TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Abortion rights groups in Florida are locked in a battle with the state over the cost of a referendum to overturn the state’s six-week ban.
The fight is over a seemingly vague budget impact statement that estimates the cost to the state if the proposed constitutional amendment passes. It underscores how both pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion forces are scrambling to gain every inch of ground ahead of a campaign that will see tens of millions of dollars spent in the nation’s third-largest state.
And abortion rights activists say it shows how the state’s Republican leaders are trying to thwart the November referendum by any means possible.
“They almost always throw up as many procedural obstacles as possible,” said Anna Hochkammer of the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition. “They try to make these processes as expensive and complicated as possible, and this is another example of that tactic.”
Florida law requires every ballot initiative to include a financial impact statement that voters must consider. The statement for the abortion rights amendment—which would allow the procedure in the state up to the point where a pregnancy is viable—was finalized last November, well before the state’s current six-week ban went into effect. At the time, state economists said the impact of the six-week ban on the state’s finances could be significant, but because the law had not yet gone into effect, there wasn’t enough data to calculate precise numbers.
Abortion rights groups filed a lawsuit demanding that the state update its estimates now that the ban is in place. They claim the stricter ban is costing the state significantly more money than before.Roo restrictions, and that a new, revised figure should reflect that.
Few expect the financial impact statement – current or revised – to be the deciding factor in this election. But it shows how both sides are fighting for every possible advantage they can gain.
The amendment’s proponents had already won a small victory after Florida’s Republican legislative leaders called on a consortium of state economists to revise the budget impact statement amid a lawsuit. But the decision by Senate President Kathleen Passidomo and House Speaker Paul Renner to reconvene the Financial Impact Estimating Conference to reevaluate the initiative came only after the groups won a victory in a lower court.
The Estimate Conference will be held on Monday and July 8. Estimate conferences typically require two days of public comment and extensive discussion before issuing a statement. The conference is hosted by the state Bureau of Economic and Demographic Research, and participants include top budget officials from the House, Senate and governor’s office.
The initiative, which will appear on the November ballot as Amendment 4, is backed by the Floridians Protecting Freedom Committee, which wants the estimates conference to answer questions that economists couldn’t answer when the last statement was released more than seven months ago. Many of these uncertainties limited details about the expected impact of the state’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, which went into effect in May.
Keisha Mulfort, a spokesperson for ACLU Florida, which is supporting the ballot measure, said the meeting will mark the first time the Financial Impact Estimating Conference has “voluntarily” reconvened.
“We expected a simple, collaborative process and that the state and Floridians Protecting Freedom would share the goal of ensuring voters receive accurate information when they cast their ballots,” Mulfort wrote in an email. “Unfortunately, the state claims in the lawsuit that the Conference can attach any declaration it chooses to any citizen-sponsored amendment without any appeal to the court.”
Even as legislative leaders have reconvened the estimates conference, the state continues to fight the lawsuit, seeking a revised impact statement in court.
A spokesperson for Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office referred to the state’s appeals court’s initial filing in response to a question about why Florida continues to challenge a lower court’s ruling — even though the conference has already received orders from the Legislature received power to redraft the statement — and made no further comment. The petition lists the case law and other evidence the state presented to challenge the lower court’s ruling.
John Morgan, who sparred with the state over impact statements while successfully leading ballot initiatives that legalized medical marijuana in 2016 and raised the state’s minimum wage to $15 in 2020, said state advocates have bigger plans that require that the court of appeals reverse the lower wages. order of the court.
“There is a constitutional scholar who is planning something in the future,” said Morgan, a prominent Democratic megadonor. “The one thing lawmakers don’t like is the people having a say in democracy, other than electing them to represent the interests of special interests.”
The campaign to get Amendment 4 on the ballot began after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the six-week ban last April, facing several state obstacles.
Moody asked the state Supreme Court to block the measure, but failed to convince them to halt the initiative as of the November ballot. In a separate ruling issued on the same day in April, the Supreme Court also upheld the state’s previous 15-week ban, which DeSantis signed in 2022. That ruling also prompted language that lifted the 15-week ban and replaced it with the six-week ban. weekly ban on May 1.
That all worked out after the impact statement was finalized last November. Without the six-week ban, and with litigation over the 15-week ban ongoing at the time, the Financial Impact Estimating Conference discussed several restrictions that prevented economists from providing details.
“Because there are several possible outcomes with respect to this litigation that vary widely in their effects, the impact of the proposed amendment on state and local government revenues and costs, if any, cannot be determined,” the November statement said.
Without further recourse, Floridians Protecting Freedom sued the members of the valuation conference to reconvene. A judge’s subsequent order to hold the meetings prompted the state’s appeal, which argues that a court was not the proper venue for the case.
Senate spokesperson Katie Betta declined to discuss details because of the ongoing litigation, instead referring to court briefs filed by Moody’s office. They brought forward a similar lawsuit that the campaign behind the 2020 minimum wage initiative also won in court, but that decision was overturned by the appeals court, which ruled that the lower court did not have jurisdiction.
An analysis submitted to the estimates conference by the Amendment 4 campaign before the November meetings predicted that the state would realize significant health care cost savings if it were to pass. The analysis shows that pregnancies that would have been terminated without strict state restrictions are 40 times more likely to result in mothers and children living in poverty. In addition to cuts to subsidized health care and child welfare programs, the state would also see savings from reduced public school enrollment, they argued. Criminal costs would also be saved because the state would no longer have to enforce the six-week ban.
“We are not asking that the Conference do or say anything that was not already included in the analysis,” Mulfort wrote in an email. “We ask for an accurate and non-misleading statement of the financial impact of Amendment 4.”
