Gov. Rick Scott was urged Friday to veto $149.6 million in hometown projects and other suspect spending in the state’s proposed $70 billion budget, including millions tucked in by legislative leaders.

Florida TaxWatch released its annual “turkey watch” as a prelude to Scott’s planned budget signing next week. Last year, Scott vetoed a record $615 million in spending but recently told the Post he didn’t expect to get anywhere near that level in the latest round.

Still, TaxWatch President Dominic Calabro said Scott should rely on a simple guide when reviewing legislative spending proposals.

“When in doubt, take it out,” Calabro said.

In addition to the amount TaxWatch targeted for veto, the business-backed research organization recommended Scott take a closer look at $21.3 million in economic development projects. TaxWatch said it’s likely some can spur the economy, but added that the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity should give this 16-project list more scrutiny.

A handful of Palm Beach County budget items were marked as turkeys Friday. Among them, $1 million for water treatment work in the Glades area, $250,000 for security at this fall’s presidential debate at Boca Raton’s Lynn University, $50,000 to help prepare a master plan for Torry Island development, and $500,000 for widening Riviera Beach’s 13th Street.

Tony Brown, executive director of the Riviera Beach Community Redevelopment Authority, earlier told the Post the 13th Street money would help the city complete a project it sees as vital to connecting a nearby industrial park to the Port of Palm Beach. He called the state’s expected contribution a “good public partnership” for a city strapped by several years of budget deficits.

Legislative leaders saw several of their hometown projects questioned.  Two of the biggest spending items TaxWatch opposed were in the backyard of Senate President Mike Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, with $14 million for a Brevard College public safety institute and $10 million for economic development condemned as turkeys.

House budget chair Denise Grimsley, R-Sebring, also would lose $520,203 for an international baccalaureate program at Sebring High School and incoming Senate President Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, would have $389,825 axed from a science and technology program at a local middle school, if Scott follows TaxWatch’s recommendation.

But one of the most controversial spending provisions of the spring session was given the go-ahead Friday. TaxWatch said Sen. J.D. Alexander’s push for accelerating the creation of a 12th public university by giving independence to the University of South Florida’s Polytechnic campus in Lakeland — in Alexander’s home county — was included in legislation that was debated by lawmakers.

As a result, it doesn’t fit the organization’s definition of a turkey. But it still may not be the best use of taxpayer money. Polytechnic would receive $27 million in state start-up funds, while USF would get $16 million to cover costs stemming from the separation.

“Do we need a 12th university? I think the preponderance of our thinking is no,” Calabro said.  

A final state budget deal Monday cut $24.8 million from Florida Atlantic University as House and Senate negotiators capped days of talks with last-minute additions that tucked dozens of hometown projects into a $70 billion spending plan.

The agreement sets the stage for budgets to be placed on the desks of lawmakers today. A constitutionally required 72-hour waiting period means final votes are likely Friday, the two-month session’s last scheduled day.

FAU’s reduction trims about 10 percent of the school’s budget and is part of a $300 million cut leveled across Florida’s 11 public universities.

Officials said FAU can use $16 million in reserves to help ease the lost dollars. Still, it marks the fifth straight year of declining state aid for universities – a trend that has heightened the push for tuition increases.

The higher education cuts come even as the budget deal anticipates a 12^th state university – with the Legislature approving separating the University of South Florida from its polytechnic campus in Lakeland.

Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales, spearheaded the break with USF, as the term-limited lawmaker will leave office in November with a new school created in his home Polk County.

But Alexander wasn’t the only leading lawmaker to land a favored project Monday as millions of dollars was steered to community centers, social service programs, local road projects and even $5 million for a Sarasota rowing center, already vetoed once by Gov. Rick Scott.

Alexander’s House counterpart, Rep. Denise Grimsley, R-Sebring, steered $520,203 to an international baccalaureate program at her hometown high school.

When asked about what critics call political pork, Alexander said lawmakers had a right to fight for hometown spending.

“It’s a fair amount, all and all,” Alexander said of the projects. “We haven’t done a lot of that in a number of years…but at the end of the day, each of us is elected to represent our districts and their unique needs.”

Scott, though,  last year vetoed a record $615 million in spending by lawmakers. Mindful of that, Alexander added a caution to the items lawmakers managed to include Monday.

“Of course, most all that will be subject to discussion with the governor,” he added.

Florida school funding is set — with per-pupil cash expected to rise 2.34 percent next year — but higher education dollars remain up-in-the-air as House and Senate budget negotiators worked Thursday night on dozens of details separating the two sides.

The agreed-on school cash represents a $1 billion increase — complying with Gov. Rick Scott’s demand for a big boost to partially offset last year’s $1.3 billion reduction. That brought classroom spending to its lowest level in six years.

“We’ve done well. Schools are well served,” said Senate Pre-K-12 budget chief David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs.

The increase settled by Simmons and his House counterpart, Rep. Marti Coley, R-Marianna, amounts to a $145.48 per-pupil hike, bringing average spending to $6,370 for each of Florida’s 2.7 million school kids. The funding level is closer to  the $141 level where the House started out, than the Senate’s more robust plan for increasing school cash by $1.3 billion, or  $192-per-student.

The fate of university dollars, though, remains unsettled.

The House and Senate have agreed to cut universities by $300 million, but how to apply the cuts has stumped negotiators. The final deal-cutting, involving scores of issues, was turned over Thursday night to Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales, and House Appropriations Chair Denise Grimsley, R-Sebring, to settle.

Florida Atlantic University is among several schools warily watching how the final deal is structured. Many also have questioned Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander’scharacterization that Florida’s 11 public universities have more than $800 million in reserves.

FAU President M.J. Saunders described the Senate’s initial plan to cut $400 million as “disastrous.” It would have sliced $47 million from the Boca Raton-based university, costing it about one-third of its operating budget.

Under the smaller reduction, FAU is looking at losing between $23.1 million and $27.2 million, officials said. But the school’s cushion for softening this cut isn’t as large as lawmakers claimed. FAU’s purported $66 million reserve is actually closer to $16 million, when a range of spending commitments and already planned reductions are deducted, official said.

House budget chair Denise Grimsley gave House members a Monday morning update on how lawmakers are positioned for end-of-session negotitations with the Senate on a roughly $70 billion state spending plan.

In summary: Not-so-hot.

There’s no sign yet of the House and Senate agreeing on budget allocations — the first step toward working toward a consensus. The Senate approved its budget proposal last week, a plan that spends about $1.5 billion more than the House’s approach and includes dozens of individual spending differences.

But Grimsley, R-Sebring, said there remain plenty of hopeful signs heading into the Legislature’s scheduled final two weeks.

“We are far closer than we’ve been in several years,” Grimsley said.

In an unusual move, Grimsley also addressed Capitol hall-talk speculating that senators might be deliberately foot-dragging, or even looking to postpone budget negotiations until a later special session.  The House and Senate have grown increasingly at odds, nudging along plenty of suspicions.

Her counterpart, Sen. J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales, is a hardnosed deal-maker. But Grimsley said she has no reason to suspect he’s fueling those rumors.

“I have seen no indication that Senator Alexander shares that view,” Grimsley said.

A legislative panel gave Gov. Rick Scott’s administration approval Wednesday for a $3.4 million grant drawn from the federal Affordable Care Act, the measure backed by President Obama which Florida’s Republican chief executive ridicules regularly.

The Legislative Budget Commission agreed to take the cash to provide home visiting services to at-risk families. But Sens. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, and Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, urged lawmakers to reject the funding, warning that the program’s services were murky and that if federal dollars dry up, the state could be left covering the cost.

“It’s overly intrusive,” Negron said, adding he was wary of what he called the government’s “amorphous assistance.”

Scott and the state’s Republican-led Legislature has drawn national attention for rejecting federal grants aimed at moving nursing home patients back into their homes and providing in-home counseling to families where child abuse was a looming threat. Funding for these services and others were turned down because they stem from the Affordable Care Act — which many in the GOP deride as ObamaCare.

The Legislative Budget Commission, though, went along with the Scott administration’s request to accept this latest round of grant money Wednesday. A Republican majority on the panel endorsed the move, chiefly because rejecting it would have made Florida ineligible for as much as $100 million in future learning and development grants under the federal Race to the top legislation.

House budget chair Denise Grimsley, R-Sebring, said she was offended by the linkage. But she made it clear she didn’t like the program and felt such steps created a dependency for at-risk families.

“We have generations of individuals depending on government,” Grimsley said, adding, “it’s a no-win situation.”

The tax provision that caused the Legislature to unravel and miss its scheduled Friday midnight close first emerged last weekend — and was ushered into a conforming bill by House and Senate budget-writers, said House Appropriations Chair Denise Grimsley.

“It’s been a very tough year, we had a lot of conforming bills,” Grimsley said shortly after the House adjourned and ended the 2011 session at 2:07 a.m., Saturday. “We just had some members who had some issues with it.”

Grimsley acknowledged she failed to fully gauge how a provision cutting the tax rate on coin-operated arcade machines would be seen as a major expansion of gambling by many in the conservative House.

The Senate, especially Senate Rules Chairman John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, wanted the measure to help dog tracks with card rooms.

But by then, the House had little love for the Senate — which Friday night had an uprising of its own over two other conforming bills that would have deregulated a dozen professions, but had never gotten a hearing in the Senate.

The Senate refused to go along with what the House wanted, killing the biggest of the two bills on a 32-6 vote. Senate President Mike Haridopolos, R-Merritt Island, and his leadership team were on the losing side.

Sifting through the still smoking wreckage of the last night, House Speaker Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, declined to question whether the 45 conforming bills lawmakers were asked to vote on, may have caused the upheaval.

The bills, containing vast policy changes, some of which were being aired for the first time, had been agreed-upon only by a handful of leaders before being foisted on the full chambers for a final vote.

“A conference committee is an effort where people agree to things that they might not have otherwise have done in their chamber because it’s important to the other chamber,” Cannon said. “That’s what conference is all about. And that’s why conference is sort of an implied agreement between the two chambers.”

Was there a lesson learned? Maybe 45 conforming bills settled by a narrow group of lawmakers isn’t so hot?

Cannon disagreed. But his explanation may have reflected the early a.m. hour.

“Every session is different. And every Legislature is different. And because legislators are made of people, they’re subject to different personalities and different challenges,” Cannon said.

House and Senate budget negotiators reached a deal Tuesday morning on a state budget — after leaders broke an impasse over health and human services funding and also tucked millions of dollars in hometown projects into the spending plan to satisfy key lawmakers.

The deal keeps lawmakers on track for an on-time adjournment Friday, the final scheduled day of the session. It also may allow Gov. Rick Scott to claim a modest achievement — with $308 million in tax breaks tucked into the proposal.

That’s far from the $2 billion Scott demanded. But Senate budget-writer J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales, said the first-year governor should be satisfied.

“We all fight hard for the things we believe in,” Alexander said. “But at the end of the day, I think the governor has got a lot of the things he’s interested in, including some reduction in the corporate tax.”

Scott came into the session seeking a more than $450 million cut in the corporate income tax. Instead, lawmakers have advanced a $30 million reduction — a level close to what they’re also setting aside for a three-day back-to-school tax holiday in late summer.

In other issues, the Senate abandoned its push to slash spending on the state’s Medically Needy and Medicare Aged and Disabled programs, which serve 90,000 severely sick and elderly Floridians. Instead, the programs have maintained current-year funding.

But hospitals will absorb an even deeper reduction in Medicaid rate payments than earlier proposed by either the House or Senate. Hospitals will lose 12 percent of state reimbursement payments and nursing homes will absorb a 6.5 percent reduction.

The budget deal also was flavored with pork.

 The University of South Florida’s Polytechnic college in Lakeland, which has long been helped by Alexander, drew a stunning $46 million in state funding in the budget — about one-third of the state’s Public Education Capital Outlay (PECO) total — far outstripping the University of Florida, Florida State University and other bigger schools.

House budget chief Denise Grimsley, R- Sebring, also represents a district that includes a large chunk of Polk County.

“There’s a lot of advocates for every part of the budget,” Alexander said.

Football in Florida — especially University of Florida football — packs plenty of muscle in the state Legislature.

So when Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander, R-Lake Wales, said the Senate was having problems with the House’s push to deregulate more than a dozen profession, including athletic agents, he wasn’t averse to some influential name-dropping.

Alexander said Saturday morning that the day before he received a call from UF Athletic Director Jeremy Foley, reminding him of past tales of agent abuses, urging that the state maintain oversight of the profession.

“I’m very hesitant to deregulate that particular one,” Alexander said. “But we’re trying to find common ground.”

Alexander’s House counterpart, Denise Grimsley, R-Sebring, said during Saturday morning’s budget negotiations that her side would have to talk further about the Senate’s counter-proposal, which would maintain regulation of health clubs, dance studios and talent agents.

The House earlier this month approved legislation deregulating movers, auto repair shops, travel agents, auctioneers, telemarketers, architects and several other professions as part of a sweeping push to cut government red tape, a goal endorsed by Gov. Rick Scott.

Alexander, however, warned Saturday that many of the professions in line for being cut free have figured in past headline-grabbing scandals.

Talks between the budget chiefs are expected to continue at least through Saturday.