Gary Fineout
Gov. Rick Scott and other top Florida Republicans frequently complain about government spending, but they have quietly spent more than $237 million on private lawyers to advance and defend their agendas, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Florida taxpayers have also been forced to reimburse nearly $16 million for their opponents’ private attorney fees. That means an overall $253 million has been spent on legal fights, including a water war with Georgia and losing battles to test welfare recipients for drugs, trim the state’s voter registration lists and ban companies that do business with Cuba from bidding on government contracts.
“A quarter of a billion dollars is a gosh lot of money,” said Dominic Calabro, president of Florida TaxWatch, a business-backed group that scrutinizes state spending.
Much of the state’s legal spending doesn’t show up in the normal process of assembling the state’s $82 billion budget.
Attorney General Pam Bondi oversees a legal budget of nearly $309 million a year that helps pay for 450 state lawyers, but all that in-house legal firepower hasn’t stopped state leaders from hiring private attorneys, and no one in state government is closely tracking what their hourly rates add up to.
“We do not have that information and are unaware of a way to capture expenditures for the purchase of outside legal services that would not entail an exhaustive search of documents,” said Whitney Ray, a spokesman for Bondi.
The Associated Press came up with the figure by analyzing budget documents and the results of public records requests.
The AP review found that Florida has spent more than $237 million on outside lawyering since 2011, a figure that averages to nearly $40 million a year, plus nearly $16 million reimbursing private attorney fees on opposing sides.
Hiring private counsel in expenditures that fall outside the normal budget process seems common in state governments around the country, though perhaps not on the same scale as during the Scott administration.
New York has spent more than $86 million since 2012, or about $17 million a year, on outside lawyering, according to that state’s comptroller. California’s Democratic leaders recently approved payments of $25,000 a month to former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his law firm to defend the state’s interests against President Donald Trump’s policies.
In Florida, it was the soaring cost of the state’s water war against Georgia — more than $41 million in the last 18 months alone— that started to raise eyebrows when the Department of Environmental Protection sought more money in January.
Rep. Carlos Trujillo, a Miami Republican and House budget chief, called the department’s legal spending a “runaway train.”
His response when told that the overall state tab for private legal fees is about a quarter-billion dollars?
“Insane,” Trujillo said.
Trujillo said “nobody is disputing” that defending Florida’s water rights is important, but “as taxpayers and constituents, we have the right to ask: ‘Is it necessary, are we overpaying?'”
House Speaker Richard Corcoran, who ordered a legislative review, was even more blunt: “We are getting gouged, and that needs to be fixed.”
A spokeswoman for Scott, Jackie Schutz, sought to downplay the outside legal costs during Scott’s administration, saying that private law firms are sometimes necessary “when there are complex legal matters or specific expertise needed.”
“It’s no surprise that our office vigorously defends the laws we sign,” she said.
The decades-long water dispute took a new and expensive turn when Scott asked the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 to limit the water Georgia takes from the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint river basin. Florida argues that Georgia has guzzled more than its share of water at the expense of Florida’s oyster industry.
Bondi’s office handed the case over to one of the world’s most prestigious firms, Latham & Watkins, whose lawyers charge up to $825 an hour. The firm’s bills to date almost doubled the funding Scott personally requested in late 2014 to repair the Apalachicola Bay watershed.
Scott, an attorney and multimillionaire businessman who ran one of the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chains, has backed the use of taxpayer money to bolster the state’s legal team with private attorneys for defending his initiatives, despite the rising costs.
“It’s important to make sure that Florida gets the water it deserves,” Scott said.
Ryan Matthews, the interim secretary for the Department of Environmental Protection, said last week that his staff “carefully reviews every invoice.” He also said that since July 2015, DEP has denied more than $3 million in legal expenses and hourly charges.
A spokesman for Bondi’s office noted that her agency’s lawyers are assigned to duties such as handling criminal appeals and Medicaid fraud cases. Bondi’s office must approve the hiring of outside attorneys by state agencies. Her office keeps a list of outside lawyers hired and hourly fees charged.
But no one keeps track of the overall spending. The governor, Legislature and other state elected officials, such as Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, do not have to report their spending on legal fees to the state’s chief legal officer.
To capture that total, the AP sought public records on all the firms hired and outside lawyers used. It asked agencies how much they spent. The office of Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater maintains a website where the public can see spending on individual contracts, and provided information on legal settlements.
Calabro said the state may be hiring outside counsel for good reasons, but the cost of this lawyering “has hardly gotten any attention” by either Democrats or Republicans.
The Associated Press has documented that since Scott took office in 2011, agencies under his control, as well as the Florida Legislature and Cabinet officials, have spent more than $250 million on private attorneys. Here’s a look at some of the spending on outside lawyering Florida taxpayers have had to pay for under Republican leadership:
—More than $100 million in fees paid to lawyers by state agencies, including an expensive water rights struggle with Georgia. The water wars have been waged for nearly 20 years, but costs soared after Scott pushed to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
This total also includes money billed by lawyers defending the actions of the Legislature and governor. For example, the Department of State paid more than $200,000 to defend a plan initiated by Scott to remove non-U.S. citizens from the voting rolls. Election supervisors said that effort was flawed, and it was eventually halted after being challenged by voting rights groups.
The Scott administration successfully defended a state law that requires public employees to contribute 3 percent of their pay to the state pension fund. But the state spent nearly $533,000 with an Atlanta firm on the litigation.
Some of the agency legal expenses are for routine work that is farmed out to outside attorneys.
For example, the Florida Department of Citrus uses a private firm to act as its general counsel while the Department of Education uses private attorneys to assist in cases alleging teachers of misconduct. The Department of Revenue hires private attorneys to work on child support cases, and the Department of Transportation hires firms to handle some of its eminent domain lawsuits associated with road projects.
— Nearly $16 million paid to opposing lawyers after losing battles over voting rights, gay marriage, drug testing and other controversial policies. This includes $12 million to attorneys who represented pediatricians who contended Florida violated federal mandates by failing to deliver critical health services to 2 million children on Medicaid; more than $800,000 to lawyers working for the American Civil Liberties Union; and nearly $513,000 to lawyers who defeated a state law targeting businesses doing business in Cuba.
— Nearly $20 million spent by the Legislature defending budgets that advocates say shortchange public schools and Republican-drawn legislative and congressional districts. The state won the education lawsuit at its first turn, but the courts sided against them on districts and approved changes that upended the state’s political landscape.
— About $111 million since 2011 through its risk management division. These are cases where someone sued the state over auto accidents, employment disputes and worker’s compensation claims. The annual cost was $19.7 million back in 2012 but it has been rising each year.
Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
