As the clock ticked closer to midnight, lawmakers became more anxious.
A six-month legislative session featuring near fist fights, budget vetoes and intense racial politics was winding down, yet they still had not figured out how to keep the lights on.
If lawmakers don’t pass a budget by the June 30 end of the fiscal year, it triggers a government shutdown. That means mass state worker furloughs, a suspension of most government services, and a body blow to the state economy.
Yet, after 128 days in legislative session, the second longest in state history, that’s where lawmakers found themselves June 30, 1992, as the clock’s hour-hand crept closer to 12.
“We had someone turn back the clock. They actually got up and set it back,” said state Sen. Gwen Margolis, a Hollywood Democrat who served as senate president during the 1992 session. “Things were really, really tense.”
Lawmakers missed the midnight deadline by roughly 30 minutes, but technically avoided a government shutdown through an executive order signed by Gov. Lawton Chiles.
It’s the last time lawmakers adjourned a regular session without passing a state budget. More than two decades later, lawmakers have again adjourned without passing a spending plan.
The 2015 Legislature did not pass a budget after a billion-dollar health-care funding fight hijacked the session. They are set to come back June 1 for a three-week special session to finish their work.
Gov. Rick Scott asked agencies, departments and state courts to lay out what services would be cut if state government shut down. With more than a month to craft a final budget, legislative leaders have expressed confidence they would pass one.
But the Scott-requested budget slashing plans outline a dire picture that the governor’s office can use to put pressure on the Legislature.
“I’m cautiously optimistic that we will have a good special session,” Scott said last week. “We have to keep our state going.”
Scott has called for a scaled- back budget during a special session to avoid a shutdown, but pushed for a more than $600 million in tax cuts and record education spending during the regular session.
The E.W. Scripps Capitol Bureau went through thousands of documents, speeches and newspaper articles housed with the State Library and Archives to look at the at the driving factors behind the 1992 session, the last time lawmakers needed legislative overtime to pass a budget.
The budget is the only issue current-day lawmakers must resolve, although they continue to debate expanding Medicaid under Obamacare.
The 1992 Legislature faced bigger differences including a recession that shrunk revenues by more than $1 billion over two years, and a racially charged redistricting process that altered Florida’s political landscape.
“We just did not have any money,” T.K Wetherell, who was a Daytona Beach Democrat serving as House speaker, said in a recent interview. And “you had members very goosey about their political future and how those lines were going to down.”
Not only did several members want maps to boost their own political ambitions, in 1992 map-drawers had to consider an exploding Hispanic population and clashes between Democratic leadership and their black members who pressed for districts that allowed them to elect candidates of their choosing.
It created odd political bedfellows as black Democrats aligned with Republicans, who pushed for maps that included seats with high black voting-age populations, a move that consolidated those often Democratic-leaning voters into fewer seats, thus making surrounding seats more Republican-leaning.
The battle created personal, sometimes physical, attacks.
During one debate on reapportionment, Rep. Miguel De Grandy, R-Miami, used a racial slur when he described how he believed Democratic leaders were treating Hispanic lawmakers, according to an Orlando Sentinel story on March 15, 1992, the last day of the regular session.
The same story reported state Rep. Peter Deutsch, D-Tamarac, “almost got into a fist fight with Rep. Bill Clark, D-Lauderdale Lakes, a member of the Black Caucus, over proposed South Florida congressional districts.”
The maps were ultimately drawn by the courts, which created a handful of black and Hispanic statehouse seats and three at the congressional level, a decision that helped shift Florida’s political landscape. Republicans were able to use the new maps to take control of state government for the first time in more than a century. It’s power they have not since relinquished.
“Tragically, the way that worked out did change the complexion of the state,” said Margolis, who was the state’s first female Senate president.
Lawmakers duked it out over state maps during a handful of spring special sessions, leaving the task of dealing with plummeting revenue for a final June special session. The Legislature had cut $622 billion from the budget during a December special session, but had to slice more as the economy remained stagnant.
On the final day of the regular legislative session, the dysfunction was on full display, as lawmakers allowed reams of bills to die, and even those that passed were fights.
“I get a headache and win by 21 votes,” longtime lobbyist Mac Stipanovich told the St. Petersburg Times in a March 14, 1992, story. “If it was close, I guess I’d have a stroke.”
Wetherell said that uncertainty in the Senate meant that the Democratic majorities could not simply steamroll GOP opponents with the maps or legislative priorities.
“Gwen had a tough time down there because she only became president by one vote,” he said. “It’s not that she did not want to help you … she just did not have the votes.”
The budget shortfalls and feuding Legislature left state officials preparing for an unprecedented government shutdown with no real guidance.
“There is no explicit direction provided by the Constitution or case law,” wrote Comptroller Gerald Lewis in a June 15, 1992, letter to Education Commissioner Betty Castor, who was asking how to move forward in a shutdown.
Throughout the process, Chiles had a rocky relationship with the Legislature.
Margolis, in a recent interview, said she never had a good relationship with Chiles, a dynamic she thinks was partially driven by gender.
“He could not quite understand why a woman that did not talk about hunting and stuff was in charge,” she said.
Margolis said she had lunch each week with the governor and Wetherell, but he would only talk to him. “It was like nothing I had seen,” she said.
The 1992 legislative session included a laundry list of complexities that today’s Legislature does not face, but in a recent interview Stapanovich, the longtime lobbyist, says there is a lesson current lawmakers can learn as the June special session approaches.
“Steady, men, steady,” he said. “There is no reason to start panicking in May.”
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