DeSantis signs Florida budget and cuts $800M while promoting wins

TALLAHASSEE

Gov. Ron DeSantis slashed about $800 million in spending from the state budget on Monday, completing one of his final tasks as governor while leaving plenty for his successor to clean up.

At a Tampa news conference on Monday, he touted what he considered his fiscal legacy for the state: a smaller budget for multiple years in a row, fewer state workers, paying off half the state’s debt and padding the rainy day funds.

“We should be thankful that we’re run in a successful way and really set up for whatever happens in the future,” he said.

The final nearly $117.6 billion package will run through the end of DeSantis’ term and the start of the next governor’s first year.

This year’s budget, like last year’s, was delayed as the House and Senate sparred. Lawmakers were yet again unable to finish the budget, the only constitutionally required bill, within the regular 60-day legislative session.

And while lawmakers in the Florida House have fought with DeSantis for the last two years, they still funded some of his key wishes in the budget they approved in May.

That includes $50 million for Hillsborough College for infrastructure improvements as the Tampa Bay Rays eye the Dale Mabry campus as the site for their new stadium.

DeSantis signed the budget at Hillsborough College and touted the money for a “reimagined campus” at the start of his news conference.

“From the state’s perspective, I’ve said from the beginning, I don’t want to lose a major league baseball team,” DeSantis said.

When asked by a Herald/Times reporter, DeSantis said he wasn’t planning to work for the Rays or their owner, Patrick Zalupski, after leaving office.

Vetoes hit already strained prison system

DeSantis’ vetoes hit Florida’s long-beleaguered corrections system, slashing more than $135 million for infrastructure improvements and new construction — a move that further delays efforts to address the billions of dollars in renovation and new construction that state-hired auditors projected the prison system needs.

Lawmakers this year approved $50 million in bonding to start construction on a new prison hospital. DeSantis vetoed the plan.

“We cannot reduce debt with one hand while adding debt with another,” he said in his veto letter.

The chairperson of the House Justice Budget subcommittee, Rep. Patt Maney, R-Shalimar, said in May that off-site medical care is costly and a new hospital on prison grounds could help the state control expenses.

DeSantis also vetoed a raise for correctional officers that would bring their starting pay up to $24 an hour, saying that he had to because it was tied to the construction of the prison hospital. In his veto letter, he said the Legislature was holding pay raises “hostage.”

It wasn’t an issue of support, he said, noting that his earlier budget proposal would have given officers a higher raise than what the Legislature put forward.

Jim Baiardi, the president of the Police Benevolent Association’s corrections chapter, said correctional officer staffing is starting to take a downward swing again — and said it’s a tough, hot summer ahead.

“The (correctional officers) got robbed,” Baiardi said. “They got caught in a political game.”

Along with the vetoed $50 million, DeSantis’ corrections cuts also include $750,000 for Americans with Disabilities Act renovations, about $25 million for major repairs to prisons and about $56 million to build seven dormitories at Lancaster Correctional Institution.

In late 2022, the state hired the firm KPMG to create a 20-year master plan for Florida’s prisons. Its report, presented to lawmakers in 2023, said Florida’s system is “unsustainable” in the long run without billions of dollars toward renovation, staff support and at least one new prison.

What’s in the budget?

The budget DeSantis signed keeps Florida’s AIDS Drug Assistance Program, which provides low-income HIV-positive Floridians with medication, running with $75 million.

The Department of Health in January announced dramatic cuts that could have left thousands of people without access to life-saving medicine. Lawmakers quickly responded with stopgap funding and later secured the $75 million to pay for up to 21,000 participants for the coming fiscal year.

The budget also requires a detailed study of the program’s past and future, including what led the Department of Health to put forward its surprise changes.

The budget also includes $4 million for the state to implement an artificial intelligence program to help determine eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps low-income Floridians get money for groceries.

Florida has a high error rate in determining who qualifies for the program and how much they should receive. If the state can’t bring down its error rate, it could have to take on about $1 billion more of the cost of the program, rather than the federal government paying.

The governor also kept $4 million for an artificial intelligence pilot program to be used in a Florida prison, which could include things like robot dogs guarding cell blocks and AI-controlled lasers breaking up fights, according to Sen. Ileana Garcia, R-Miami.

The budget also transfers control of the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College of Florida, but doesn’t attach money to the plan.

DeSantis’ legacy

DeSantis will leave office because of term limits in January.

While he touts his efforts to put Florida in a sound fiscal position — pointing to debt repayment, the growing rainy-day fund and flush state reserves — the state’s incoming governor may have to deal with several financial issues not addressed in this year’s budget.

There’s the potential $1 billion federal cost shift onto Florida to run the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Florida is also set to lose billions in federal Medicaid money under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

And there’s the chance that Floridians in November will approve a $250,000 property tax exemption on homesteads, which could strain local governments’ budgets and cause them to turn to the state for financial help.

House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat, said Monday that she wasn’t confident that the budget sets Florida up for the future.

“He’s gonna be out of here in January, so he’s going to leave future legislators and future governors to have to deal with this mess,” she said.

Some critics in DeSantis’ own Republican Party have hit the governor for not being a strong fiscal conservative in Tallahassee, pointing to years of questionable spending to enact his big-government agendas, such as his reshaping of New College of Florida, the diversion of millions to fight ballot initiatives and the creation of the Florida State Guard. In the last several years, state lawmakers passed budgets that were smaller than what DeSantis had proposed.

DeSantis on Monday pointed out that this will be the fourth year in a row that the state reduced its spending, a natural comedown from budgets that were flush with federal COVID money.

“If you go back to 2019 until now, no question that we’re leaving it better than we found it,” DeSantis said. “No question that we’re stronger. No question that we’re fiscally responsible.”

Tampa Bay Times reporter Paige Stevens contributed to this report.