Florida officials predict stable economic growth for the next year or so

(The Center Square) — The Joint Legislative Budget Commission met Friday to discuss the state’s financial outlook and state officials predict stable growth for the Sunshine State.

Amy Baker, the coordinator at the Office of Economic & Demographic Research, presented the state’s long-range financial outlook and said the work to prepare it begins early in the summer.

“This year’s plan is gonna be addressing fiscal years 2025-26, 26-27 and 27-28. Mostly it’s driven by two types of drivers, one is the revenue drivers,” Baker said. “The big force in those, particularly this year, is what our assumptions are for the national and Florida economic outlooks and what we’re doing with population growth.”

Baker said Florida’s gross domestic product continues to grow despite a large part of the U.S. showing negative growth. While a slight slowdown is expected over the next year or so, growth will remain stable. For personal income, Florida ranks 10th in the nation, according to Baker.

“The other set is budget drivers, those budget drivers are the results coming out of estimating conferences, they’re also based on legislative actions and we also provide information through three-year averages,” Baker said

Baker said they recognized a big surge of available non-recurring dollars, so they paced the expenditures to match that pattern but added that some states have not done that.

State Sen. Doug Broxson, R-Pensacola, commended the work done on the budget and added that it shows Florida’s unique position.

“When we started in December of 2019, the world really had no idea where we’d be fiscally, we were blessed in Florida to have very close to a balanced budget which was not true in many other states,” Broxson said. “Then we saw the federal influx in response to the pandemic and our members, to their credit, made a joint decision that we were gonna take those dollars and spend on non-recurring projects, such as infrastructure.”

Broxson added these funds were spent on roads and bridges, facilities, coastal resilience projects and reduction of state debt. Now those extra funds have stopped, Broxson warned against spending when it is not needed.

“I would hope that we continue to be the state that stays within our budget and does not put additional pressure on our already over-pressured taxpayers,” Broxson said.

The committee adopted the long-range financial outlook.