By Jim Saunders ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — A state panel late Monday finished revising a “financial impact statement” that will appear on the November ballot with a proposed constitutional amendment on abortion rights — with amendment supporters accusing the panel of a “dirty trick to mislead voters.”
Financial impact statements provide estimated effects of proposed constitutional amendments on government revenues and the state budget. They usually receive little attention, but the abortion measure spurred contentious debate and divided the panel.
Representatives of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office and the Florida House pushed to include information in the statement about issues such as the possibility that passage of the amendment could lead to Medicaid-funded abortions and spur a wide range of costly lawsuits. Those are issues that amendment opponents have cited as they fight the proposal.
Ultimately, with the help of the panel’s representative from the Florida Senate, DeSantis’ office and the House got the information they sought into the statement.
In part, the statement says there is “uncertainty about whether the amendment will require the state to subsidize abortions with public funds. Litigation to resolve those and other uncertainties will result in additional costs to the state government and state courts that will negatively impact the state budget. An increase in abortions may negatively affect the growth of state and local revenues over time. Because the fiscal impact of increased abortions on state and local revenues and costs cannot be estimated with precision, the total impact of the proposed amendment is indeterminate.”
Chris Spencer, DeSantis’ representative on the panel, known as the Financial Impact Estimating Conference, said “protracted” lawsuits about abortion issues would be inevitable if the amendment passes. That could include lawsuits about whether Medicaid should pay for abortions and which health-care providers would be able to perform abortions, he said.
Panel member Amy Baker, coordinator of the Legislature’s Office of Economic & Demographic Research, agreed that passage of the amendment would lead to lawsuits. But Baker, the panel’s lone dissenter, objected to including issues such as the possibility of litigation leading to Medicaid-funded abortions.
“I would, personally, feel more comfortable if we just did it clean and crisp,” Baker said. “We’re not making a political statement here. We are not trying to frighten people. There will be litigation costs.”
But Spencer, who is DeSantis’ former budget director, pushed back against the suggestion that including the information was political. DeSantis and other state Republican leaders oppose the proposed constitutional amendment.
“I don’t think it’s a political statement,” said Spencer, who was recently appointed as executive director of the State Board of Administration. “I don’t think it’s anything other than we know litigation is going to occur.”
The proposed amendment, which will appear on the November ballot as Amendment 4, says, in part, that no “law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” Abortion-rights supporters began the initiative effort after DeSantis and the GOP-controlled Legislature in spring 2023 approved a bill to prevent abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
The Financial Impact Estimating Conference released an initial statement for the abortion proposal in November 2023. But on April 1, the Florida Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed a six-week abortion limit to take effect. Though the limit was approved in 2023, it was hung up in court for nearly a year.
Floridians Protecting Freedom, a political committee leading efforts to pass the amendment, filed a lawsuit in April arguing that the November financial impact statement needed to be revised because it was outdated after the Supreme Court ruling. Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper agreed with the committee, but the state appealed to the 1st District Court of Appeal, where the case is pending.
Amid the case, Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, and House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast, directed the Financial Impact Estimating Conference to begin meeting again to revise the statement. The panel met three times, with Monday’s meeting lasting into the night.
Floridians Protecting Freedom and its “Yes on 4” campaign issued a news release late Monday that described the revised statement as reading “like an ad written by Amendment 4 opponents — highly-politicized and unlawfully inaccurate to mislead voters on Amendment 4.”
“What should have been an easy administrative fix on outdated (financial impact statement) language has become a dirty trick to mislead voters.” Lauren Brenzel, campaigns director for Yes on 4, said in a prepared statement.
But Sara Johnson of the anti-amendment group Vote No on 4, told the panel during Monday’s meeting that it should provide information about such issues as potential lawsuit costs.
“It’s important for Florida voters to know that what you see is not what you will get,” Johnson said. “What we will get is costly litigation for years to come that will result in policies we have not yet seen and therefore cannot yet analyze.”
— News Service Assignment Manager Tom Urban contributed to this report.
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