TALLAHASSEE — A much-anticipated report of the spending habits of Florida’s emergency and disaster agency was finally released two months past deadline, revealing a $1.5 billion, worst-case-scenario deficit by next summer.
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The report was released Friday, about an hour before a legislative committee charged with reviewing budget requests met to discuss the Florida Division of Emergency Management’s ask for an additional $250 million to pay already overdue bills.
The Republican-dominated legislative budget commission voted 7 to 3 along party lines to approve the request. Most of that, or $187 million, was to pay the contractors who built and maintained Alligator Alcatraz, the now-shuttered detention facility in the Everglades, and for other immigration enforcement services. It included $60 million owed to Doodie Calls, a supplier of porta-potties. The other $62 million was for hurricane recovery going back three years.
Florida has a pay-first, get-reimbursed-later system that makes it quicker to respond to emergencies, but that also means it can take months to years to get money back from the federal government when the state helps with hurricane recovery efforts or President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement goals, officials said.
The federal government, for example, has so far reimbursed the state $84 million for immigration enforcement efforts but still owes Florida more than $500 million for that work.
The report said there are still 592 pending invoices for those efforts, collectively referred to as Operation Vigilant Sentry, with an additional $500 million in projected costs this year.
Another $581 million is pending from the federal government for services Florida provided after Hurricane Helene struck, and $1.5 billion is pending from Hurricane Milton, both 2024 storms.
“The bulk of that is for services already rendered,” said Florida Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue, acting as chief of emergency management. “We are continuously acting and responding to all sorts of things and at the same time seeking reimbursement from our federal partners.”
Democrats on the panel objected to paying more for immigration enforcement efforts, especially because they do not think Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has been upfront about the costs. In late August, they demanded to know why the emergency management division had not yet provided the required report.
Democrats also believe immigration enforcement is a drain on local and state resources and should be left to the federal government.
Senate Democratic Leader Lori Berman of Boynton Beach, who voted against the additional $250 million, noted that DeSantis declared an immigration emergency, then extended that order 22 times. That becamse a pretext, she said, for putting emergency dollars into immigration efforts.
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“Continued use of this emergency power is an insult to the people of Florida,” Berman said.
The Legislature passed a bill earlier this year, renewing the fund DeSantis uses for those activities — but with new conditions, including a quarterly report on how the agency spends that money and a status report on federal reimbursements.
“The report was due on July 15,” Berman said.
It was delivered Sept. 11.
The 50-page report appears to be comprehensive and includes the information demanded by the Legislature, she said, “but we haven’t had a chance to get through the report and understand it.”
Having to approve a request for money that’s been obligated but not originally budgeted made her feel “boxed in,” Berman said, and defeats the purpose of legislative oversight.
Rep. Allison Tant, D-Tallahassee, who also voted against the extra funding, said the agency needs to place a priority on meeting the needs of Floridians who lost their homes and livelihoods because of hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding.
The report projects that the emergency management division will spend $2.6 billion in the current budget cycle that ends June 30, 2027 but will only receive about $1.1 billion — $600 million in federal funds and $500 million from the state emergency preparedness fund.
That deficit is based on an assumption of two major hurricanes and four severe weather events and no increase in federal revenues received, the report said. Emergency managers said the state could anticipate an additional $2 billion in costs if there are two major hurricanes this year.
Perdue said he could not answer lawmakers’ questions as to when the state will fully repay all its outstanding invoices.
“My main priority is to make sure we are ready to respond to a natural disaster and aggressively pursue the federal reimbursements available,” he said.
Tant said that she liked the model of acting first and getting support later but couldn’t vote to give more money to the agency when it still had so much outstanding debt and when counties are still struggling to get reimbursed.
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