taxpayers

ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida taxpayers could be on the hook for $218 million the state spent to convert a remote training airport in the Everglades into an immigration detention center dubbed “ Alligator Alcatraz.”

The facility may soon be empty as a judge upheld her decision late Wednesday ordering operations to wind down indefinitely.

Shutting down the facility for the time being would cost the state $15 million to $20 million immediately, and it would cost another $15 million to $20 million to reinstall structures if Florida is allowed to reopen it, according to court filings by the state.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management will lose most of the value of the $218 million it has invested in making the airport suitable for a detention center, a state official said in court papers.

Built in just a few days, the facility consists of chain-link cages surrounding large white tents filled with rows of bunk beds. As of late July, state officials had already signed more than $245 million in contracts for building and operating the facility, which officially opened July 1.

President Trump toured the facility last month and suggested it could be a model for future lockups nationwide as his administration races to expand the infrastructure needed to increase deportations.

The center has been plagued by reports of unsanitary conditions and detainees being cut off from the legal system.

It’s also facing several legal challenges, including one that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled on late Wednesday. She denied requests to pause her order to wind down operations, after agreeing last week with environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe that the state and federal defendants didn’t follow federal law requiring an environmental review for the detention center in the middle of sensitive wetlands.

The Miami judge said the number of detainees was already dwindling, and the federal government’s “immigration enforcement goals will not be thwarted by a pause in operations.” That’s despite Department of Homeland Security lawyers saying the judge’s order would disrupt that enforcement.

When asked, the Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t say how many detainees remained and how many had been moved out since the judge’s temporary injunction last week.

“DHS is complying with this order and moving detainees to other facilities,” the department said Thursday in an emailed statement.

Environmental activist Jessica Namath, who has kept a nearly constant watch outside the facility’s gates, said Thursday that fellow observers had seen white tents hauled out but no signs of the removal of Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers or portable bathrooms.

“It definitely seems like they have been winding down operations,” Namath said.

Based on publicly available contract data, the Associated Press estimated the state allocated $50 million for the bathrooms. Detainees and advocates have described toilets that don’t flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, although officials dispute such descriptions.

The facility was already being emptied of detainees as of last week, according to an email exchange shared with the AP on Wednesday. The executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, Kevin Guthrie, said on Aug. 22 “we are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days,” in a message to a rabbi about chaplaincy services.

Funding is central to the federal government’s arguments that Williams’ order should be overturned by an appellate court.

Homeland Security attorneys said in a court filing this week that federal environmental law doesn’t apply to a state like Florida, and the federal government isn’t responsible for the detention center since it hasn’t spent a cent to build or operate the facility, even though Florida is seeking some federal grant money to fund a portion of the detention center.

“No final federal funding decisions have been made,” the attorneys said.

Almost two dozen Republican-led states also urged the appellate court to overturn the order. The 22 states argued in another court filing that the judge overstepped her authority and that the federal environmental laws applied only to the federal agencies, not the state of Florida.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ’ administration is preparing to open a second immigration detention facility dubbed “Deportation Depot” at a state prison in north Florida.

Civil rights groups filed a second lawsuit last month against the state and federal governments over practices at the Everglades facility, claiming detainees were denied access to the legal system.

A third lawsuit by civil rights groups on Aug. 22 described “severe problems” at the facility that were “previously unheard-of in the immigration system.”

Schneider and Payne write for the Associated Press.

BRITAIN’S Chagos Islands handover will cost taxpayers ten times more than Sir Keir Starmer let on, newly unearthed figures claim.

Official estimates reveal the bill for giving the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius is not £3.4billion as promised, but actually close to £35billion.

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The figure, which was released to the Conservative Party under Freedom of Information laws, is far higher than the £3.4 billion figure the Prime Minister had previously stated in public, according to The Telegraph.

Ministers are now facing allegations that they misled Parliament with a controversial “accountancy trick” to hide the size of the bill from taxpayers.

Britain is to hand over sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory while paying billions of pounds to continue using the Diego Garcia base, a key military facility used by Britain and the United States.

Negotiations for a deal to hand over sovereignty of the island began under the Conservatives and was concluded by the new Labour government.

Back in February, Sir Keir Starmer dismissed Tory warnings of a £30billion cost and branded a £9bn to £18bn estimate “absolutely wide of the mark”.

But an official document produced by the Government Actuary’s Department shows the cost of the deal was first estimated at ten times the stated figure, at £34.7 billion, in nominal terms.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said: “Add that to their £50bn black hole, and it’s clear – when Labour negotiates, Britain loses.”

A government spokesman said: “The deal is supported by our closest allies, including the US, Canada, Australia and Nato.

“The costs compare favourably with other international base agreements, and the UK-US base on Diego Garcia is larger, in a more strategic location.”

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TURNBERRY, Scotland — It may not be typical golf attire, but one of the most ubiquitous outfits seen on President Trump’s golf course Friday ahead of his visit was the reflective yellow vest worn by Scottish police.

The standard issue garb that is far removed from the traditional Turnberry tartan was highly visible on the dunes, the beaches and the grass as thousands of officers secured the course in advance of protests planned during the president’s visit to two of his Scottish golf resorts.

Trump was expected to arrive Friday evening to a mix of respect and ridicule.

His visit requires a major police operation that will cost Scottish taxpayers millions of pounds as protests are planned over the weekend. The union representing officers is concerned they are already overworked and will be diverted from their normal duties, and some residents are not happy about the cost.

“Why isn’t he paying for it himself? He’s coming for golf, isn’t he?” said Merle Fertuson, a solo protester in Edinburgh holding a hand-drawn cardboard sign that featured a foolishly grinning Trump likeness in a tuxedo. “It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with public money, either U.S. or U.K.”

Policing for Trump’s four-day visit to the U.K. in 2018 cost more than $19 million, according to Freedom of Information figures. That included more than $4 million spent for his two-day golf trip to Turnberry, the historic course and hotel in southwest Scotland that he bought in 2014.

Police Scotland would not discuss how many officers were being deployed for operational reasons and only said the costs would be “considerable.”

“The visit will require a significant police operation using local, national and specialist resources from across Police Scotland, supported by colleagues from other U.K. police forces as part of mutual aid arrangements,” Assistant Chief Constable Emma Bond said.

Scottish First Minister John Swinney said the visit would not be detrimental to policing.

“It’s nonsensical to say it won’t impact it,” said David Kennedy, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, the officers’ union.

Kennedy said he expects about 5,000 officers to take part in the operation.

He said a force reduction in recent years has police working 12-hour shifts. Communities that are understaffed will be left behind with even fewer officers during Trump’s visit.

“We want the president of the United States to be able to come to Scotland. That’s not what this is about,” Kennedy said. “It’s the current state of the police service and the numbers we have causes great difficulty.”

The Stop Trump Scotland group has planned demonstrations Saturday in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dumfries. The group encouraged people to “show Trump exactly what we think of him in Scotland.”

Trump should receive a much warmer welcome from U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is expected to meet with him during the visit. Swinney, the left-leaning head of Scottish government and former Trump critic, also plans to meet with the president.

Ha and Melley write for the Associated Press. Melley reported from London. Will Weissert contributed to this report from Edinburgh.

AS KING Canute found over a thousand years ago, it is quite difficult to stand on a beach and order the tide to recede. 

Today, it is equally difficult to make the argument that giving families cash is not always the best way of lifting them out of poverty. 

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This is especially true when one particular measure becomes the symbol of whether or not you’re on the right side of the debate about child poverty.

But as someone who now can afford the comforts of life, I constantly remind myself of my childhood.

The grinding poverty that I experienced when my father was killed
in a work accident when I was 12 – leaving my mother, who had serious health problems, to fight a long battle for minimal compensation.

Having only bread and dripping in the house was, by anyone’s standards, a hallmark of absolute poverty.

Why on earth would I question, therefore, the morality of reversing a Tory policy introduced eight years ago?

This restricts the additional supplement to universal credit – worth over £3,000 a child per year – to just two children. 

I should know, my friends tell me, that the easiest and quickest way of overcoming the growth in child poverty is to restore the £3.5 billion pounds it would cost to give this additional money for all the children in every family entitled to the credit.

It is true that the policy, introduced in 2017, failed its first test.

Women did not stop having more than two children even when they were strapped for cash. It is still unclear why. 

After all, many people have to make a calculation as to how many children they can afford.

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But one thing must be certain: namely, that if you give parents a relatively substantial additional amount of money for every child they have whilst entitled to benefits, they are likely to have more children.

Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, said as much last week. His argument for restoring the benefit to the third and subsequent children was precisely that we needed to persuade low- income families to have more children.

Surely having children that you cannot afford to feed is the legacy of a bygone era?

All those earning below £60,000 are entitled to the basic child benefit, so the argument is about just over £60 a week extra per child.

One difficulty in having a sensible debate about what really works in overcoming intergenerational poverty is the lack of reliable statistics.

Some people have claimed, over recent days, that over 50 per cent of children in Manchester and Birmingham live in poverty. 

I fear that such claims should be treated with scepticism.

Those struggling to make ends meet – sometimes having not just one but two jobs – who pay their taxes and national insurance and plan their lives around what can be afforded, have the right to question where their hard-earned wages go.

The simple and obvious truth is that child poverty springs from the lack of income of the adults who care for them.

Transforming their lives impacts directly on the children in their family.

There is a limit to how much money taxpayers are willing to hand over to pay for another family’s children. 

Helping them to help themselves is a different matter.

So, what would I do?

Firstly, I would ensure that families with a disabled youngster automatically have the entitlement restored.

This would self-evidently apply also to multiple births. 

In both cases, life is not only more difficult, it is also harder to get and keep a job.

I would come down like a ton of bricks on absent parents.

My mum was a single parent because she was widowed; many others are single in the sense that the other partner has walked away.

The Child Maintenance Service should step up efforts to identify and pursue absent parents who do not pay their fair share towards their child. 

We, the community, have a clear duty to support and assist those in need.

To help those where a helping hand will restore them to independence and self-reliance.

But there is an obligation on individuals as well as the State, and mutual help starts with individuals taking some responsibility for themselves.

Finally, if (and this is where I am in full agreement with colleagues campaigning to dramatically reduce child poverty) we make substantial sums of money available to overcome hardship, then a comprehensive approach to supporting the families must surely be the best way to achieve this.

As ever in politics there is a trade off. What you spend on handing over cash is not available to invest in public services: that is the reality.

Help from the moment a child is born, not just with childcare but with nurturing and child development.

Dedicated backing to gain skills and employment and to taper the
withdrawal of help so that it genuinely becomes worthwhile having and keeping a job. 

A contract between the taxpayer and the individual or household.
Government is about difficult choices, that is why Keir Starmer and his colleagues are agonising over what to do next.

Reporting from Sacramento — Past efforts to repeal the death penalty in California have centered on moral or ethical objections. This year, proponents of Proposition 62, which would replace the punishment with life in prison without parole, are focusing on economics.

Prominent supporters of the measure have repeatedly pointed out that the state’s taxpayers have spent $5 billion on the executions of only 13 people in almost 40 years. Online ads have urged voters to end a costly system that “wastes” $150 million a year.

“Sometimes, something is so broken it just can’t be fixed,” a voiceover says in one commercial, as a blue-and-white china vase shatters to the ground.

“Let’s spend that money on programs that are proven to make us safer,” a crime victim pleads in another.

But as voters weigh two dueling death penalty measures on the Nov. 8 ballot — one to eliminate executions, another to speed them up — researchers are at odds over the actual costs and potential savings of each. Independent legislative analysts, meanwhile, believe Proposition 62 could save taxpayers millions, while concluding that the fiscal impact of Proposition 66’s attempt to expedite death sentences is unknown.

Death penalty cases are often the most expensive in the criminal justice system because the costs associated with capital punishment trials and the incarceration of death row offenders are vastly higher.

The expenses begin to accrue at the county level. Capital cases require two trials, one to decide the verdict and another the punishment. They require more attorneys, more investigators, more time and experts and a larger jury pool.

The costs grow as the state must pay to incarcerate inmates during a lengthy appeals process: The average cost of imprisoning an offender was about $47,000 per year in 2008-09, according to the nonpartisan state legislative analyst’s office. But housing a death row inmate can lead to an additional $50,000 to $90,000 per year, studies have found.

Paula Mitchell, a professor at Loyola Law School who is against the death penalty and has advised the Yes on Prop. 62 campaign, puts the cost of the entire death penalty system since 1978 at about $5 billion.

That figure, updated from data compiled in a 2011 report, includes 13 executions since the death penalty was reinstated through a 1978 ballot measure; it was suspended in 2006 because of legal challenges over injection protocols. The figure also includes the cost of trials, lengthy appeals and the housing of nearly 750 inmates on California’s death row.

The initial study estimated taxpayers spent $70 million per year on incarceration costs, $775 million on federal legal challenges to convictions, known as habeas corpus petitions, and $925 million on automatic appeals and initial legal challenges to death row cases.

Mitchell and other researchers said Proposition 62, which would retroactively apply life sentences to all death row defendants, would save the state most of that money.

“It is sort of a fantasy that this system is ever going to be cost efficient,” said Mitchell, who has been named the university’s executive director of the Project for the Innocent.

But proponents of Proposition 66 argue the system can be reformed. The ballot measure would designate trial courts to take on initial challenges to convictions and limit successive appeals to within five years of a death sentence. It also would require lawyers who don’t take capital cases to represent death row inmates in an attempt to expand the pool of available lawyers.

In an analysis for its proponents, Michael Genest, a former budget director for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, contends such changes would save taxpayers $30 million annually in the long run. Proposition 62, in comparison, would cost taxpayers more than $100 million due to this “lost opportunity” over a 10-year period.

But independent researchers with the legislative analyst’s office found plenty of factors could increase or reduce the chances of either ballot measure saving taxpayers money.

Overall, they found Proposition 62 was likely to reduce net state and county costs by roughly $150 million within a few years.

The actual number could be partially offset if, without the death penalty, offenders are less inclined to plead guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence in some murder cases. That could lead to more cases going to trial and higher court costs, according to the legislative analyst’s office.

Yet over time, the state could see lower prison expenses, even with a larger and older prison population, since the costs of housing and supervising death row inmates is much higher than paying for their medical bills, analysts said.

“If Prop. 62 goes into effect, they can be housed like life-without-parole inmates, some in single and some double cells,” legislative analyst Anita Lee said. “It would fall to [the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] to do an evaluation of risks.”

Calculating the fiscal impact of Proposition 66 is much more complicated, the office found, as the measure leaves more open questions on implementation, such as how the state would staff up with additional private attorneys.

Silicon Valley is pouring millions into repealing California’s death penalty. Will it make a difference? »

Legislative analysts said the costs in the short term were likely to be higher, as the state would have to process hundreds of pending legal challenges within the new time limits. Just how much is unknown, but the actual number could be in the tens of millions of dollars annually for many years.

Also unknown, analysts said, is the proposition’s effect on the cost of each legal challenge. The limits on appeals and new deadlines could cut the expenses if they result in fewer, shorter legal filings that take less time and state resources to process.

But they could increase costs if additional layers of review are required for habeas corpus petitions, the initial legal challenges in criminal cases, and if more lawyers are needed.

Meanwhile, potential prison savings could reach tens of millions of dollars annually, depending on how the state changes the way it houses condemned inmates. Transferring male inmates to other prisons rather than housing them in single cells at San Quentin could lead to lower costs. But how much depends on how many the state can move.

Mitchell said it was “pretty much delusional” to expect Proposition 66 to ever save the state money. For that to happen, she said, California would have to execute “one person every week, 52 people a year for the next 15 years, assuming they are all guilty.”

But Kent Scheidegger, author of the proposition and legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, argued the legislative office’s numbers were skewed, while security costs for dangerous inmates would likely have to remain just as high.

“They don’t become any less dangerous if you change their sentence from death row to life without parole,” he said.

[email protected]

@jazmineulloa

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