A tour of Florida's new state budget, from money for Mike Huckabee to tax cuts for casinos

A look at some of the more interesting line items, tax breaks and policy changes embedded in the $115 billion budget that Florida state lawmakers will approve tomorrow.

Photo credit: Florida Department of Management Services

This is Seeking Rents, a newsletter and podcast devoted to producing original journalism — and lifting up the work of others — about Florida politics, with an emphasis on the ways that big businesses and other special interests influence public policy in the state. Seeking Rents is produced by veteran investigative journalist Jason Garcia, and it is free to all. But please consider a voluntary paid subscription, if you can afford one, to help support our work. And check out our video channel, too.

After a months-long stalemate — and still-simmering animosity among the state’s top Republican leaders — Florida lawmakers will finally vote Friday on a new state budget.

Ahead of the final roll call, I thought it might be “fun” to take a quick tour of the roughly $115 billion spending plan — at least as it stands now, before an angry Gov. Ron DeSantis pulls out his retaliatory veto pen.

What follows is a bullet-point list of line items, tax breaks and policy changes spread across the budget and various pieces of linked legislation — including the annual “tax package” of cuts and tweaks.

Please understand: This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. It’s just a bunch of stuff (technical term) that I find interesting for one reason or another — usually because it’s objectionable, but sometimes because it’s encouraging or intriguing.

We’ve written in-depth stories about many of these items here on Seeking Rents. I’ve added links next to the ones we have.

The list is in no particular order, other than items are generally grouped by budget “silo” (education, health and human services, environment and agriculture, and so forth).

Here it is:

Line items and earmarks

• $79 million to offset shrinking student enrollment in Florida public schools

• $725,000 to pay an education-and-propaganda company linked to U.S. Ambassador to Israel and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to develop anti-communism curriculum materials for use in Florida public schools (read more)

• $3 million to install athletic fields at a classical charter school in Jacksonville led by apartment developer John Rood, a major campaign contributor

• $2 million to purchase an online platform to implement a new system of federally funded private school scholarships — a procurement that appears tailored for a new startup company backed a venture capital firm connected to right-wing billionaire Charles Koch (read more)

• $50 million to support construction of a new baseball stadium on the campus of Hillsborough College for the Tampa Bay Rays, whose billionaire majority owner, Patrick Zalupski, is a major campaign contributor

• $0 in bonus “preeminence” funding to support Florida’s top-performing public universities

• $4 million to buy artificial intelligence-enabled software that can review and help make eligibility determinations for grocery benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (read more)

• $500,000 for several state agencies to try out what sure sounds like AI-based “candidate assessment technology” that evaluates job applicants using “adaptive conversational interviews” and “dynamically generated follow-up questions”

• $500,000 for a hotline run by an anti-abortion called the Human Coalition that uses data tracking and online search ads to identify and intercept women seeking abortions

• $4 million to buy hearing-protection equipment for police officers from a company owned by billionaire Bill Austin, a major campaign contributor

• $500,000 to fund testing of municipal toilet water for narcotics and explosives, a proposal pitched by a wastewater surveillance vendor whose lobbyists include former U.S. Attorney General William “Bill” Barr (read more)

• $6 million to enable more law enforcement agencies to use a criminal intelligence platform developed by Peregrine Technologies, a contractor founded by a former Palantir executive

• $675,000 to pay the law firm Cooper & Kirk to continue defending a 2021 law prohibiting social media networks from suspending the accounts of politicians like Donald Trump

• $200 million — at least — for flood control and drainage improvement projects

• $87 million to fight wildfires and buy new wildfire-fighting equipment

• $15 million for Florida International University to create a "Category 6” hurricane simulator at its Wall of Wind” hurricane research facility

• $425 million to buy development rights from agricultural landowners

• $0 to restore the Ocklawaha River (read more)

• $2.5 million to reopen a swimming area in Silver Springs State Park

• $4 million for a garbage-to-gas project led by a new company that has donated more than $500,000 to Florida politicians in the two years since it was founded (read more)

• $750,000 for renovations and upgrades at the Central Florida Zoo. This was a line item that was briefly cut to $500,000 during budget conference but was restored to $750,000 just before the spending plan was finalized — a last-minute boost that comes as the zoo faces an estimated $200,000 in unexpected costs from caring for a group of dangerously sick sloths that were rescued from the failed “Sloth World” tourist trap

• $3,255,407 for continuing cleanup and shutdown costs at the former Piney Point phosphate-processing plant, the site of a 2021 disaster in which more than 215 million gallons of polluted wastewater were released into Tampa Bay

• $5 million to build a new I-75 interchange near the Hillsborough County and Manatee County line lobbied for by homebuilder Pat Neal, a major campaign contributor

• $5 million to widen Power Line Road in Polk County pushed by real estate developer Cassidy Holdings, a major campaign contributor

• $2.75 million to rebrand Palm Beach International Airport as “President Donald J. Trump International Airport” (read more)

• $24.5 million for Space Florida — a nearly 20 percent increase over the current budget — including $3 million for site planning, environmental assessments and other infrastructure-development work and $1 million to contract with a company providing data storage in space

• $250 million for the emergency response fund that Ron DeSantis raided to pay for construction of an immigrant detention camp in the Florida Everglades

Tax cuts and tax changes

• A four-month tax break on gun silencers

• A three-year tax break on tickets to the Miami Open pro tennis tournament

• Permanent tax cuts for casinos (on the revenue generated by slot machines and card games)

• A provision allowing people who buy heavy pickup trucks and SUVs to redirect the sales tax they pay on the purchase to private school scholarships

• An extension of a tax break on home-alarm installations conceived by lobbyists for ADT Corp.

• A requirement that any county referendum asking voters to increase property taxes for local public schools be held during a general election

• $60 million a year redirected from a tax on real-estate transactions to a grant program for railroads — which would reverse a cut the Legislature and governor made a year ago that triggered a fiscal crisis at Tri-Rail, the commuter train system in south Florida (read more)

• $60 million redirected a year from the tax on real-estate transactions to fund the C-51 reservoir, a water-storage “public private partnership” with Palm Beach Aggregates and Phillips Inc.

• Note: One of the more interesting elements of this year’s tax package is what is not in it — namely, a change sought by charter school management giant Academica Corp. that would have forced local school districts to share revenue from voter-approved property taxes with charter schools that opened without permission from the district. Lawmakers dropped that proposal during budget conference (read more)

Policy changes and non-spending provisions

The budget and its various implementing and conforming bills will:

• Enable the state to buy more property from the same Panhandle developer and GOP donor to whom the Florida leaders paid $83 million last year for 4 acres of land in Destin — although a spokesperson for the developer said he “currently has no plans” to sell more land to the state (read more)

• Privatize pharmacy operations in Florida prisons

• Make Attorney General James Uthmeier continue providing quarterly reports to the Legislature with details about contracts he has approved four outside law firms, including billing rates and expenses incurred

• Force the DeSantis administration to repeal a last-minute rule issued on New Year’s Eve that severely restricts advertising by medical marijuana companies (read more)

• Require the Florida Lottery to pay a 6 percent commission on ticket sales to retailers, which means millions of dollars a year in additional payments to grocery and convenience store operators like Publix and Sunshine Gasoline Distributors (read more)

• Block local battery-recycling laws, like one in Broward County that requires stores that sell lots of batteries to let customers drop off dead batteries for recycling (read more)

• Prohibit state agencies from contracting with any vendor that uses the services of media bias-monitoring and fact-checking firms like NewsGuard Technologies — a provision originally lobbied into place by Newsmax, the far-right cable network that scores poorly on NewsGuard’s accuracy ratings (read more)

• Compile a statewide database of fingerprints and other information collected from anyone who is stopped by law enforcement and subject to a detainer issued by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement

• Empower the governor-appointed Board of Governors and State Board of Education to selectively edit core course lists at individual universities and colleges (read more)

• Transfer the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus to New College of Florida