By Matt Wiley
If you follow politics, you know that Florida is a little “out there.” So much so that the Florida House of Representatives decided to pack up the 2015 Legislative Session and leave Tallahassee three days early this year due to disagreements over the state budget.
New Tampa’s representative in the Florida House is aware of how it looks, but Dist. 63 Rep. Shawn Harrison (R–New Tampa) told the Greater Wesley Chapel Chamber of Commerce (WCCC) during its May 5 Monthly Business Breakfast at the Pasco Hernando State College Porter Campus at Wiregrass Ranch in Wesley Chapel that he thinks the state House and Senate will be able to resolve their differences and pass a budget when they return to the state capitol on June 1 for a Special Session.
“I can tell you that it’s good to be home and out of Tallahassee,” Rep. Harrison told WCCC members. “It has been an ‘interesting’ few months up there.”
Harrison gave a short primer on how the session ended, and the reasoning for heading home early.
“Everything looked like we were going to have a fantastic session and come up with some great things for the folks in Florida,” Harrison said of the $1-billion budget surplus going into the session in January. “But, there became a very heated and bitter dispute between the two chambers about the concept of Medicaid expansion in the state of Florida. That caused everything to grind to a halt. The leadership basically decided we should all go home and cool down.”
Rep. Harrison explained that the House passed a $76.2 billion budget and the Senate passed a $80.4 billion budget, the difference being that the Senate’s budget included $4 billion in Federal funding to expand Medicaid coverage, or coverage for the state’s uninsured who require medical care.
“This was a difference in ideology,” Rep. Harrison said, explaining that the state can accept the funding from the Federal government, but that the additional funding doesn’t last past 2016 and the bill then falls onto the taxpayers.
“You hear a lot about the House refusing to take up Medicaid expansion,” Rep. Harrison said. “Not one single legislator in the House or Senate filed a bill regarding Medicaid expansion. The only time that issue ever came up was when it was included in the Senate budget and wasn’t included in the House budget.” He added, “It’s always been my philosophy that you vote for budgets because of what’s in the budget, not what’s left out of it.”
Rep. Harrison broke down some of the things that the House budget included.
“We had a communications services tax rate cut by four percentage points,” he said. “That’s on everyone’s cell phone bills.”
He also described sales tax exemptions for agricultural items, irrigation equipment, farming equipment, school books and supplies and even college textbooks. He said that the House also added a small business tax holiday for businesses purchases under $1,000, as well as a Fourth of July sales tax holiday for guns, ammunition, camping and fishing supplies.
The budget set a new record for education spending, Rep. Harrison said, noting that the budget had set aside the highest average spending per student in the state’s history.
“We set aside $21 billion for public education,” he said, adding that the average amount spent per student was $7,129, up from $20 billion and $6,937 per student last year. The budget also invested $9 billion for Florida’s transportation network, set aside $742 million into the Land Acquisition Trust Fund (which purchases environmentally-sensitive lands for conservation), invested $480 million for workforce education, $185 million into economic development, put $51 million into the child welfare system and allocated $16 million to the state’s Department of Corrections.
Rep. Harrison said that of the six bills he was allowed to file, four were passed, including HB 305, which seeks to assist property owners with removing unwanted guests. The property owner files an affidavit with the sheriff’s office, which then questions the legitimacy of the guest’s residency. If the person doesn’t have a legit reason to remain at the residence, the agency can charge that person with trespassing.
“Have you ever let someone stay with you, maybe a boyfriend or girlfriend, but the relationship sours and the other person doesn’t want to leave?” Rep. Harrison asked. “Right now there are no options besides going through the eviction process. It takes time, it takes money and it’s convoluted. This bill created a simplified procedure for removing unwanted guests.”
He also described HB 309: “Patient Admission Status Notification,” a bill of which Rep. Harrison said he was particularly proud. He explained that if you’re in the hospital for three days or more and will need longterm recovery in medical facility, you can qualify for Medicare. However, only if you are formally admitted. Instead of patients getting stuck with a huge bill after a month at a recovery facility because they thought they qualified, the bill requires that a notation be made on discharge papers, so patients will know if they qualified.
Although he’s New Tampa’s representative, Rep. Harrison said he also helped sponsor with Florida Senator Wilton Simpson (R–New Port Richey) a new 10-year pilot program for the Epperson Ranch Development of Regional Impact in Wesley Chapel, where the country’s first Crystal Lagoons mega pool will be built on Curley Rd.
“It takes the state development review function and brings it down to the county commission level for approvals to help speed it up,” Rep. Harrison explained. “The state review could take up to two years. We created a pilot for rest of state to see if we can streamline that process and bring the project online faster.”
In addition to talking Tallahassee, Rep. Harrison also expressed his approval of the WCCC’s recent absorbing of the WCCC and New Tampa Chamber of Commerce.
“The merger of the New Tampa Chamber of Commerce and (WCCC) is a great thing for our region,” he said. “Wesley Chapel today is what New Tampa was 20 years ago.”
For more information about Rep. Harrison and his bills, please visit MyFloridaHouse.gov. You also can call his local District 63 office at 910-3277.
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