Last week, State Senator Don Gaetz (R-Niceville) talked on “Pensacola Speaks” about Gov. Rick Scott’s line-item of several projects in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties.
Gaetz wasn’t too surprised by the cuts, except for the veto of $1 million for Project FOIL, an economic development project of the Pensacola Escambia Economic Development Commission.
“We did this year was to simply say that because of state agencies’ slowness in getting paperwork done with certain local projects-the FOIL Project in North Escambia is one of them-we simply did what’s routine, and that’s to reappropriate the funds to finish out the project that the legislature and governor approved last year,” he said.
“For some odd reason that no one can quite explain, the governor approved the project and then vetoed completing the project,” said Gaetz. “We’re scratching our heads around Florida about some of those, particularly since it was the governor’s own agencies that caused most of the delays in getting the project started. We’ll be having some hearings about that and inviting the governor to come and explain himself.”
The state senator said he believed the special session shouldn’t have been needed.
“I believe we could have gotten the work that we did in the special session done during the regular session,” he said. “It was basically to put together a budget and the work to do that, both in the House and the Senate, was pretty much done at the time that the House decided to leave early and walk out of the regular session.”
Gaetz added, “For me (the special session) was a waste of time, although we did get the budget done, and we got it done on time.”