Rick Scott vetoed a lot of pork projects

During his 2010 campaign, Rick Scott promised to trim the state's fat. With the power to veto line-items from the budget, he said so-called "pork" or "turkey" spending wouldn't survive.

Florida TaxWatch, a conservative-leaning watchdog group, defines a turkey as a project that ended up in the budget without proper scrutiny by lawmakers. (It doesn't mean it's worthless.)

Scott didn't explain in his 7-7-7 plan whether he intended to veto every single turkey; if that was the bar, he didn't clear it.

Scott earned a Promise Kept after his veto fest in 2011 when he cancelled $615 million in projects. Scott vetoed 89 percent of projects identified as budget turkeys by TaxWatch.

Scott upset a lot of legislators with his vetoes and let more slide in the years after.

"He campaigned on that so he hit them really hard first year, but he realized that was politically unsustainable for the long term," said Kurt Wenner, vice president of Florida TaxWatch.

He scaled back his vetoes in 2012 ($143 million), so we moved his progress to Compromise.

Scott continued to flex his veto power in many subsequent budgets, but never quite meeting the threshold of his first year.

In looking at Scott's entire record in counting projects in the main part of the budget, he vetoed about $2.4 billion more in sheer dollars than former Gov. Jeb Bush, who also served two terms, and vetoed about $2.1 billion, Wenner said.

But when comparing the size of the budget, Bush vetoed a higher amount. (Scott's predecessor, Charlie Crist, only served one term, and vetoed a bit less than $900,000, Wenner said.)

"If you go back and look, (Scott) has vetoed more than any other governor, at least in the dollar amount total," Wenner said.

At the end of his second term, we are leaving this promise at Compromise.