Governor Cannot Cut Budget, Florida High Court Affirms

Her chief concern, said Karen Gievers, is her clients--”six children stuck in foster care who seem to be overlooked in this budget crisis. So I had to file a suit to protect them.

“I never knew it would come to this,” she said.

What it came to this week was a special session of the Florida Supreme Court in Tallahassee, an hour of impassioned argument and one of the oddest budget impasses in state history. The court voted, 6 to 1, Tuesday to uphold a Miami trial judge’s ruling that Gov. Lawton Chiles acted unconstitutionally when he and his Cabinet decided to slash state spending by $579 million.

Those cuts, representing 5% of Florida’s $29-billion budget, would have led to more crowded classrooms, reductions in social services, a freeze on college enrollment, fewer prison beds and state worker layoffs.

Chiles said he had no choice. State law requires a balanced budget, and, as he said last week: “Many of us are beginning to understand there is no free lunch.”

But before the cuts could take effect, Gievers, a 42-year-old Miami attorney, brought suit, charging the governor and his Cabinet with usurping the power of the Legislature. A Miami judge said she was correct and ruled Oct. 17 that Chiles and the Cabinet had no constitutional authority to order the cuts.

Furthermore, Dade County Circuit Judge Henry Ferro barred the governor and the Cabinet from even discussing the budget. Ferro is “way out of line,” the state’s deputy attorney general said angrily.

Last week, the state Supreme Court convened in a rare evening session and overturned Ferro’s ruling on talking about the budget. On Tuesday, the justices upheld Ferro’s ruling on the larger issue of just who has the constitutional right to make the cuts--the executive branch or the legislative branch.

Chiles, who was in Washington when the ruling was released, had said that he would call a special session of the Legislature to balance the spending plan if the court ruled against the cuts. However, House Speaker T. K. Wetherell said his inclination was to wait until the next regular session in January.

For Chiles, the budget crunch has become a personal nightmare. Over the past few weeks the first-term Democrat has been assailed in meetings all around the state by beleaguered teachers, outraged college students and parents of at-risk children whose lives have been saved by the very programs due to be abolished.

In less than a year since his landslide victory over incumbent Republican Bob Martinez, Chiles has seen his popularity plummet because of his struggle with the budget.

In a state with no personal income tax, state revenues are generated chiefly by a 6% sales tax. The slump in sales caused by the recession has already prompted the Cabinet to cut more than $1 billion from the budget this year, but that has not been enough.

“We’re kind of caught between a rock and a hard place right now,” Chiles said during a recent visit to an inner-city Miami church.

The long-term solution to Florida’s budget woes, Chiles said, is to cure the chronic fiscal imbalance caused by the steady rises in population and the costs of services that outstrip tax revenues.

Gievers said she can sympathize with Chiles. “He’s right. We need to have a constitutionally balanced budget,” she says. “But the way to do it is through the Legislature.”

Meanwhile, Gievers insists that her first duty is to her clients, six anonymous children who are cared for under the state’s guardianship program, one of those targeted for cuts.

“People are tired of seeing waste, mismanagement and greed,” Gievers said. “For example, one of the children I represent was warehoused in a $500-a-day hospital earlier this year when he didn’t need to be there. That means that for about six months the state paid $252 more a day than it needed to for the care of that child.

“That’s outrageous.”