With time running out to avoid a special session, legislative leaders agreed Thursday to the outlines of a nearly $83 billion budget and began negotiations aimed at hammering out details of the spending plan before a Tuesday deadline.
The deal likely will allow the session to end May 5, as scheduled, avoiding the embarrassment for legislative Republicans of needing extra time for the second time in three years to complete lawmakers’ only constitutionally required task.
“The reports of the demise of session have been greatly exaggerated,” said House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’ Lakes, in a statement following the announcement.
Even as lawmakers celebrated, critics including Gov. Rick Scott were questioning the process that Corcoran and Senate President Joe Negron, R-Stuart, used to reach the agreement on “allocations.”
The deal sets out how much money should be spent on broad areas of the budget, like education or human services.
The late-breaking nature of the agreement, along with a couple of false starts and some comments by legislative leaders, seemed to indicate that Negron and Corcoran were moving beyond allocations and into the fine details of the plan in their closed-door negotiations.
Those smaller disagreements are usually smoothed over by joint House-Senate negotiating committees, which are open to the public and at least theoretically allow for more input by individual lawmakers.
The committees began meeting Thursday evening after the deal was announced.
There was also speculation that Negron and Corcoran cut deals on policy issues and potentially other legislation during the discussions.
Even Scott, while lambasting the Legislature for spending less on tourism marketing and economic development than he had called for, took the unusual step of criticizing the process.
“I’d be furious if I was a House or Senate member,” Scott told reporters.
“Think about it, every one of them got elected in a district. They represent that district. They have the same number of votes as the speaker and Senate president. They should be in the discussion, just like the speaker and Senate president,” he said.
Negron and Corcoran, who pledged to run the most open and transparent session in history, defended their negotiations during a joint appearance Thursday afternoon, even as they refused to offer much detail on what had been agreed to.
“We’ve agreed that we would respect the priorities of the other chamber,” Corcoran said.
After a contentious back-and-forth that lasted several minutes, Corcoran and Negron abruptly walked away from reporters who repeatedly asked for more specific information about the agreement.
To end the legislative session on time May 5, lawmakers need to finish the budget by Tuesday because of a constitutionally required 72-hour “cooling off” period.
One detail from the allocations agreement that emerged Thursday included an across-the-board pay raise for state employees, which Latvala and others said was the first in roughly a decade despite the fact that a salary increase was approved in 2013.
“For too long the men and women who have made Florida one of the premier places to raise a family, grow a business or enjoy retirement have done so without their hard work being justly compensated. No longer,” said Andy Madtes, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Florida.
In an apparent exchange, the Senate will consider a House proposal to require new state employees who don’t select a retirement option within nine months to go into a 401(k)-style “investment plan.”
Those employees currently default into the traditional pension plan. The Senate won an extended time period for the selection, up from six months, and an exemption for law-enforcement and emergency workers.
The House won policy concessions on a $200 million plan to encourage charter schools where traditional public schools have struggled, and $200 million for teacher bonuses.
But Rep. Shevrin Jones, a West Park Democrat involved in education issues, said school districts would have more control over charters under the language than under the “schools of hope” plan that the House initially put forward.
Jones said the compromise might not assuage teachers unions and other groups, but satisfied him.
“The school district is in charge. ... We started somewhere which wasn’t a happy medium, and I’m happy where we are now,” Jones said.
The governor did not fare as well.
Scott would get just $25 million for Visit Florida, a tourism marketer, and operating funds for Enterprise Florida, an economic development agency.
Scott had asked for as much as $100 million for Visit Florida and $85 million in incentives for Enterprise Florida.
In health care, the budget includes cuts to Medicaid funding for hospitals.
House Appropriations Chairman Carlos Trujillo, R-Miami, said money in the Low Income Pool program remains out of the budget until final details are negotiated with the federal government.