With more than 1 million Floridians out of work, Florida taxpayers are footing the bill for the salaries for out-of-state workers.

This time, it’s Florida Lottery vendor GTECH’s workers in Texas that are the beneficiaries. GTECH’s call center is located in Austin and that’s where calls regarding the Lottery’s on-line tickets and other products are answered.

And lawmakers don’t even know how many jobs are at stake in Texas because the private contractors hired by the state to handle call lines won’t give up their number of employees or where they’re located, according to legislative analyst Emily Leventhal.

Sen. Ted Deutch, a Boca Raton Democrat who sits on the committee, asked Leventhal how many of the 16 private call centers were located outside Florida.

Only GTECH’s, she told him.

“And do you know how many people the state of Florida is paying to work in Austin, Texas?” Deutch asked.

“I do not,” Leventhal replied.

“I think that would be worthwhile information for this committee,” Deutch said.

An incensed Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander agreed.

“If they take the cash or check they can tell us what we want to know,” said Alexander, R-Lake Wales.

Last year, the Department of Children and Families got in hot water because the agency’s food stamp contractor, JP Morgan Chase, routed questions about food stamp services to a call center based in India. The vendor stopped sending the calls overseas and instead sent them to Ohio and Illinois.

The head of the state’s tourism agency also earned the wrath of lawmakers last year when lawmakers found out that calls to Visit Florida were being answered in Missouri. The agency later canceled the contract.

Gov. Charlie Crist’s inspector general found Transportation Department Secretary Stephanie Kopelousos did no wrong by using breakfast words as subject lines in e-mails dealing with the controversial SunRail project.

And IG Melinda Miguel also cleared the department of any wrongdoing by not providing e-mails on the SunRail deal to Sen. Paula Dockery until after Crist’s open government office was brought in.

“No evidence was found to suggest that any Department official intentionally withheld documents in violation of the law,” Miguel wrote in her 45-page report. “To the contrary, evidence shows that an unintentional, human error occurred during the initial public records request.”

Kopelousos and her aides insisted that they used the words “Pancakes” and “waffles” in subject lines to draw attention to the messages about the rail deal out of the thousands that the secretary receives daily.

Food loaf. It’s what inmates hope isn’t for dinner.

As if prison food isn’t bad enough already, naughty inmates are fed a mystery “meat” called “food loaf.”

What exactly the loaf is made up of and what prisoners do to warrant the punishing meal isn’t clear either.

“Food loaf” is also known as called “meal management loaf,” “nutri-loaf” or “behavioral loaf in prison circles. In some prisons the concoction is made up of all of the day’s food put into a blender with some oats thrown in and baked into a loaf.

It is given in some prisons to unruly inmates who throw their food trays at correctional officers and was served in the past to Florida inmates with no utensils.

Currently, inmates in Vermont are suing prison officials over the use of the food loaf and which some states have banned.

Sen. Arthenia Joyner, D-Tampa, asked Department of Corrections Chief of Staff Richard Prudhom at this morning’s Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations meeting morning to give her, in writing, the caloric value of the mystery package and the department policy on offenses that result in the loaf.

Prudhom said he will report back.

The state spends $2.33 a day for three meals and a snack on the 100,000 prisoners behind bars.

So many state workers helping Haitian earthquake survivors that the Department of Children and Families asked for help from federal health authorities.

DCF has asked staff from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to screen Haitians at the Sanford and Orlando airports to try to keep flu-like infections from spreading, DCF spokeswoman Carrie Hoeppner said today.

Up to 80 DCF employees, who have volunteered to help the agency handle the influx of refugees from earthquake-shattered Haiti, are working around the clock in the Orlando area, Hoeppner said.

Agency officials sent out an e-mail instructing workers to use universal health precautions, such as gloves and masks, to keep from getting sick.

“We don’t know where this is coming from but want to make sure that everybody’s health is being taken care of,” said Hoeppner, who said she had stomach-flu symptoms throughout the weekend.

“You’re comforting people. You’re wiping running noses. And you’re changing diapers. Those are all things that workers are doing every day. There’s a lot of close contact with our own staff and with the passengers coming off of these planes,” she said, adding that there is “hand sanitizer everywhere you look.”

About 25 workers in the Orlando and Sanford area, where Florida’s Haitian aid is centered, have come down with flu-like symptoms.

Hoeppner said that although the situation is stressful for the refugees and the workers, the job is also rewarding.

“Everybody has probably had an emotional moment being here. If you haven’t cried, you don’t care. And if you don’t care you don’t need to be here,” she said.

Complaints about unwanted telephone sales calls top the list of consumer complaints in Florida this year.

Here’s the list of the most frequent complaints:

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Tea Partiers have asked Leon County State Attorney Willie Meggs to convene a grand jury to investigate state transportation officials’ use of code words in e-mails.

Tea Party Chairman Fred O’Neal filed a request with Meggs yesterday asking for a grand jury to look into “deliberate evasion of Florida’s Public Records law” as well as “as an arrogant disregard” of the state constitution’s Sunshine Law guaranteeing access to public records and meetings.

Tea Party activists dubbed the messages “Wafflegate” after The Palm Beach Post reported that Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Stephanie Kopelousos and her deputy Kevin Thibault exchanged three messages last month with the subject lines “pancake,” “pancakes” and “french toast.”

Doug Guetzloe, chairman of “Ax the Tax,” said he plans to file complaints with the ethics commission and Attorney General Bill McCollum’s office and another to Meggs.

“This is a direct violation of public trust,” Guetzloe said. (more…)

Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Stephanie Kopelousos said that the word “pancake” in the subject line of an e-mail from her deputy Kevin Thibault was just a way for the message to stand out from the hundreds she receives daily.

The code words were not a way to circumvent public records laws, Kopelousos insisted.

“I get hundreds of e-mails in a day and Kevin was trying to get me to look at something,” Kopelousos said. “There was nothing more, nothing less than just that. He wanted to get my attention so I would read the email he was forwarding.”

Kopelousos said her department e-mail searches include not only the subject line but the attachments as well.

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Florida labor unions blasted state transportation officials for refusing to back down from a proposal to do away with union workers on railroads.

Lawmakers are expected to meet later this week in a special session to vote on commuter rail issues in an effort to tap into nearly $4 billion in federal stimulus money for transportation projects being doled out in January.

At issue is the controversial Central Florida SunRail commuter rail project that lawmakers failed to approve during the past two regular legislative sessions.

Florida Department of Transportation officials already signed off on a deal in which the state would pay transportation behemoth CSX Inc. about $500 million for 61 miles of track and upgrades to its railyards and continue to be able to haul freight on the line that would also be used as a commuter system.

The unions accuse FDOT of refusing to negotiate with them over language in a proposed bill that would effectively prohibit union laborers from working on the construction of new projects or on the SunRail line.

Mike Williams, head of the state AFL-CIO, called the effort “government-sanctioned union busting at its very best.”

FDOT officials have not yet responded to the accusations.

SunRail has the backing of prominent GOP lawmakers, including Gov. Charlie Crist.

The session is also supposed to include a fix for the financially ailing Tri-Rail line.

The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that are a staple of state prisoners’ diet aren’t just nutritionally filling.

They’re also saving money and jobs, according to the Department of Corrections.

DOC officials came to the rescue of Tampa peanut butter manufacturer Ernest Turbeville, whose business was flailing when he sent an e-mail to Gov. Charlie Crist earlier this year.

Turbeville was unsuccessful in getting DOC’s food vendor to contract with his Sunshine Peanut Company.

By the time he wrote to Crist in March, DOC had already fired its vendors and taken food service back in-house.

Turbeville said he could keep the 14 workers at the Jackonsville-based company on the job for about three weeks.

The agency signed on with Turbeville, according to a press release issued by DOC this morning, and saved the state $200,000 by buying the peanut butter from him.

(more…)

Department of Children and Families officials insist that the foster kids living with Martin Gill for nearly five years aren’t going anywhere.

But the agency’s own lawyers told a judge that the two boys adopted by Gill should be “made available for adoption” elsewhere, something Gill can’t legally do because he’s gay.

Despite DCF’s insistence that the Gill family won’t be affected by its appeal of the adoption, the agency has made a test case out of the gay man’s adoption and intends to take the case to the Florida Supreme Court to decide once and for all if Florida’s ban on gay adoption is unconstitutional.

DCF has paid Attorney General Bill McCollum’s office nearly $400,000 so far on the case, and it has yet to make its way to the high court.

Read more about the disconnect between DCF and its own high-paid lawyers here.

Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander is setting up a new office to help him figure out if the state is spending money wisely.
Alexander and his House counterparts have grappled with the state’s plummeting revenues and are facing a $2.7 billion projected spending gap in next year’s budget.

Alexander said he’s willing to pay an expert up to $170,000 a year to provide a detailed analysis of state spending

“I’m going up against lobbyists who can pay a whole lot more than that,” said Alexander, R-Lake Wales. “I need people who can really get into what’s going on here.”

Alexander said he doesn’t have anyone in mind for the job but is hoping to get someone who with expertise in the state’s annual $18 billion spending on Medicaid.

Asked when he plans to bring the new hire on board, Alexander quipped: “Yesterday. I need help tomorrow.”

The “Senate Budget Office” will be “responsible for providing independent analyses of state government agency operations, including overlapping agency jurisdictions and functions, the financial structure of agencies, sources and uses of revenues, expenditure patterns and whether programmatic performance measures exist and are being met,” Senate President Jeff Atwater’s office said in a press release announcing the new office today.

(more…)

Department of Children and Families Secretary George Sheldon made the apparent suicide of a 7-year-old Broward County boy in foster care one of his top priorities in April.

Sheldon created a working group to get to the bottom of Gabriel Myers’ death and examine why the child was on a psychotropic drug cocktail without the consent of his guardians.

Despite Sheldon’s attention to the boy’s case, his office was unable to get its hands on a copy of the autopsy released to the public by the Broward County Medical Examiner early Thursday afternoon.

About an hour after the autopsy was made public around 11 a.m., Sheldon’s press secretary Joe Follick said he did not have a copy of it. He suggested getting a copy from the medical examiner.

Broward County Medical Examiner Joshua Perper quickly replied to a public records request and e-mailed a copy of the 28-page report.

Hours later, Follick still did not have a copy of it.

“By reviewing the facts of this case carefully, we can work to continue to improve the child welfare system in Florida. While much progress has been made, Gabriel’s death starkly reminds us that when it comes to a child’s life, we cannot relax. Every decision we make profoundly affects the life of that child,” Sheldon said in a press release when the Myers work group was created in April.

Gov. Charlie Crist is ordering agencies to audit their compliance with state law requiring criminal background checks on workers who deal with children, the frail or the elderly.

Crist ordered the review after The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that about more than 6,000 people had been approved by the state to work with the elderly, disabled and children, including some who had been convicted of murder and rape.

Crist is asking a host of agencies to examine the current legal requirements for screening, compliance and report back to him on Nov. 2.

Crist’s order comes on the heels of Democratic Sen. Nan Rich’s filing of legislation to tighten up screening requirements.

(more…)

Gov. Charlie Crist and Attorney General Bill McCollum put off a request from Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink to expand the board they make up that oversees the agency in charge of $185 billion in state investments.

Sink, the sole member of the panel with any professional financial experience, is proposing an expansion of the State Board of Administration to include at one least investment expert and also wants the panel to get some training in financial matters.

But McCollum, a Republican running against Democrat Sink to replace Crist as governor next year, balked at his political opponent’s suggestion. Crist, also a Republican, backed him up.

Sink wants to add at least two members to the Board of Trustees that supervises the SBA, which manages the state’s $110 billion retirement fund. She suggested expanding the three-member panel to include an investment expert and someone who is invested in the state’s pension fund, the fourth largest in the nation, like other states with similar boards.

But McCollum and Crist put the brakes on making any decision about the board.

(more…)

The Florida Cabinet just appointed Julie Jones to head the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

Until now, Jones served as the head of law enforcement for the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and was instrumental in search and rescue operations following the devastating hurricanes that struck Florida in 2004 and 2005. She also oversaw rescue operations in Mississippi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Jones pledged to continue an emphasis on customer service.

“This is a huge opportunity and the trust that you place in me,” she said. “This is a huge agency that I think touches every single citizen in the state of Florida. It’s a huge responsibility.”

Jones replaces Elektra Bustle.
I intend to take your…

good customer service…
and continue the good things this agency’s done thus far.

Florida Power & Light Co. officials tried but failed to keep secret the names of some of those who flew on their corporate jets during a rate hike hearing today.

Public Service Commission Chairman Matthew Carter ordered the Juno Beach-based utility to provide the names of everyone who flew on its private jet over the objections of FPL lawyer John Butler.

The 1,500-page volume of flight logs going back to 2006 revealed that the company spent about $52 million on operation and maintenance for corporate jet flights over the past four years. That includes what they project they will spend for the next three months.

At least two GOP Florida elected officials traveled with FPL executives on the jet, the flight logs showed.

U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, who retired last month, and U.S. Rep. Connie Mack, flew on the plane on separate occasions in 2006.

Taking away charges the company made to its affiliates for the jet travel, FPL still spent between $6.7 million and $9.5 million a year over the past four years, the records show.

FPL officials say the planes are necessary for the corporation to conduct its business.

“All the redacted names were those of NextEra/FPL Energy employees whose travel costs were paid for by their company, not Florida Power & Light,” FPL spokesman Mark Bubriski said in an e-mailed statement.

“NextEra/FPL Energy flight data, in addition to not being paid by FPL, is competitively sensitive, and that is why it is redacted. The only information that has been redacted is: 1) phone numbers, for privacy reasons; and 2) competitively sensitive NextEra/FPL Energy-specific information that does not relate to the cost of the travel,” Bubriski wrote.

Aircraft play a vital role in the safe and reliable operations of our 35-county electric infrastructure. We adhere to policies and procedures that prevent unnecessary use and keep costs as low as possible.

Public Service Commissioner Nancy Argenziano snapped back at state Rep. Carlos Lopez-Cantera for criticizing her critique of his questions of Public Service Commission Chairman Matthew Carter.

Argenziano, a former lawmaker who served in both the House and the Senate, sent a heated letter to Lopez-Cantera late this evening in which she expounds on her repeated complaints that lawmakers with too close of ties to utilities have too much influence over the regulatory panel on which she sits.

Lopez-Cantera sits on the council that selects nominees for the governor to appoint to the regulatory agency. He wasn’t happy with the answers Carter gave at the Sept. 1 nominating council meeting although Carter did make the list of six finalists for Gov. Charlie Crist to consider.

Her letter is a response to one Lopez-Cantera sent to her yesterday criticizing her reaction to his dissatisfaction with the PSC’s unanimous decision to force Florida Power & Light officials to release the salaries of all its employees that earn more than $165,000 per year. He advised Argenziano she could have found the information in the Juno Beach-based corporation’s federal filings as he and his office staff did in less than an hour.

“This same information would have saved the PSC time and taxpayer money,” Lopez-Cantera, R-Miami, wrote in a letter sent yesterday.

The federal information does not include bonuses and other perks that boost some of the salaries by up to 500 percent, Argenziano responded tonight.

“Your apparently gullible acceptance, Representative Cantera, as the FERC document reflects, that the salary of FPL’s Executive Vice President is $23,000, is flabbergasting. The ‘less than an hour’ which you and your office spent producing this useless information is perhaps the true waste of time and taxpayer money,” Argenziano wrote.

(more…)

Public Service Commissioner Katrina McMurrian offered what appears to be a simple solution to the troubled regulators and staff caught in a web of secret messages with utility company execs and lawyers.

Put it in writing.

McMurrian issued a proposal late Friday evening suggesting that the quasi-judicial panel should act more like…judges to restore the public’s trust.

In 1992, a statewide grand jury found that “the manner in which utilities communicate with the PSC is in need of reform.” That was long before Blackberries and text messages revolutionized communications, but, to McMurrian at least, the shoe still fits.

McMurrian proposed that no commissioner or staff “shall engage in communications with parties, interested persons, or stakeholders except in writing.” That would include “all procedural matters, docketed matters, rulemaking proceedings, declaratory statements, workshops, non-docketed matters and matters for deliberation at Internal Affairs,” she wrote.

And, she suggested, all the communications should be posted on the PSC’s website for the public to read.

Today Sen. Mike Fasano asked that a Florida Power & Light $1.3 billion rate increase hearing scheduled to resume Wednesday and a Progress Energy Florida $500 million rate increase case set for the following Monday be delayed indefinitely.

McMurrian and Chairman Matthew Carter are both included in a list of six nominees give to Gov. Charlie Crist earlier this month. He has until Oct. 1 to pick one and the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee, on which Fasano sits, must confirm his choice.
“Respectfully, I ask my fellow commissioners for their support of this proposal. I would also like to let the public know that we hear you and want to earn back your trust,” McMurrian’s proposal concluded.

Public Service Commission spokeswoman Cynthia Muir gave this response to Sen. Mike Fasano’s request today that Chairman Matthew Carter indefinitely delay rate hearings now underway for FPL and Progress Energy Florida.

“The Chairman is on bed rest today due to his recent back surgery and the strain caused from the long hours of sitting during the hearings. I can tell you that there are statutory time lines that must be followed for each rate case filing. If a Commission decision is not made within the required time frame, the rates requested by the company in its filing can be implemented, at the discretion of the company.

Florida Statue 366.06 provides detail on this.

Thanks,
Cindy”

Progress is requesting a $500 million rate hike. That hearing is scheduled to resume Sept. 21, and the FPL - which is seeking a $1.3 billion rate increase - case is slated to resume on Wednesday.

When asked specifically whether Chairman Carter would postpone the hearings and what the pertinent dates were in both cases, Muir gave the following reply:

“Florida Statute 366.06 spells out the time frame. The Chairman has not responded to the Senator’s letter yet, so there’s no way of knowing what he intends,” she wrote.

Under Florida law, the PSC must give a final order in the FPL case by Nov. 20 or the new rates can go into effect Jan. 1. The utility would have to pay customers back if the panel then rejected the rate hike.

Florida Power & Light Co. officials had this to say about a top GOP senator’s request to halt utility rate hearings until investigations into what could be too cozy connections between regulators and utilities.

“We believe it is in our customers’ best interest for the PSC to proceed with its evaluation of our request - on its merits and the facts - so that it can make a timely decision that will allow us to move forward with investments in the electrical infrastructure that benefit our customers and the communities we serve,” FPL spokesman Mark Bubriski said in an e-mail.

Sen. Mike Fasano asked Public Service Commission Chairman Matthew Carter to postpone rate hearings currently underway - including a $1.3 billion rate hike sought by FPL scheduled to resume Wednesday - indefinitely.

Fasano wants several current investigations wrapped up before the hearings continue. He also wants them suspended until the Senate confirms Gov. Charlie Crist’s two nominations for the panel. Crist received a list of six finalists - including two current commissioners - earlier this month and has until Oct. 2 to make his picks.

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