Fort Pierce - Thursday June 15, 2023: In Fort Pierce this morning Governor DeSantis signed a $117-billion-dollar state budget for the coming fiscal year which begins on July 1.
“We wanted to be in a nice beautiful backdrop," said the Governor, "to highlight all that we did in this budget for Florida’s natural resources.”
Inside Fort Pierce’s Pelican Yacht Club, with the Indian River Lagoon in the background outside, Governor DeSantis highlighted key features of the state budget, in particular, the $100 million-dollar commitment for the Indian River Lagoon Protection Project.
“So, I issued an executive order for this to be established for water quality projects to benefit the Indian River Lagoon and to support the restoration efforts, and so we have that, $100-million, and we’ll continue to do it," said DeSantis.
In all the budget has a total of $7.3-billion dollars in funding for agriculture, environment and natural resource projects across the state. “I think this is the strongest environmental budget we’ve ever had in the state of Florida including $1.6 billion for everglades and water quality projects.”
On his Presidential campaign, when asked about his chief rival’s recent felony indictment, he again attacked what he called a biased prosecution, without mentioning Trump by name.
“My mission is to bring accountability to politized agencies like DOJ, FBI. What we’ll do starting day one, you'll have a new FBI Director, you'll have a housecleaning in these agencies, and we will use our full powers to ensure that the weaponization of government ends.”