Florida spent $240 million on lawyers

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Gov. Rick Scott and other top Florida Republicans frequently complain about government spending, but they have spent more than $237 million on private lawyers to advance and defend their agendas, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Florida taxpayers also have 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 in the last six years, 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 lawyers. And no one in state government is tracking the total of their hourly rates.

"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 AP came up with the figure by analyzing budget documents and results of public-records requests.

The review found 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 lawyer 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 against President Donald Trump's policies.

In Florida, it was the cost of the state's water war against Georgia -- more than $41 million in the last 18 months alone -- that began 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" 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, including defending laws passed by the legislature, we utilize available resources and, as required by statute, get approval from the Attorney General's office," Schutz said.

"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.

Ray 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.

Ray added there are several reasons that Bondi's office may not take up a case including that it "falls into an area in which our office lacks specialized expertise, there is a conflict of interest, or the matter is pending outside the state of Florida."

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