Charlie Crist has got to save Florida from itself and Rick Scott
Plenty of ‘turkey’ projects in state’s $75 billion budget
The drawings of a gleaming 1,000-foot-tall observation tower planned for downtown Miami are eye-catching.
Resembling a badly bent nail clipper, SkyRise Miami would be part event space, part amusement park with a flight-simulation ride and bungee jump.
Also eye-catching: $10 million.
That is what the Florida House is proposing to spend on the project next year, according to a budget proposal released last week.
Other big ticket items in the proposed budgets of either the Senate or the House: $15 million for the 200-mile Coast-to-Coast Connector, a bicycle and pedestrian path that links St. Petersburg and Titusville; $4 million for the Clearwater Marine Aquarium; and $1 million for infrastructure in the Miami Design District.
During the Great Recession, budget deficits and tea party protests meant pork barrel spending gave way to austerity. But now it’s an election year and legislators are looking at a projected $1.2 billion surplus in what is expected to be a total budget of around $75 billion. So lawmakers are scrambling to haul in projects to benefit their districts.
“I must have 30 pounds of member requests, stacks and stacks of them, in my office,” said Ed Hooper, the Clearwater Republican who chairs the House appropriations committee on transportation and economic development. “It was easier to do budgets when we had no money. Now that there’s this perceived surplus, there’s four to five years of pent-up demand.”
The surge in requests promises that lawmakers will deliver a plumper budget to Gov. Rick Scott in May, posing an election-year quandary for a politician who came to power riding a crest of tea party frustration with government spending.
“Scott is going to have trouble,” said Henry Kelley, former chairman of the Fort Walton Beach Tea Party. “He’ll be under a lot of pressure to approve these projects, but I don’t think letting these projects through is a good way to rally the base.”
What to do? If Scott approves local projects that people like Kelley deem “turkeys,” he risks turning them off as he campaigns against former Gov. Charlie Crist.
“The base will still vote for him,” Kelley said. “But will we knock on doors and wave signs for him like we did in 2010 if we think it’s business as usual?”
“We are certainly going to look over all these pork and turkey projects and call them to the governor’s attention,” said Slade O’Brien, who directs the Florida chapter of Americans for Prosperity. “We don’t want to get lazy.”
But vetoes could alienate constituencies who view the projects as long-overdue community investments.
Miami-Dade will be pivotal to the governor’s race, and South Florida lawmakers are feeling cautiously optimistic about their pet projects.
The early budget proposals include $775,000 for the SEED School of Miami, a charter boarding school; $1.25 million for the Mourning Family Foundation; and $500,000 for the City of Hialeah Educational Academy Charter School. The Senate has $1 million for the Miami Design District and $750,000 for Miami’s Downtown Development Authority.
SkyRise Miami towers above them all.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/23/4013285/plenty-of-turkey-projects-in-states.html#storylink=cpy
= new reply since forum marked as read
