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Budget Reality: Some Will Suffer

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By CATHERINE DOLINSKI

cdolinski@tampatrib.com

Published: March 27, 2009

Updated: 03/27/2009 12:44 am

TALLAHASSEE - In a gruesome budget year, who's first in line for the few spare dollars available - Florida's schoolchildren or its poorest and frailest residents?

Hospitals versus high schools. Foster kids versus Advanced Placement students. Those are the kinds of funding choices that some lawmakers complain they are facing as they work to plug a $6 billion hole in the state budget, of which schools and health care claim the largest share.

"That's why we need new revenue," said Sen. Nan Rich, D-Weston. "Because we have the poor, the sick, the elderly, medically fragile on one side and we have a public education system that is, you know, tremendously underfunded, ... this is robbing Peter to pay Paul."

Both the House and Senate expect to plug about half of the 2009-10 budget hole with $3 billion in federal stimulus dollars. That includes an increase in what the federal government spends on Florida Medicaid, which will free up roughly $785 million that Florida would have spent on health care for use anywhere in the budget. But where?

Education, that's where, said Rep. Marty Kiar, ranking minority member of the House PreK-12 Appropriations Committee, where members are contemplating cuts of $500 million or more - even after spending roughly $1 billion in federal stimulus money earmarked for schools.

The cut could affect anything from daily school operations to the Florida Holocaust Museum, Kiar said. "I would like to take every one of those freed dollars and put them toward education to try to plug some of these terrible budget holes we have."

In the Senate, budget writers propose to maintain overall spending on K-12 education. To do that, they are relying to some extent on money freed by extra federal spending on Medicaid.

But even in the Senate's plan, some individual districts are losing money because of factors such as declining enrollment and falling property tax collections, the local portion of education funding. Hillsborough County would lose $19 million, the biggest cut for any district, though it represents only 1.45 percent of its total funding.

In the House, Kiar lauded Tampa Republican Rep. Kevin Ambler, chairman of the Health Care Appropriations Committee, for declaring publicly Thursday that the House should give public schools most or all of the $785 million freed up by the Medicaid stimulus money.

But some disagree, noting that Florida is getting the extra Medicaid money only because it has a large Medicaid population - meaning the poor, the sick, the disabled and the elderly who rely on the state for health care and social services.

Deborah Linton, executive director of Florida ARC, which serves the developmentally disabled, called it ironic that the people responsible for Florida getting the money nonetheless are facing budget cuts. Linton is worried about cuts proposed in the Senate for behavioral services and 3 percent reimbursement rate cuts for providers who serve people with developmental disabilities.

"A rate cut for a human service organization only means one thing: You've got to have fewer staff," she said.

A spokeswoman for Senate President Jeff Atwater, R-North Palm Beach, said the chamber is using the money freed by Medicaid to cushion cuts to education and health care.

But Sen. Durell Peaden, R, Crestview, who oversees health care spending, called any decision to move freed money out of the health care budget - for education or any other purpose - a "shell game."

That, he said, is why lawmakers need to pass new revenue-raising measures this session.

Unlike the House, the Senate is embracing proposals to generate more revenue for the state and factoring some of that into the budget before voting formally on whether to adopt them. Senate budget writers are banking on a $1-per-pack tax hike on cigarettes, a lucrative new gaming compact with the Seminole Tribe and expanded nontribal gaming that will yield higher tax collections.

Presumably, that would leave about $1 billion in budget cuts. But House leaders have derided the plan as optimistic at best and misguided fantasy at worst.

The Senate also wants to ask voters to raise the sales tax by a penny as well as loosen the state's existing - and expensive - restrictions on class sizes in public schools. The two-part proposal would appear before voters as a constitutional amendment during either a special election this fall or the general election in 2010.

The sales tax increase, which would be permanent, would raise $2.8 billion a year for education. Steve Wise, who oversees the K-12 budget in the Senate, said he hopes introducing the idea as a constitutional amendment will improve its chances of passage in the more conservative House - since a yes vote would put the question before voters rather than increase the tax directly.

He acknowledged that the legislation's chances are unclear, given skepticism among House leaders. Kiar, D-Davie, said he isn't wild about the plan either because he is not convinced it would constitute a spending increase for education.

He worries, he said, that legislative leaders would swap out money already in the education budget for spending in some other area and replace that money with the additional sales tax dollars. "That's just shifting the state's burden to fund education onto the backs of middle-class taxpayers."

Reporter Catherine Dolinski can be reached at (850) 222-8382.

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