By DAVID ROYSE
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, Feb. 6, 2011…..As Gov. Rick Scott prepares to propose his first state budget, he’s portrayed the process of whacking $5 billion from the spending plan – which he plans to do – as surprisingly simple.
Scott hasn’t given out a lot of specifics about how he plans to do it, those will come Monday afternoon when he sends his budget proposal to lawmakers and makes it public. But when he’s been asked, Scott has said his team is simply going through the state budget, finding things that the state shouldn’t be doing. Accountability budgeting is what he calls it.
If the state doesn’t have to do it, it won’t, if Scott has his way.
“We’re not doing alligator marketing, things like that,” Scott said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.
But what he’s about to find – of course he may already know this – is that just about every single line item in the budget has a constituency, or it likely wouldn’t be there. And nearly all of them will fight hard for those line items.
Including alligator farmers, who pay the state to help them advertise the meat and hides they produce, keeping them in business.
“Every year we fight for this money,” said alligator farmer Allen Register, owner of the Gatorama Farm in Glades County. “The way we look at it is, it’s our money.”
In fact, if Scott follows through on cutting the $26,000 it spent this year to help Florida’s alligator farms sell their products, it could be looked at as a tax increase, growers say. They pay $5 per alligator egg to the state. A part of that –$1 – was included at the request of farmers, who asked the state to use it to help with marketing. If the marketing doesn’t happen but they still pay that $1 per egg, that’s money out of their pocket. And they would also probably sell less meat and fewer hides.
Alligator farmers like Register say they need the marketing help in part because many people around the country – including restaurant diners and chefs– think alligators are still endangered. Those diners and restaurants need to be reassured that it’s OK to buy alligator meat. The farmers could each go out and hire an ad agency on their own.
“But by having a government agency market on our behalf – using our money – that gives us credibility,” Register said. If the state of Florida says it’s OK for a restaurant in New York to buy gator, it probably is. “As opposed to having Joe Blow Marketing Company in Pahokee saying ‘Yeah, it’s OK to kill alligators and sell the meat,’” Register said.
Not only that, the state Department of Agriculture has experience at selling Florida farm products.
“They do a good job,” said Register, who doesn’t officially speak for the alligator industry, but is one of its more active growers. “Most of us are small family owned businesses. We’re not marketers.”
It’s a multimillion dollar industry that provides jobs, as well, Register reminds the governor, who says his primary goal is to create work in the state.
And again, the growers point out, the alligator marketing line item in the state budget is sort of a pass through – state taxpayers don’t pay to market the alligators, the farmers pay to market the alligators. They simply pay the money to Tallahassee to do it.
Still, it would go a tiny way toward balancing a budget that is $3.6 billion in the red, maybe more. In addition to erasing the deficit, Scott wants to cut $2 billion in taxes, meaning he needs to find $5.6 billion in savings. And that doesn’t account for any reserves, which legislative leaders have said they’ll insist on setting aside.
Lawmakers, of course, write the budget, and they could simply ignore Scott’s proposal. It’s unlikely they’d do that entirely – the Republicans in control of the Legislature would love to cut taxes more, and they must balance the budget, it’s constitutionally required.
And they have vowed not to raise taxes either, though the definition of a tax increase is often debated.
That means they’ll be finding ways to cut the spending plan too – and like Scott, they’ll come up against backers of nearly every dollar that’s currently spent. Whether it’s a health program for the elderly that the state isn’t required to pay for or a state park, someone will work to preserve the spending for every item that’s proposed for the axe.
As for the alligator marketing program – the farmers have done without it before. Gov. Jeb Bush vetoed the money for a few years. The Department of Agriculture, which markets more than 300 commodities, isn’t pushing to eliminate the program, though neither would a spokesman say it was opposed to it being removed.
“The support we are able to provide to local farmers allows them to take advantage of national and international market conditions to sell their products across the world,” Agriculture Department Spokesman Sterling Ivey said. “We look forward to reviewing the governor’s budget on Monday and how it will continue to build and strengthen Florida’s $100 billion agriculture industry.”