that sounds so completely innocuous and really it’s designed for one vendor to stick it to another vendor. That’s why you have staff to say, “Listen, we know what’s going on here,” someone who’s been around and understands what’s up. Tom Lee too, he had a very good understanding of where things were. He’s probably the most methodical researcher. You’ll always have in an $80-billion-plus budget something tucked away somewhere. It could be $25,000 for something. If we didn’t flag it, the governor usually does. And he usually vetoes it. It tends to work itself out. We did our best to empower our (budget) subcommittee chairs, which was key to my presidency. I was good about saying to Tom Lee, “You build a budget. I’ll have a few things I’m interested in, but you build it.” Working with those chairs to do the allocations is a key piece to whoever is going to preside. Everybody has earned the right to be here, so why not empower them? One thing we tried to do and ultimately weren’t able to get done was, we looked at all these after-school programs, and we had this idea of having a larger pot of money and have these organizations compete for it. Come in, show your return on investment ... if you do a good job, you could even get more money. It was $30 million. And you would have thought the world was going to end. We gave them the opportunity for more money, and in our negotiations with the House, I think the House would have gone and done that for everybody. And I think, long term, instead of having earmarks, you get to a point where you say, “Here (are) the after-school program block grants.” Like the federal government, let them compete. Maybe that’s the thing that I would say the Legislature ought to consider. If anything, you have the opportunity to promote yourself and get more money. You do as much in the public as you possibly can, but there is always going to be, just based on timing, (things) you’re 126 | INFLUENCE SUMMER/FALL 2016 going to have to work out with staff. That’s just the reality. You can be held accountable and have the information available to everybody as to what decisions were made … but to get back to that block grant idea, if you do that, then you can set up a timeframe and all that information is available to everybody. Then it’s not who has the best lobbyists, but who has the best program. If you’re looking at return on investment, you’re getting into numbers and not the fancy flier. You’re looking at measurable goals, and whether they were met and made sense. … ABOUT GETTING THINGS DONE: I’m very happy about the additional funding (that went to the Agency for People with Disabilities), the bike trails, the Officer Pine legislation (to expand benefits to survivors of first responders) this year. I think all the way across the board it was very special. There aren’t a lot of high-powered lobbyists or vendors pushing to do things for kids with unique abilities. To be able to say we moved the bar, to have parents come up to you literally crying, that’s pretty special … When I try to look at what I’ve done, which is good or bad, I don’t look at just the last two years, I look at the last 16 years. Being proud about it is not a thing I am comfortable with. I do think there are a lot of families that will be very happy with what we were able to accomplish. It’s funny, there was one thing that was left in the last day of session, one of the last bills. It provided insurance for children with Down syndrome, specifically for behavioral therapies. There was a huge fight when Marco Rubio was speaker of the House regarding behavioral coverage. Autism got coverage. Down syndrome did not. I thought that I would leave here with that not being resolved. But that was one of the last bills that passed this year. It was a pretty special thing to get that done. It gets to the heart of a family being able to understand what is the issue with their kid. … ABOUT REGRETS (OR LACK THEREOF): As a presiding officer, you have to have the things that you care about and then surround yourself with people that will know how to implement them. It’s probably not as vendor-driven as others, but we laid out some things we wanted to get done the last two years and we got them all done. It was pretty special to me. Now certainly as people try to rewrite history on the (2015) health care discussion, they’ll say, “Oh, why did he get involved in that?” I’m very comfortable with all that. I know the facts and what we were facing. The reality was, we had a Low Income Pool (LIP) that was going away. (LIP is the state-federal pool of money that reimbursed hospitals for health care given to the poor.) We could not build a budget without knowing what that number was going to be. But the federal government said, “We’re not doing $2 billion again.” They were very clear. The Senate tried to fix it. We were just saying that we had to look at all the options. Ultimately, we were able to get a budget done and we put close to $600 million into health care. I don’t look at that as a regret. There’s very little in this process that I lose sleep over. And again, let’s stick with the facts here: I didn’t send anybody home. They left (referring to the House quitting the 2015 Legislative Session three days early). And the reality is — I want to make sure everybody’s clear on this — we had no allocations. We had all agreed, three or four weeks before they left, that we were not going to get a budget done. We were going to come back to do the budget. What I had hoped was that we would have looked at the 70 or 80 bills that were still available and finished strong. We didn’t have all the answers, but I feel pretty darn comfortable with it. I wasn’t played by anybody. We offered ideas and solutions. We asked them to offer ideas and solutions. That’s how the process works. They didn’t. That’s their prerogative. But I didn’t run them off. We were willing and ready to talk. … ABOUT THE BATTLE OVER THE NEXT SENATE PRESIDENCY: I’ll say this about Sen. (Jack) Latvala and the President designate (Joe Negron): Regardless of what happened outside the Capitol, with fundraising and all that, they both did a very good job of keeping it clean on the inside. I firmly believe that. I’ve been around both of them a lot, we’ve all traveled together. I didn’t see the bleed-over into any policy I wanted to get done or issues that were important. Ultimately, the members felt like it needed to get resolved. You could sense it was just starting to wear on them. “ When I try to look at what I’ve done ... I don’t look at just the last two years, I look at the last 16 years. Being proud about it is not a thing I am comfortable with.” —Andy Gardiner
19137EE
To see the actual publication please follow the link above