Bowing to resistance from the Department of Corrections, Senate Republicans scaled back their prison privatization plans Wednesday.
But the DOC is still directed to open the new 2,224-bed Blackwater River Correctional Facility as a privately operated facility by the GEO Group.
GEO, which built the $110 million Panhandle prison per state contract, can operate the facility for $5.7 million less per year than the state, according to the Department of Management Services. Those savings are based on GEO's daily contract cost of $41 per inmate vs. $48 projected by the DOC.
While Blackwater would move forward as a privately run facility, a series of amendments watered down savings that Ways and Means Committee Chairman J.D. Alexander had hoped to achieve.
Instead of directing the DOC to privatize a yet-to-be-designated 1,350-bed facility and close others, the department was permitted to retain its operations with state personnel.
The net effect is that the DOC must find savings in its budget to compensate for the $22 million the state will expend on the Blackwater contract in the coming year.
Prison guards represented by the Police Benevolent Association vehemently opposed any privatization efforts that would diminish their ranks.
Complicating Alexander's plan politically, the House of Representatives does not have a comparable privatization initiative in its budget.
Reacting to Alexander's initial plan, Rep. Marti Coley, R-Marianna, said:
The proposal coming from the Florida Senate regarding the privatization of the Blackwater River Correctional Facility and the resulting transfer of inmates to a private facility will result in the closure of two state prisons.
"These closings will cause as many as 1,400 state corrections officers to lose their jobs and would be catastrophic to a region already reeling from the effects of our current economic crisis."
DOC spokeswoman Gretel Plessinger said closures would have "eliminated 2,400 positions."
Sen. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, said amendments that he and Alexander authored on Wednesday "give the DOC flexibility" to economize.
Officials said it was too soon to say how or where cost-cutting would occur under the Senate's newly amended version, but Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa, suggested that the necessary savings could be achieved through normal attrition and selective closures of specific units.
The sprawling corrections department, with an annual budget of $2.4 billion, loses up to 300 employees per month via retirement and resignations.
"There shouldn't be any mass firings here," Crist said.
Alexander, R-Lake Wales, and proponents of privatization had argued that privately run facilities can save Florida money in the long run. The state approved the construction and operation of Blackwater through a competitive-bid process, and makes the contractor, the GEO Group, responsible for all operational expenses.
The new facility, near Milton in Santa Rosa County, is equipped with the latest security technology as well as air conditioning -- which many of the state's 40- and 50-year-old prisons do not have.
Citing a flattening of Florida's prison population, Alexander had urged the DOC to open Blackwater and decommission aging, inefficient facilities.
"It just makes sense to close facilities that are more costly and less safe," Alexander said.
Instead, the department announced it would mothball the unopened Blackwater facility for another year and keep the status quo elsewhere.
By some estimates, that decision would cost the DOC $1 million just to secure and maintain an empty facility, on top of roughly $10 million in annual debt service for the complex.
Blackwater was built by the GEO Group with public financing. Designed and engineered to the latest state specifications, it can house ailing inmates as well as those with special needs.
Sen. Crist said Blackwater's energy-efficiency standards make it "significantly less expensive to operate" than existing penal facilities.
The GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp., a division of Wackenhut Corp., is the second largest provider of correctional, detention and residential treatment services to federal, state and local governments.
GEOs worldwide operations include the management and/or ownership of 62 correctional and residential treatment facilities with a capacity of 60,000 beds.
Nationally, privatization is gaining favor as states look for ways to economize.
From June 2007 to June 2008, more than 50 percent of new U.S. inmates were housed in privately run facilities, according to a 2009 study by the MTC Institute of Utah.
MTC said that as of December 2008 (the latest date for which data were available), 7.8 percent of the nation's inmates were in privately contracted beds.
While the National Institute of Justice found that public-vs-private costs vary by location, a 2007 Vanderbilt University study found that states that have privatized achieved savings of 2 percent to 3 percent annually.
In 2009, an Avondale Partners survey of 30 state correctional facilities reported that privately contracted prisons operate at 28 percent less cost than their public-sector counterparts.
Alexander hopes Wednesday's compromise can also help bring savings to another facet of Florida's corrections system.
One of his amendments, which backed off the privatization of work-release programs, said the DOC could continue to operate them as long as it meets or beats the private-sector bid of $22 per person.
"I don't really care whether it's public or private. I just want to get the best price," Alexander said.
"Fortunately, just raising the possibility that certain governmental functions may be outsourced to private providers can serve as a restraint on the otherwise-unfettered demands of public employee unions," noted Robert F. Sanchez, policy director for the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee.
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Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or (772) 801-5341.