Local budget requests might become more transparent in the coming legislative session, newly-elected Senate President Don Gaetz said, but the old Community Budget Issue Request process probably isn’t going to be on deck. “I don’t know if we’ll call it CBIRs because I don’t want to start a CBIRs parade, because there is no onrush of new money,” said Gaetz, R-Niceville.
But he did tell reporters after the Senate’s organizing session Tuesday that there might be other ways to make the process more open; despite a years-long moratorium on CBIRs in the difficult budget environment, lawmakers are set getting pet projects into the state spending plan. “But I think what we should do is ask people to bring their priorities that they think are important from a budgetary standpoint, bring them to the surface soon so that we can see if they make sense, so we can debate them and if they’re valuable, be able to bake them into the budget,” he said.
