New House, Senate budgets still don’t say Joint Council is charge of COE money

House Speaker Steve Crisafulli and Senate President Andy Gardiner

House bill (top) and Senate bill (bottom)

Both chambers of the Florida Legislature released their proposed 2016-2017 budgets last week. Neither one states that the Joint College of Engineering Governance Council will be in charge of the money goes to the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering (COE).

Last year, the House of Representatives and Senate agreed to appropriate $12,999,685 to the COE. The new House budget bill has $13,451,572 for the COE and the Senate budget bill includes $13,241,710.

The Florida Legislature designated FAMU to be in charge of the funds for the COE and put that money in the university’s general revenue line between 1987 and 2014. But in May 2015, after the legislature created a new budget entity for the appropriation, a new Joint College of Engineering Governance Council decided that it was going to start calling the shots about what happens to the $12.9M COE budget instead of FAMU.

The council took that position even though it isn’t even mentioned in the General Appropriations Act that created the new budget entity. No part of the current General Appropriations Act says that the Joint College of Engineering Governance Council has permission to take control of the $12.9M COE budget. The Senate originally placed the BOG language about the council in its version of the bill, but that language was not part of the final bill that Gov. Rick Scott signed into law because the House asked for those paragraphs to be removed. 

Rattlers should write the Office of the Florida Auditor General and ask it to help find answers about whether or not the FAMU Board of Trustees was supposed to have given its approval before the $12.9M COE budget was moved to FSU. The preliminary audit for the FAMU 2014-2015 fiscal year is expected to be released in February or March.

The contact page for the Office of the Florida Auditor General is here.