Senate votes to cut $500 million from current budget

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- State spending this year would be about a half billion dollars less than planned under a bill the Senate passed Thursday.

With Florida's economy in a tailspin and residents not spending money, incoming taxes are expected to be about 13 percent lower this year than what legislators initially expected to have when they wrote the budget last year.

Senators passed the roughly $500 million reduction in the current year's approximately $70 billion budget to bring state spending in line with lower-than-expected tax collections.

The House passed its budget-cutting proposal a day earlier and representatives of the two chambers worked out many of the differences between the plans Thursday afternoon. Lawmakers were hoping for a final vote on the shrunken budget by next Wednesday.

Only one difference remained - an issue involving the rate paid to hospitals, nursing homes, county health clinics other health care providers under the Medicaid program.

That could be a difficult sticking point, however. The House is reluctant to go along with a Senate plan to freeze automatic annual increases in those rates.

The chairmen of the budget committees in each chamber, Sen. Lisa Carlton, R-Osprey, and Rep. Ray Sansom, R-Destin, will try to work out that issue Friday.

Late Thursday, the House and Senate reached a key agreement on giving prosecutors and public defenders access to $2.5 million in money collected in fines that would ensure they wouldn't have to take unwanted time off.

Sen. Victor Crist, who chairs the Senate committee that writes the criminal justice part of the budget, warned that when lawmakers start writing next year's budget, there will still be difficulties.

"This is a quick fix to help them get through this year's budget," said Crist, R-Tampa, who sponsored the amendment shifting the money.

The Senate also agreed Thursday not to shrink the budget for a teacher bonus program that the House wanted to preserve, avoiding an $8 million hit to the program.

The bill to make the cuts (HB 7009) passed the Senate 26-13, almost entirely along party lines, with Republicans in favor and Democrats against.

Democrats had urged that the state dig more deeply into its savings accounts to avoid deep program cuts and consider finding new sources of money - possibly including tax increases.

Republicans in control of the Legislature, however, oppose tax increases.

AP