TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida’s state budget talks are back on after weeks of gridlock. Lawmakers are back in Tallahassee on Tuesday and hope to reach a deal before a looming deadline, the start of the fiscal year on July 1.
Nearly a month after leaving the Capitol without passing a budget, House and Senate leaders said Friday night they had reached an agreement that will clear the way for lawmakers to begin hammering out details of a spending plan Tuesday.
House Speaker Daniel Perez, R-Miami, and Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, issued memos that indicated they expect to pass a budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year on June 16.
The memos came after weeks of behind-the-scenes talks aimed at trying to kick-start the conference negotiating process.
The memos said the agreement includes a $900 million tax cut through eliminating a tax on commercial leases, a longtime priority of business lobbyists. It also includes what the memos described as $350 million in “permanent sales tax exemptions targeted towards Florida families,” $250 million in debt reduction and $750 million in annual payments into a state rainy-day fund.
“In total, the framework set forth in these allocations provides for a fiscally responsible, balanced budget that reduces state spending, lowers per capita spending, and reduces the growth of state bureaucracy,” Albritton wrote in his memo to senators. “The budget authorizes early payoff of state debt, accounts for significant, broad-based tax relief, and builds on historic state reserves for emergencies.”
Conference committees will start meeting Tuesday to negotiate details of the different parts of the budget, such as education, health care and criminal justice.
Unresolved issues will go Thursday to House Budget Chairman Lawrence McClure, R-Dover, and Senate Appropriations Chairman Ed Hooper, R-Trinity, for further negotiations.
The fiscal year will start July 1, which, if a budget passes June 16, will give Gov. Ron DeSantis two weeks to use his line-item veto authority.
The House and Senate were unable to reach an agreement on a budget before the scheduled May 2 end of the annual legislative session because of differences about tax cuts and spending levels.
Lawmakers extended the session, but House and Senate leaders remained at odds as they worked behind the scenes.
The House in April approved a plan that called for cutting the state sales-tax rate from 6% to 5.25%, which would have totaled roughly $5 billion.
But the Senate did not go along and pitched a plan that included providing a sales-tax exemption on clothes and shoes valued at $75 or less, sales-tax “holidays” and trimming the commercial-lease tax.
DeSantis, meanwhile, called for cutting property taxes and criticized the House’s plan for reducing the sales-tax rate.
News4JAX spoke with local lawmakers on both sides of the aisle about their take.
“Well, I would say that you know it was a fundamentally good dispute to be having because at the end of the day the argument that was holding everything up was over whether we were going to reduce the sales tax or the property tax or some combination of those things. It was a debate about how much we reduce taxes. It was the argument about being fiscally responsible,” said state Rep. Dean Black, R-Jacksonville.
But Rep. Angie Nixon, a Democrate from Jacksonville, said the budget proposal she’s seeing is not aimed at average Floridians.
“Right now, what we’re seeing in this proposed budget is the folks in charge are really just looking out for, not Floridians, but for corporations,” Nixon said. “Again, instead of closing tax loopholes to ensure that we could address things like the rising cost of rent, the rising cost in Florida in general, they chose to do otherwise.”
Nixon said one issue in particular she plans to push back on are early childhood education cuts.
“There are proposals to cut back the school readiness dollars, which are voucher programs for early childhood education for folks who cannot afford to send their children to day care or to preschool,” Nixon said. “And so I am going to push back on that and have conversations with folks. Hopefully, they restore the funding and make sure that they fully fund early childhood education. And if not, that is going to cause some of our children to be behind.”
Perez and Albritton indicated on May 2 that they had reached a “framework” that would include $2.8 billion in tax cuts, including reducing the sales-tax rate.
But that later blew up, with Perez publicly accusing Albritton of backing out of the deal. But Albritton said senators had raised concerns that a cut in the sales-tax rate would not be “meaningful, felt, or seen by families and seniors when compared with other available options.”
The memos released Friday night did not provide details of the $350 million in sales-tax exemptions that are included in the latest agreement. They also did not mention property-tax cuts.
”The state budget impacts every area of every Floridian’s life, and I wish we had gotten it done sooner, but I think in the end we’re gonna have a very responsible budget,“ Black said. ”It’s going to set Florida up for years to come, and I think it’s a budget that we can be proud of and that we cannot only live with but prosper with.”
