DeSantis selfishly guts Florida's arts and culture funding for a budget gimmick | Commentary

John Delaney, a former Republican mayor of Jacksonville who later became president of the University of North Florida and Flagler College, has what's become a kind of ready-made line when he needs to defend much-maligned liberal arts programs in higher education — the types of things Tallahassee legislators like to target with budget cuts.

"We want to be Athens, not Sparta," he'd say. "We need artists, actors, teachers, poets, writers."

Some of the larger line items Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed last week out of the $116 billion budget were about $32 million for arts, culture and museum grants and related projects, a stunning blow to hundreds of organizations across the sprawling state: children's choruses, opera houses, symphonies, theatres, zoological societies, cultural councils. This was a cruel, crude and first-of-its-kind across-the-board gutting the governor didn't even try to justify. We can only guess at DeSantis' strange hostility toward arts and culture funding, but it's difficult to avoid concluding from this blackout that DeSantis must view Florida's cultural institutions as a threat to the peculiar political culture he is trying to cultivate instead — a reactionary and spartan one.

The governor bragged about his nearly $1 billion in vetoes, which he said helped keep the budget for the next fiscal year below this year's spending. That eye-rolling technicality — cheap, talking-point gimmickry — came with an enormous cost in a state chock-full of needs. It's also bad fiscal management and self-sabotage: arts and culture spending has a meaningful return on investment. “The state has an overall nine-to-one return on investment from these grants that generate hundreds of millions in tax revenue and fuel our local economy,” Carlos Guillermo Smith, who just won a Central Florida state Senate seat, told USA Today Network reporter John Kennedy.

Beyond the erasure of arts and culture spending, the larger list of vetoes is a curious hodgepodge of cuts. There is no discernible logic to them, save for the logic of selfishness. Why veto money for a 911 console replacement project for Nassau County? Or funds for a new fire station in Deltona and Clay County? Could the budget not sustain a mere $500,000 outlay for a public-safety complex in Brevard? What would he say about having vetoed $250,000 for mental-health services for firefighters and police?

What was it about a Black history month 5k in Orlando, or a veterans wall in Newberry, that drew his red ink?

It can't all be attributed to fiscal prudence because the budget is still crammed with largesse, expensive giveaways, and dubious vanity projects, like $75 million for a UF campus in Jacksonville, a passion of DeSantis ally and megadeveloper Mori Hosseini.

Why allow for the inclusion of $6 million to help a Jacksonville charter school build a gym, but nix $305,000 for a reading and math program for the Gulf County Schools, or a meager $172,000 to help the Suwanee School District pay for barricades for doors? (Well, that charter school was founded by a prolific Republican donor.)

"The governor reviews every bill and appropriation that comes across his desk and uses his authority under the Florida Constitution to make veto decisions that are in the best interest of the state of Florida," DeSantis' administration told reporters in a canned statement.

DeSantis doesn't see the need to explain himself, so more than 600 arts and culture organizations are left scrambling for no stated reason despite spending their time and resources applying for state grant funding — funding they had no particular reason to think would simply vanish entirely. His zeal for gutting worthy causes even nabbed the Florida Legislature: For reasons he's not explained, DeSantis vetoed a study on how to prevent credit card companies from saddling Florida retailers with swipe fees. But to do that — to join hands with credit-card companies, that is — DeSantis had to cancel out the entire multi-million dollar legislative support services budget, sending legislative leaders into a momentary crisis over how they were going to pay their staff.

The Legislature, of course, could restore all these cuts and replenish Florida's cultural lifeline, but checks and balances feel like a concept buried deep in the state's grander past. Legislative leaders were in a pickle over their support staff funding because they also didn't want to attempt to override DeSantis' veto, necessitating a dubious legal workaround instead. They wouldn't go to the mats for their own employees, so what possible chance do a bunch of nonprofits, often with few political connections, have?

No, they will allow DeSantis to sacrifice Florida's cultural richness for a budget gimmick.

Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoes funding for arts and culture projects