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.

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.

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.

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In the latest installment of intrigue at the Public Service Commission, chairman Matthew Carter issued an indignant press release today saying he takes “great offense” at reports that utility regulators are too cozy with Florida Power & Light Co. executives.

The PSC is in the midst of a FPL rate hearing in which the company is seeking a $1.3 billion rate hike implemented over two years.

The opening of the hearing was delayed after it was revealed that a PSC lobbyist and government liaison attended a party at the Palm Beach Gardens home of FPL VP Ed Tancer. Ryder Rudd, director of the commission’s Office of Strategic Analysis and Governmental Affairs, oversees staff working on two pending FPL cases - the current rate hike and a proposed $1.5 billion natural gas pipeline from the Panhandle to Palm Beach County.

An internal investigation released yesterday found that Rudd may not have broken the law by attending the party but may have violated rules of conduct prohibiting PSC staff from accepting gifts from those whose cases are under review.

Commissioner Nathan Skop, who exposed Rudd’s attendance at the party, demanded that Rudd be fired immediately. Rudd has been taken off any dockets involving FPL.

Carter weighed in today with the press release denying that commissioners and their staff are “too cozy with regulated industries, FPL in particular.”

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Florida's $250 million investment in Peter Cooper Village in New York City has turned into a total loss, officials said today.

Peter Cooper Village in NYC is part of the state’s $99.6 billion portfolio that makes up the state’s pension plan.

The state invested $250 million in the apartment complex, where monthly rents range from $2,625 to $8,333, according to the development’s website.

Less than two years later, the value of the investment is zero, Williams told Gov. Charlie Crist, CFO Alex Sink and AG Bill McCollum, who oversee the SBA.

“We think we’re carrying that investment as a zero on our books,” Williams said.

This morning is the first of the quarterly meetings on the state’s investments requested by Sink that the SBA will give to the panel. (more…)

Florida Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Charles Bronson last week asked folks to stop giving pork a bad rap by calling the H1N1 virus “swine flu” because of the devastating impact it’s having on the pork industry.

But the threat of spreading the virus between pigs and people is a real threat, according to yesterday’s New York Times.

Not in the way most might think, however.

Vets fear that humans will spread the virus to the animals and are instituting precautions at state fairs and other places where the porcine creatures come into contact with those higher up on the food chain.

“When the Oregon State Fair opens next week, the pigs will be kept behind an elaborate configuration of plastic and ribbon barriers, taller-than-usual fences and off-limits walkways. The state veterinarian is also urging visitors to stay six feet away.

The worry? The spread of swine flu, but with a twist: state officials hope to insulate the pigs from sick people.

‘Help us protect the piggies,’ signs at the fair will read in pink,” the story begins.

“The whole idea of the animals getting sick from people is a foreign concept to people, but that’s what we’re looking at here,” said Iowa state veterinarian David E. Marshall said in the story.

Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigations to join state law enforcement officials investigating the weekend beating of an inmate by prison guards at Union Correction Institution in Raiford.

McNeil revealed little about the nature of the 47-year-old inmate’s injuries other than that they are “serious” but did not know if they were life-threatening. The unnamed inmate remains in the hospital, McNeil said.

Four guards took removed the inmate from his cell on Saturday after he threw feces at them, McNeil said. On Monday morning, another prison worker reported the injuries.

McNeil fired four nurses and placed seven correctional officers on paid leave. He said he asked the FBI to investigate because of possible civil rights violations.

The beatings are the latest in a string of attacks on inmates by prison guards at UCI and neighboring Florida State Prison in Starke.

But McNeil said he doubts there is a systemic problem in the prison system.

“There is never an excuse for this type of behavior. What you’re seeing is a manifestation of persons that don’t have that kind of self-control that they need to,” he said.

Florida’s jobless rate remained at 10.7 percent in July, 1.3 percent points higher than the national unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, the Agency for Workforce Innovation reported today.

The unemployment rate in June and July is the highest in the past 34 years. In October 1975, the jobless rate was 11 percent.

The rate remained steady although the state has already spent more than $944 million of federal stimulus money on unemployment benefits and resources.

State prison officials fired four nurses and put seven guards on leave pending the outcome of an investigation into a brutal attack over the weekend of a Union Correctional Institution inmate.

The nurses were fired for failing to report the beatings that took place over two days, which another employee reported. One of the nurses was a state corrections employee and three others were contract workers.

The 47-year old unidentified inmate “has multiple injuries and is being treated at an outside hospital,” a press release issued late last night by Department of Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil said.

McNeil is holding a press conference at 11:15 to discuss the beatings.

“I intend to bring the full resources of this agency to bear on the individuals responsible for this violent assault, including prosecution, termination and decertification, so they can never work in a correctional environment again. There is no place in our profession for this depraved mindset,” McNeil said in the statement.

The weekend attack is the latest in a string of attacks by guards on inmates at the prison in Raiford or nearby Florida State Prison in Starke.

In June a DOC FSP guard was arrested after being captured on videotape beating an inmate during a power outage. Eleven other employees were involved in that attack.

Four UCI prison officers were fired after an April 9 beating of an inmate. That incident remains under investigation.

Florida counties are suggesting something that sounds like a scarlet letter to warn innocents away from households with scary serpents.

It’s the latest twist in the tale of the python-induced paranoia that’s wound up with bounty hunters seeking the critters in throughout Palm Beach County on lands abutting the Everglades.

The July 1 death of a two-year-old girl who was strangled by a pet python in Central Florida set off demands for an open-season on the snakes, which have overrun the national park. Gov. Charlie Crist gladly complied and ordered the bounty hunt for the pests last week. (U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, has had the Burmese python infestation in his sights for some time).

Now, the Florida Association of Counties wants state wildlife officials to give them more control over dangerous animals. The association sent a letter to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission last week asking them to let counties notify neighbors where perilous pythons and other classified creatures reside.

Perhaps the counties have something like the sex offender registry on the Internet where neighbors can see where perpetrators live.

Will the pythons be forced to take up residence under bridges like sex offenders banned from living near schools, parks or other places where children congregate?

A python posse armed with clubs and machetes will start combing the Everglades for the supersized serpents this weekend.

Gov. Charlie Crist ordered the python bounty hunt Wednesday at the urging of two Florida congressmen who were in an uproar after one of the exotic snakes strangled a 2-year-old girl July 1 near Ocala.

That python was a pet and didn’t live in the Everglades. But the case called new attention to the plague of the oversized reptiles that have spread throughout South Florida’s marshes, gobbling wading birds and posing a danger to native wildlife.

Estimates of the python population in the Everglades range between 10,000 and 150,000. They can reach up to 20 feet in length and have long, curved teeth, along with the ability to squeeze their prey to death.

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A federal appellate court upheld a Florida law that bars petition gatherers from bothering voters within 100 feet of a polling place.

The U.S. Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit, overturned a lower court’s ruling that made the law unable to enforce during August’s primary elections. Voters complained then of being accosted by signature gatherers as they exited their polling sites.

Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a former elections supervisor, filed the appeal.

The court ruled that “exit petitioning” is akin to traditional political canvassing, which is also barred within 100 feet of a polling place.

“We believe the sanctity of the voting process and the abuse it has historically faced must allow the Florida legislature to exercise some foresight, to take precautions, and to prohibit questionable conduct nearly polling places before that conduct proves its danger; a compromised election is too great a harm to require otherwise.”

A Democratic activist filed an ethics complaintt against Attorney General Bill McCollum yesterday charging the Republican candidate for governor with misuse of the state plane, including a trip to West Palm Beach.

The complaint came later the same day a state employee and Gov. Charlie Crist appointee filed a similar complaint against Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, a Democrat, for the same thing. Sink is also running for governor.

A Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times investigation found that Sink and McCollum each used the planes dozens of times to ferry them to their homes and not for official state business as required by law.

The complaint against McCollum filed by Kenneth Quinnell, a Tallahassee Democrat, charges that the attorney general’s misuse of the state plane included a trip to West Palm Beach on Feb. 19.

McCollum ordered an empty state plane to pick him up at a private airport in Sanford near his Longwood home in Central Florida. He took the plane to Sarasota then to West Palm Beach. The plane returned to Tallahassee empty, which taxpayers must pay for, and McCollum took the next day, Friday, off.

A Department of Management Services, which oversees the state’s executive aircraft pool, draft audit of Cabinet members’ state plane use found that there was potential abuse by high-priority state officials. But the final audit released to the public did not include that information.

Sink ordered her office to investigate the state plane use.

State prison officials are refusing to hand over videotapes of guard-on-inmate brutality or even tapes of guards taking mail from prisoners unless they are sued.

For years, Department of Corrections staff gave the tapes to the public, the media and lawyers although officials there now say they never should have.

The clamp-down on public records is chilling, civil rights advocates contend.

The shift comes under the leadership of Gov. Charlie Crist, whose first official action after taking office was to create the “Office of Open Government.”

“This whole thing of Charlie Crist saying there’s transparency in government is just BS, at least as far as the Department of Corrections,” said civil rights lawyer Randall Berg, executive director and founder of the Miami-based Florida Justice Institute.

Read the full story here.

Bud Chiles is asking Gov. Charlie Crist to keep his promise.

The son of the late Gov. Lawton Chiles who secured an historic $11.3 billion settlement with tobacco companies, wants Crist to appoint the panel established in Florida law to oversee the endowment named after his father.

Chiles first asked Crist in December to appoint the panel after lawmakers and Crist diverted more than $350 million from the fund, then worth about $2 billion, which pays for health programs for children and the elderly.

That never happened.

Instead, lawmakers took another $700 million from the endowment, raising the total trust fund raid to more than $1 billion, as they struggled to balance the budget with a two-year $6 billion spending gap.

Bud Chiles today sent Crist a letter asking him to appoint the 16-member panel, which has apparently not met in about five years. Under Florida law, the advisory group is supposed to give recommendations about the fund to the governor by Nov. 1 each year.

Chiles said he and his lawyers considered filing a complaint but decided to bank on Crist’s goodwill instead. He thinks the legislature and Crist might not be so keen on raiding the fund in the future with the oversight the panel should provide.

“If these people aren’t doing it then whose going to protect the rights of these children that are not getting the funds?” he said.

The committee established by law to make recommendations to the governor about how to spend the state’s historic tobacco settlement has not met in more than a decade.

his latest raid on the fund brings the total taken from the endowment to over $1 billion. In 2008, Gov. Charlie Crist convinced legislators and children’s advocates to allow a withdrawal of more than $350 million from the endowment to meet a budget shortfall, then surprised advocates with a second raid on the fund that led to today’s $700 million withdrawal.

Gov. Charlie Crist weighed in on a variety of topics this morning after signing several law enforcement-related bills at the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles this morning.

Sheltered from the blazing heat by tents, slews of department employees dressed in bright red shirts turned out to hear Crist speak and pose for pictures with the governor, who is also running to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez.

Among the bills Crist signed today was one that will expand the state’s DNA database. Law enforcement officials, now limited to taking DNA samples from those convicted of crimes, will now be able to take DNA from anyone who is arrested.

But Crist defended the bill (SB 2276) which civil liberties advocates argue is too far-reaching and have threatened to challenge in court.

“I think it’ll be alright or I wouldn’t have signed the bill. I think that we need to protect first and make sure that our people are safe. I think that this legislation will help us to do that even better,” he said.

Read what else Crist told reporters at a gaggle after the bill-signing after the jump. (more…)

Local governments don’t have to scrap their laws requiring developers to pay for roads despite a new law loosening the states growth management oversight, Florida’s top planner said today.

But the state was given that power because cities and counties were too susceptible to pressure from builders, critics of the law contend.

Department of Community Affairs Secretary Tom Pelham held an Internet-based seminar today to answer a slew of questions asked by planners and others since Gov. Charlie Crist signed SB 360 into law.

Pelham, who criticized the bill during the legislative session that ended last month, repeatedly instructed local planners that they do not have to weaken their laws requiring developers to include roads in urban areas just because the state will no longer force them to.

“Nothing here limits a home rule power to adopt ordinances or fees,” Pelham emphasized over and over.

But cities and counties that fit the law’s broad definition of “urban” will have two years to come up with an as-yet-undefined alternative strategy for dealing with transportation congestion.

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The McCranie’s, married nearly a decade, might be considered a Romeo and Juliet romance.
They met when was Virgil was 19 and Misty was 14 and fell in love. Since then, they’ve raised four children while struggling to make ends meet.
But their story is no fairy tale.
Misty and her father pressed charges against Virgil, accusing him of raping the minor. The rape charge was dropped and adjudication but he was charged with lewd and lascivious acts against a minor and was sentenced to two years of probation.
That’s when the father of four’s nightmare began, McCranie told the clemency board today.
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Gov. Charlie Crist again succumbed to pressure from Senate budget chief J.D. Alexander regarding no-bid contracts inked by the governor’s executive agency staff.

Crist said yesterday he would re-open a $20 million contract to market Florida citrus.

Florida Citrus Commission staff recently recommended re-upping the contract with a Texas-based corporation without a public hearing or taking new offers despite a significant drop in citrus sales since the agency took over the contract.

“I think every contract ought to be open bid. Every time,” Crist said when asked whether he would re-open bids on the advertising contract.

When asked if he would order the commission to do so, he replied: “I think I just did.”

The orange juice struggle is the latest in what is becoming an increasingly sour relationship between Alexander, an heir to Ben Hill Griffin’s citrus fortune, and Crist.

Crist vetoed a bill Alexander sponsored that would have given lawmakers more control over high-dollar contracts with private vendors.

Since then, the Lake Wales Republican has publicly asked Crist to re-open bids on two multi-million dollar contracts that would have been automatically renewed had he not intervened.

Last week, Alexander asked Crist to re-bid a $44 million contract with Convergys for the troubled PeopleFirst human resources system.

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State and federal officials are joining with private organizations to offer a $15,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a Florida panther killer.

The panther was shot and killed in Hendry County near the Big Cypress National Preserve. Its body was found on April 21.

Anyone with information about the killing of the Florida panther can call the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at (239) 561-8144, or can anonymously call the state’s Fish and Wildlife Commission’s toll-free hotline at (888) 404-3922.

There are only about 100 Florida panthers, protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, left. It’s illegal to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture or collect them.