![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/DESANTIS-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nDeSantis held a bill signing ceremony at a New Smyrna Beach restaurant and used the event to boast about his response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying fully opening Florida to business early helped the economy rebound faster and stronger than expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA lot of people were trying to tell me to close restaurants like this last summer. We didn\u2019t do it. We kept business open, we got kids in school,\u201d DeSantis said. \u201cThe result was our economy really started to rebound.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even with the vetoes, the budget is nearly $8 billion above the current state spending plan. The budget year starts July 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said the state continues to far exceed revenue projections, helped in part by tourism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou had a lot of these other states that just kept locking people down. We were the state lifting people up. That was good for Floridians, but we were also the landing spot for a lot of people that wanted to escape the insanity and come and get recharged.\u201d DeSantis said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The billion dollars in federal money was supposed to go to an emergency response fund set up by the Legislature. DeSantis said that while he supports such a fund, the federal government set conditions on it that didn\u2019t make sense for the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part of it was because the money would come in the form of grants and the state would have to go through normal bidding process to spend it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn an emergency situation, you don\u2019t have the time to do the normal procurement. You\u2019ve got to do this very quickly. It would defeat the purpose to try to use it for emergency response if you have to go through all that bureaucracy,\u201d DeSantis said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said the state also wanted to use the money to meet future emergency needs, and the federal government said it couldn\u2019t be used for those purposes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a $100 billion budget Wednesday after vetoing $1.5 billion, including $1 billion in federal money for an emergency response fund he said had strings attached that… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":47471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[357],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49065"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49066,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49065\/revisions\/49066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}