TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Florida’s 2017 legislative session was by no means normal.
A senator resigned over racist remarks he made in front of black colleagues, Republican Gov. Rick Scott flew around the state criticizing Republican lawmakers, lawmakers needed three days of overtime to complete the state’s budget and the Legislature passed far fewer bills than it normally does.
“It was bizarre from start to finish,” said Democratic Rep. Evan Jenne just before session ended. “It was a slow moving session, it was mean, there was retribution. This was a rough one. This was a brutal session.”
There were more than 3,000 bills filed for the 63-day session that ended Monday, and only about 250 passed, the second lowest total in an annual session in at least 17 years. The budget is the only thing the Legislature is required to get done, and there were other major issues that made it through the process, but this year might be known more for infighting and what didn’t get done than what did.
Republican House Speaker Richard Corcoran publicly fought with the governor, who was angered that incentive money was stripped from the state’s economic development agency, Enterprise Florida. Scott was also upset that two-thirds of the Visit Florida tourism marketing agency was cut and most of his tax cut package didn’t make it through the budget process.
“The legislature decided not to give me the toolkit to make sure we get more jobs. On top of that they decided not to continue to market the state like we’ve been marketed,” Scott said during a media availability in Panama City on Tuesday. “We’re going to lose jobs.”
Still, Republicans were self-congratulatory about what they did get done.
“We passed a tremendous amount of legislation. I think we set out to have a bold, transformative agenda. There’s no question we accomplished that,” said Corcoran. “There’s a lot in the budget that the governor is going to like.”
Senate President Joe Negron pointed to two of his priorities that did pass, a plan to build reservoirs south of Lake Okeechobee to treat polluted water in the hopes of preventing algae blooms and a higher education bill he said will rise Florida to among the elite state university systems.
“For 20 years people talked about doing something for southern storage to stop the discharges in Lake Okeechobee. History will record that this Legislature acted and funded to stop all the discharges,” Negron said. “We set a goal to transform our universities into world class institutions like the University of Virginia and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. With the budget we passed and policy changes we did that.”
Yet lawmakers failed to pass a bill to implement the medical marijuana constitutional amendment voters passed last November. And bills allowing more gun rights and cracking down on illegal immigration also failed - not that Democrats considered that a bad thing.
And toward the end of session, Republican Sen. Frank Artiles resigned abruptly after it was reported he used the “n-word” in front of two black senators at a private club near the Capitol. In the exchange he also called a female senator an expletive particularly offensive to woman and used a vulgar comment to describe Negron.
___
AP writer Joe Reedy contributed to this report.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.