The state agency that quietly signed away an estimated $1 billion in taxpayer funds for immigration enforcement finally produced a state-mandated public accounting Friday of its staggering emergency spending – nearly two months late.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management had blown through the July 15 deadline set in state law to open the books on the state’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Fund, originally set aside for recovery from disasters like hurricanes and wildfires. This past year, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration used much of the money to build and operate the now-shuttered Everglades immigration detention facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” – largely out of public view and with little oversight by state lawmakers.

FDEM handed over that report to the state’s legislative leaders Friday morning, less than an hour before lawmakers gaveled in a budget commission meeting, to decide whether the agency should get another $250 million to help cover its unpaid debts, including for immigration enforcement costs.

“There’s just so many different problems with the fact that we’re just getting this report,” said Senate Minority Leader Lori Berman. 

“This is not the way that we should be spending our Florida money,” Berman added. “We need more legislative oversight. We need transparency.”

The report shows that the state’s emergency fund is projected to end the current fiscal year, which began July 1, with a $1.5 billion deficit – an eye-popping potential liability for state taxpayers. That estimate is a “worst-case scenario” for all expected costs, the report notes, taking into account possible spending for two major hurricanes and four severe weather events, as well as projected immigration enforcement costs.

Yet the legislative budget commission chair and one of the architects of the state’s budget, Republican state Sen. Ed Hooper, acknowledged during Friday’s meeting that he had still not personally received the spending report – a measure of the lack of transparency around the unprecedented spending by the DeSantis administration.

Nonetheless, lawmakers voted along party lines to sign off on the additional funding – on top of the $250 million the Legislature had already allocated to the emergency fund in this year’s budget. 

Jared Perdue, who DeSantis named as the new director of FDEM less than a month ago, defended the spending to lawmakers and refused to take questions from journalists.

“My main focus, serving in this role in the next few months, is to make sure we are indeed ready to respond to a natural disaster. And I can assure you we are,” Perdue told lawmakers.

“And secondly, to aggressively continue to pursue reimbursements with our federal partners,” Perdue added, in reference to the more than $523 million the feds still owe Florida taxpayers for immigration enforcement

More than $417 million in unpaid immigration bills

FDEM’s newly released report details the sheer scale of the spending funneled through the emergency fund by the DeSantis administration – not only on traditional emergencies like hurricanes and other natural disasters, but on reining in illegal immigration, which the governor has repeatedly declared a state “emergency.” 

According to the report, Florida has received only $84.5 million of a long-promised $608 million federal reimbursement for its makeshift detention centers. As of June 30, the state had some 592 pending vendor invoices for immigrant expenses alone, totaling more than $417 million in unpaid bills – including hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to city and county governments. The state has another $43.4 million in outstanding invoices related to recent years’ storms. And the DeSantis administration plans to keep spending on immigration enforcement, with a “conservative” estimate of $500 million in projected costs through the end of this fiscal year.

Democratic Rep. Allison Tant, one of just three state lawmakers to attend Friday’s meeting in-person, raised concerns that FDEM’s spending on immigration enforcement comes at a cost to the state’s victims of natural disasters – and the vendors hired to help them recover. Communities in Tant’s North Florida district have been battered by storms and tornadoes in recent years.

“I want to make sure that we’re making those vendors whole, so that the next storm happens, they’re ready to step up again,” Tant said. “That’s a concern of mine, in how we prioritize making sure that our constituent needs are met versus a project, Alligator Alcatraz, that we didn’t even authorize as a Legislature.”

DeSantis has continuously renewed the emergency declaration on immigration that he first issued in 2023, granting the governor and his executive agencies extraordinary powers to sidestep state laws and spend taxpayer funds without specific prior approval by lawmakers. 

The Legislature created the emergency fund in 2022, with the intention of giving the governor greater flexibility to respond to disasters quickly, without lawmakers having to scrutinize spending through the usual legislative appropriations process.

Since 2022, lawmakers have transferred more than $5 billion into the emergency fund, according to state data.

Government watchdogs have blasted the emergency account as a “slush fund” for the governor and executive agencies to spend with little oversight, funding the construction of a makeshift prison camp without lawmaker approval, through multimillion-dollar state contracts inked with companies owned by major Republican political donors.

“The continued abuse of this emergency power is an insult to our constitution and the people of Florida,” said Berman, the top Democrat in the state Senate.

The leadership of the GOP-dominated Legislature has shown little interest in publicly scrutinizing the use of emergency funds on immigration enforcement. Still, less than two weeks after the Florida Trib reported that the DeSantis administration had burned through more than a million dollars a day on the Everglades facility, lawmakers passed a bill adding significant guardrails to the emergency fund – including the requirement that FDEM submit quarterly spending reports and seek legislative approval for certain expenses. 

FDEM sailed over that hurdle during Friday’s budget commission meeting, with few questions and little debate. Only two lawmakers were still physically present when it came time to discuss FDEM’s requests, with others joining over the phone. Commission Vice Chair Lawrence McClure, a Republican, had attended the earlier part of the meeting, but walked out before FDEM’s budget proposals were taken up and did not vote via phone.

“It was our hope that by having the legislative budget commission involved, we would have legislative oversight,” said Karen Woodall, director of the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy.

“So that there could be some transparency and some real legislative oversight about the use of tax dollars,” Woodall added. “That’s obviously not what’s happening.”

Kate Payne is The Florida Trib’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org