The state of Florida wasted more than $200 million on 'Alligator Alcatraz' stunt
Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.
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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.
A few weeks ago, the Governor’s Office ordered two cases of bug spray to be shipped to the immigration detention camp it opened earlier this summer in the middle of the Florida Everglades.
This was a tiny transaction for a state with a $117 billion budget. The cases of bug spray were bundled together with a few refrigerators, surge protectors and extension cords, and the entire order totaled less than $2,500.
But it was a reminder of the intentionally cruel conditions the state of Florida has been inflicting on people caged inside the detention camp known as “Alligator Alcatraz” — the cartoonishly ghoulish nickname given to the mosquito-infested facility by a bunch of clout-chasing politicians who traded their humanity for headlines.
It is also a drop in a much larger flood of public spending on the Everglades detention facility — taxpayer money that may as well have been metaphorically flushed down a toilet now that a federal judge has ordered the camp closed and the DeSantis administration has acknowledged it will likely soon be empty.
Altogether, updated procurement records show that Florida has awarded more than $350 million in contracts and purchase orders connected with the Everglades camp, which contractors raced to build in just eight days as the DeSantis and Trump administrations tried to outrun judicial oversight.
It’s not yet clear how much of that money Florida taxpayers will ultimately end up on the hook for, especially if the facility fully closes and remains permanently shuttered. Several of the largest contracts are for staffing — one agreement with Jacksonville-based Critical Response Strategies includes positions paying as much as $187 an hour — and some of those contractors are already furloughing workers.
But the DeSantis administration admitted in court last week that it has already “invested” $218 million in the facility, which was built alongside a remote airstrip called the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport and known as TNT for short. The administration also told the court it expects to spend at least $15 million more to take down the facility.
That’s nearly a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money, at least, that may as well have been burned to ashes. In fact, Ron DeSantis and his enablers actually would have done a lot less harm — to people, to the environment, to the rule of law — if they had simply set the cash on fire.
And this from a governor who is currently jetting around the state, cosplaying as Elon Musk, and claiming that local governments are the ones pissing away people’s money.
It can be hard to put large sums like this into context. So I’ll just give you one example.
There are few things more important to a child’s economic future than early childhood education. And yet the state of Florida runs one of the poorest-funded pre-kindergarten programs in the country. Florida currently ranks 44th out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia in per-child state spending on pre-K, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.
If the state’s elected leaders had decided to “invest” that $218 million in pre-kindergarten rather than an extralegal internment camp in the middle of a national preserve, they could have boosted this year’s pre-K budget by 50 percent.
(To be fair, pre-kindergarten is an ongoing program that requires continuous investment. But then again, the Trump administration once estimated that Alligator Alcatraz would cost $450 million a year to operate.)
The looming closure of the Everglades prison camp doesn’t mean the DeSantis administration is done detaining and deporting immigrants. The governor and his aides, who seem to have seen the writing on the wall in south Florida, announced earlier this month that they would open a second detention facility in north Florida.
Florida’s “North Detention Facility” — which will operate inside a previously empty state prison about 50 miles west of Jacksonville — is a lot cheaper to build. DeSantis told reporters that the state expects to incur about $6 million in buildout costs.
That is, of course, a small fraction of the $218 million it “invested” in Alligator Alcatraz. Which raises an obvious question:
Why didn’t the state start with this site in the first place?
*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.
Doing the bidding of developers
DOGE audit makes Manatee County a test case for defying DeSantis and developers (Bradenton Herald & Suncoast Searchlight)
The Florida Chamber and the Florida Legislature did this
Immokalee farmworker dies a week after collapsing in the Florida heat (WUSF)
Will the Florida Senate try to fire him, too?
Florida consumer advocates propose new FPL deal to halve rate hikes (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
‘The law says yes but don’t expect a check’
Property insurance companies are thriving now. Are Floridians owed a refund? (South Florida Sun-Sentinel) ($)
Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly
Parents rip Hillsborough’s ‘capitulation’ to state over book removals (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
See also: Judge Dismisses Florida Arrest Over Rainbow Chalk Art Near Pulse Nightclub (Rolling Stone)
See also: Interview with Pulse crosswalk protester recently released from jail (WESH)
See also: Floridians fight DeSantis crackdown on street art (Axios Tampa Bay)
See also: St. Petersburg mayor blasts state officials, calls for ‘good trouble’ in response to street mural removal (WMNF)
Perspectives
BP is back 15 years after Deepwater Horizon disaster with plans to drill even deeper (Florida Phoenix)
Wasted money and unqualified hacks: The reign of Richard Corcoran at New College (Sarasota Herald-Tribune) ($)
DeSantis, hypocrisy and the rule of law (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
Make no mistake: Painting over the Pulse memorial crosswalk was not a neutral act (MSNBC)
Lil Ronnie, wants 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to be his soooooo badly and will do anything to mimic his master. For Republicans to be running around the state "investigating" Blue Counties and cities for wasteful spending is a fraud itself. I wonder if Republicans are aware of the $218 million waste, fraud and shitshow that Desantis was involved in. I bet they don't care because the end game was to get the "brown" people into cages. Then they could tailgate and cheer on the cruelty while the Confederate flag blows in the wind atop their lifted pickup trucks.
Grannys Alliance Holdings, $4.3 million. Please alert DOGE; this smacks of DEI.
BTW: Is the proposed Baker facility the facility that already has been used primarily as a holding location for the undocumented, one which has been repeatedly criticized for the Baker Sheriff's problematic supervision?