This report evaluates the Florida Legislature’s $16.5 billion FY 1986-87 budget for unnecessary or special-interest appropriations, which TaxWatch terms “turkeys” or “pork barrel” projects. Florida TaxWatch defines a legislative turkey as an appropriation falling into one of five categories: projects with no demonstrated public benefit that serve only a special interest, subsidies to private organizations or events that should be privately funded, local government projects of local benefit that should be locally funded, measures that let legislators sidestep public accountability, and items included in the budget outside the normal planning and budgeting process or through deliberate distortion of that process. The report frames turkey spending as a direct tradeoff against legitimate public needs, noting that every dollar spent on a turkey is a dollar unavailable for services benefiting a wider group of Floridians, and cites several health and human service programs that received less funding than recommended in the state’s own planning process, including Community Care for the Elderly (a $2.4 million shortfall), Child Care ($2.3 million), Employment Training ($2.0 million), Home Care for the Elderly ($2.8 million), and Children’s Services ($3.0 million).

Florida TaxWatch credits the 1986 Legislature, an election year, with reducing the number, size, and severity of turkeys compared to past sessions, noting the notable absence of past excesses such as a football stadium funded for a university with no football team or a civic center for a county whose officials did not want it. The report also credits the Legislature for subjecting most capital projects to normal planning and budgeting review, for the $613 million Public Education Capital Outlay bill consisting mostly of properly vetted construction projects, and for appropriating over $50 million to repair existing state buildings rather than construct new ones. Despite this improvement, the report notes that Governor Graham’s veto of four large turkeys totaling more than $15 million shows the overall turkey count remained too high, and warns that 1987, a non-election year, could see a resurgence in such spending.

The report itemizes numerous specific appropriations it considers turkeys, including a $100,000 subsidy for the Orange Bowl Game, a $200,000 subsidy for Orange Blossom Classic, a $500,000 subsidy for the Miami Grand Prix, a $300,000 subsidy tied to the Miss U.S.A. pageant, $100,000 each for Orlando Chamber of Commerce trade missions and the Orlando International Affairs Council, a $100,000 subsidy for the Miami Film Festival, $200,000 for an Inter-American Development Bank conference, $125,000 for a Tampa Trade Fair, $100,000 for an American International Exhibition, $250,000 and $70,000 respectively for “Vision Committee” and “Visions of the Future” planning initiatives in Gainesville and other counties, $250,000 for a port market research study, $60,000 for vans for the Ft. Lauderdale Jewish Community Center, $25,000 for a fern protection study, and $250,000 for the Valiant Air Command, a private group of airplane enthusiasts. It also flags larger items among the vetoed or contested “big ticket strays,” including $1.6 million for a Lakeland parking garage the Department of General Services had not requested, $5 million for a performing arts center at Santa Fe Community College and the University of Florida that the Commissioner of Education had never requested funding for, $6 million as the first installment of a $30 million Florida Atlantic University Broward campus project that bypassed normal planning review, and $2.7 million in Community Development Block Grant funding expanded to specifically include the City of Milton.

The report separately identifies two “statutory turkeys” embedded in ongoing law rather than the current year’s budget: automatic annual pay raises for legislators, which Florida TaxWatch argues meet its criteria for sidestepping public accountability since legislators set their own raise rate every year until the law is repealed, and a state requirement mandating fully reflectorized license tags, which the Legislature failed to repeal despite a bill from Representative Bo Johnson; Florida TaxWatch estimates this requirement needlessly drives up costs to taxpayers by $10 million over five years by stifling competition among suppliers.