Although Gov. Rick Scott has repeatedly said he is against federal government stimulus funds, the new budget signed into law last week contains more than $360 million in stimulus dollars. Scott, during his campaign for governor had said he would have found a way to balance the previous year’s budget without stimulus dollars.
According to the Miami Herald-St. Petersburg Times, among the items paid for in this year’s budget by stimulus dollars is $290 million to improve the use of electronic medical records, $12.5 million for drug courts, $8.6 million for county health departments, $4.4 million for public defenders and prosecutors and $4.2 million in assistance to disadvantaged children.
About $340 million in new spending in the budget was made possible by stimulus money that had been sent to the state by Washington. The budget also included about $27 million carry-over recurring spending that was earmarked earlier but continued in the new budget.
In total, Florida will eventually have gotten $24.2 billion of the $787 billion stimulus package. Earlier this year, Scott rejected $2.4 billion in federal funds for the Tampa to Orlando high speed rail line.
Commenting on why he had now included stimulus funding in the budget he had just signed, Scott bizarrely said he weighed budget line items on whether they would create jobs or hurt jobs.
Perhaps Scott forgot he had rejected federal grant funds for high speed rail which would have generated over 30,000 jobs in Florida. Nonetheless, he said the stimulus was a mistake.
“And I think we have to watch how we spend all that money, both at the state level and at the federal level,” Scott said.
