Florida Budget Special Session Update

Ryan talks to Southeast Politics publisher Janelle Irwin-Taylor about the special legislative session on the state budget.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Ryan Gorman Show podcast presented by Farah and Farah
Accident Attorneys from Tampa.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Right now, let's bring in Southeast Politics publisher Janelle Irwin Taylor.
You can find all of her work at Southeast politics
dot com and you can of course follow her on
x for more and Janelle irwinfl So, Janelle wanted to
get the latest on the special legislative session underway right now,
Any progress on a budget the House and Senate can
agree on.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
I mean, yeah, very convincing. That is not a referendum
on the legislature in the case and anyway, it's just
the budget process is inherently complicated, convoluted, and tricky to follow.
So what has happened so far. We were one week
under the belt here and then as of Friday, anything

(00:50):
that had not been agreed to by both chambers gets
bumped to the budget chairs. So that's Lawrence McClure in
the House and Hooper in the Senate. So that's where
we're at now, is the people leading budget negotiations. They've
taken control of any remaining items that still need to
be reconciled, and they will be hashing that out. We

(01:13):
expect the special session is prescribed to last until May
twenty ninth. They expect to have a budget approved somewhere
around the twenty fifth round Memorial Day, so we'll see
how that goes. There's still a lot of big stuff
out there. The House is holding out on Senate President
Benel Britton's priority royal renaissance. There's a hiccup between the

(01:35):
House and the Senate but over funding for new College
that's coming from USF basically as part of a transfer
the Sarasota Manatee campus to new College. There's also there's
still some daylight and something that I'm watching closely, which
is between public defender and state attorneys spending. Whereas there's

(01:58):
more money allocated in the Senate for new jobs for
state attorneys about forty of them at four point four million,
but for public public defenders that's only eight positions and
one point eight million dollars. And the problem with that
is when you have a lack of parity between public

(02:19):
defender and state attorneys and their salaries and their staffing,
people end up going and working for the state attorney's
office because they can make more money, right right, right, so,
and the justice system doesn't work if you don't have,
you know, mostly equitable share of attorneys on both sides
because they're handling the same cases from different perspectives. So
that's something I'm watching. So that's that's kind of it

(02:41):
in a nutshell.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
I guess. My question is they did work on the
budget some during the regular session. Correct, they did, and.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
The House and Senate were about one point four million
dollars apart. The House is more austere than the Senate.
But the reason that it did get finished is they
have to determine. They have to agree first on allocations,
and those are just broadly the buckets of spending that
you have. So we're going to put this amount of
money in higher education, this amount in K through twelve,

(03:13):
et cetera, et cetera. That was what they did not
come to during the regular session. So those came to
very early ahead of the special session. So that allowed
the budget conferences to start meeting. And that's where you
start going line by line and saying, Okay, well, we'll
compromise with the House on this, we'll compromise with the

(03:35):
Senate on that, and that's when things really start honing
and coming together.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Okay, And the reason I asked that was because you know,
you would generally think if you had worked on something
for quite a bit but you still had a little
bit more to go, that when you resumed working on it,
it would move along pretty quickly. But that doesn't seem
to be the case. I mean, this is, you know,
a process that's playing out right now.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
Well, it is a process, but I would not I
would not frame this as something that is not moving quickly. Okay,
I don't think it's supposed to move quickly. Is there
more strife than there had been in years in the
past this session and then of course twenty twenty five
also went into overtime? You know, yeah, it definitely is.

(04:22):
So this isn't necessarily part of the ordinary process. But
they have n't told July first to get it right,
and if they don't, the say goes into a partial
government shutdown, which literally never happened before. So I don't
think that we have too much to worry about in
terms of timing, but it is certainly something that everyone
is watching, all right.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Southeast Politics publisher Janelle Irwin Taylor with us again. You
can find all of her reporting and a whole lot
more at Southeast Politics dot com and you can follow
her on x for the latest at Janelle orwin fl
Janelle really appreciate the time this morning. We'll talk to
you soon.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
Thanks for having me by bye.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
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