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JONI JAMESThe private prisons commission violated a law by hiring a recent head of corrections. It's unclear what penalties could follow.
TALLAHASSEE - Florida's private prisons commission broke state law last year when it hired a former state corrections secretary as a consultant and paid him $81,500, the governor's inspector general found.
But it was unclear Wednesday if there would be any repercussions.
The law includes no enforcement mechanism or penalty and does not fall under the state Ethics Commission. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement reviewed the matter last month and found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
But Gov. Jeb Bush, who ordered the investigation in April after an inquiry from the St. Petersburg Times, said his attorneys are reviewing legal options.
"I don't know what recourse we have, but it is troubling," Bush said Wednesday. "Based on what I was told was done, it stinks. It doesn't pass the smell test."
At issue is a February 2003 decision by Alan Duffee, former executive director of the Correctional Privatization Commission, to hire former corrections chief Michael W. Moore to oversee rebidding of two of the state's five private prison contracts.
Duffee hired Moore without a public search a month after Moore quit his corrections post. Moore then hired his former chief of staff at the Department of Corrections and a department attorney to help him.
State law generally does not prohibit agencies from hiring former state employees as consultants. But the Legislature, hoping to discourage conflicts of interests between public and private prisons, prohibited the commission from hiring anyone who had worked in the previous two years for either the state corrections or juvenile justice departments.
Duffee has argued he did not break state law because he hired Moore's firm, MWM & Associates, not Moore. But Duffee, who could not be reached for comment Wednesday, acknowledged to the governor's investigators that he chose the company because he wanted Moore's expertise.
Lawmakers, with the blessing of Bush, voted in the spring to do away with the commission June 30, 2005, but turned over all its responsibility to the Department of Management Services July 1. Shortly after the vote, Duffee resigned and went to work as a lobbyist and the commission voted to stop meeting.
The Legislature's vote came in the midst of expanding controversy about the commission, an independent board created when the state Department of Corrections repeatedly rejected lawmakers' demands to privatize some state prisons.
In the year leading up to its demise, the commission was pushing to rebid the state's private prison contracts for the first time in eight years.
But amid that push, one of the state's two private prison vendors launched a successful bid protest. And Duffee acknowledged in a deposition that he fraternized with lobbyists for vendors.
The hiring of Moore was "another reason we advocated the demise of this organization," Bush said.
It's at least the second time in four years the inspector general has found the commission's employees or former employees breaking state law.
In 2000, the inspector general ruled that former commission employee Ronald T. Jones violated state law when he accepted a job with a private prison vendor within two years of leaving his commission job. Former commission Executive Director Clayton Mark Hodges was also found to have violated state ethics law by failing to report the receipt of an honorarium from another private prison that was angling to win a Florida prison contract.
"This law should have been fixed a long time ago," said Ken Kopczynski, a frequent critic of the state's private prisons and spokesman for the Florida Police Benevolent Association, which represents corrections officers at state-run prisons. "There are major holes in the law you could drive a truck through."