WINTER HAVEN — Disaster aid for Florida farms and citrus groves damaged by Hurricane Irma faces two scenarios when Congress reconvenes Jan. 3, officials say.
The Senate could pass the House bill without changes, sending it to President Donald Trump.
Or the aid package could be included in the next budget bill, which Congress must pass by Jan. 19 to keep the federal government open.
Either way, Mike Sparks, chief executive at Bartow-based Florida Citrus Mutual, the growers’ representative, said he expects Trump to sign it.
“Congress writes laws and passes the budget. I would expect him not to veto it,” Sparks said.
Federal aid would provide a big boost to the Polk County and state economies, not just growers, said Frank Hunt III, a Lake Wales-based grower.
Because of Irma damage, his family company, Hunt Bros. Inc., is employing less than half its regular workforce in the 2017-18 season. Hunt Bros. has more than 5,000 grove acres in Polk and Southwest Florida and operates a fresh citrus packinghouse in Lake Wales.
“Aid to growers means jobs. It’s going to the people we’re employing to work in the citrus groves,” Hunt said. “If you can’t afford to do those things in the grove, you can’t afford to hire that guy. That means nobody benefits.”
Florida citrus growers are looking to the new year after coming tantalizingly close to getting the federal aid they need to survive the Hurricane Irma-ravaged season.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed an $81 billion disaster-relief bill on Dec. 21. It had $2.6 billion for agricultural assistance for losses to Irma in Florida and Hurricane Harvey in Texas, including $760 million to compensate Florida citrus growers for fruit losses in the 2017-18 season.
“It would have fully funded our request,” said Sparks, who was in Washington for the vote.
But Sparks and other Florida citrus officials had been working with their legislative allies to put the disaster relief in the temporary budget bill Congress needed to pass by Friday to keep the federal government running.
Instead, House leaders put the $81 billion disaster package in a separate bill, which passed by a 251-169 vote.
Despite the big margin of victory, one of the citrus industry’s Congressional allies, Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Okeechobee, said he could see the handwriting on the wall when the federal aid went into a separate, non-essential bill.
“When you’ve been in this job as long as I have — this is my fifth term — you know which trains are leaving the station and which are not,” Rooney told The Ledger on Tuesday.
The legislative maneuvering so angered Rooney and Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Lakeland, they voted against the budget bill.
“For months following Hurricane Irma, my colleagues and I fought to get Florida’s citrus farmers the federal relief they needed,” Ross said in a statement immediately after the House votes. “This devastation has been made worse by the uncertainty of this legislative process, one in which we have been told repeatedly that ‘help is on the way.’ But despite our efforts, help is not yet on the way.”
Rooney echoed that frustration.
“The situation my (citrus) growers are facing gets worse literally every day,” he said in the joint statement with Ross. “The bill released this week containing my request to help Florida’s farmers recover from the storm became a piece in a political and partisan game. The political reality is that the only way this disaster funding was going to be signed into law before Christmas was for it to be combined with the continuing (budget) resolution.”
Sure enough, when the stand-alone disaster bill hit the U.S. Senate on Dec. 22 with just hours left before adjourning for the Christmas holiday break, some senators balked, saying they didn’t have enough time to review it before voting, Sparks said. The Senate passed the budget bill but not the disaster aid.
Sparks said he was not pleased at the delay, but “it was understandable because the Senate had only hours to read it and vote.”
Despite the delay, Congress passed two hurricane-relief packages, though both contained no money for agriculture, he said.