll try to squeak by.

This week's high gear: We'll need a special session of the Legislature to cut untold hundreds of millions of dollars.

What changed? The same underlying knowledge was there in both cases. Last week, a group of experts in Tallahassee lopped $673-million off the estimate of Florida's general revenue for the rest of this budget year. On top of that, because of the terrorist attack, everybody already figured that things will get even worse.

Last week, however, it seemed very important in Tallahassee to portray the new, lower estimate as just a bad bump in the road. Sure, losing $673-million was a hit. But by using the extra cash we had lying around, we could get the "real" deficit for the rest of this year down to a mere $265-million.

Maybe, Gov. Jeb Bush said, we would even make up the rest with extra belt-tightening. The basic strategy was to get through the current year as best we can, keep the ship afloat and start afresh with some tough decisions next year.

A few smart people in Tallahassee (even some who weren't Democrats) considered this to be an unwise way to run a railroad. We would be meeting our "recurring" expenses (things we have to pay for every year) with one-time "non-recurring" dollars -- the extra scraps we happened to have lying around. It is sort of like paying your electric bill by rolling up your extra pennies, and searching the sofa for change. Trouble is, the same bill is still going to come due again next time.

But, forget the old spin. On Thursday the governor announced, yes, we probably will need a special session.

In the light most favorable to the governor, this is less of a flip-flop than it appears. His earlier rhetoric was addressed toward the "old" deficit, the one we knew we had even before the terrorist attack. Now we face a new, worse downturn that might have forced a special session regardless.

However, before letting the governor entirely off the hook, I had an interesting conversation Thursday with the president of the state Senate, John McKay of Bradenton. McKay said if the Legislature meets, it will deal not only with any future cuts needed because of the terrorist attacks -- but also the deficit that was already on the table, the one Bush had hoped to squeak past.

"You step up to the plate and address the issue," McKay said.

When asked whether he was disagreeing with the previous approach of his fellow Republican, the governor, McKay politely and wisely demurred. However, later in our conversation, McKay did say something that seemed to me to be precisely the point made by the governor's critics:

"The recurring versus non-recurring (revenue) is important," McKay said. "It's something we're insisting upon in the Senate, to the fullest extent possible. If you don't make these cuts recurring cuts, then it's going to make the budget process that much more difficult next year."

In short, the legislative branch appears willing to start a tough job now that the executive branch wanted to put off.

No matter what, a special session is going to be a grim business. Money translates into schools, and law enforcement, and social services, and state troopers, and thousands of other worthwhile things. The Legislature now has the unhappy but necessary job of making these cuts as an election year gets under way.

The minority Democrats might argue that instead of just making cuts, the Legislature should think about undoing some of the tax breaks that it has passed the past two years. But McKay said he wouldn't let the tax cuts be used as a political scapegoat for our current mess. Had the Legislature not cut taxes, the money would already be spent anyway.

"I don't have a whole lot of patience for political demagoguery," McKay said. "We're not going to have that in the Senate."

- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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