Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran has doubts about the projected $145 million budget surplus this year is real.
“When you look at it, they were counting in that number the Triumph money,” he said this week on “Pensacola Speaks” on News Talk 1370 WCOA. “That belongs to the Panhandle. We’re not taking that Triumph money, so you can’t count that. That’s 400 million dollars.”
He said, “Then the second part of that is we cut people’s property taxes last year by almost $30. The number that they’re giving us that says it’s $145 million surplus is anticipating that we’re going to raise your property taxes. I’ve said to people, we can have 18,000 special sessions. We’re not raising taxes in the Florida House.”
Speaker Corcoran added, “When you put those two numbers together, we’ve got to cut, and honestly it’s not going to be a problem. We have a real spending problem in the state of Florida. It’s not going to be hard to find a billion dollars worth of cuts in the state of Florida.”
