Coffee's Mexican Vacation

According to a 14 April Tulsa World article, Republican Senate President Pro Tem, Glen Coffee, and former State Representative, Fred Morgan, took a little vacation to Mexico with Brett Robinson, a lobbyist for GEO, a private prison company.

Information provided for fiscal year 2008 by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections shows that the state spent slightly more than $78 million to house inmates in private prisons. Of that amount, slightly more than $41 million was spent with GEO.

Was this cozy little friendship between GEO and Coffee the reason that Coffee requested an analysis from the State Board of Corrections of what it would cost to close 3 state prisons?

Oklahoma has one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation. When the private prison industry is sure we have no other alternatives to house our prison population, they will jack up the cost per inmate and Oklahoma will be at their mercy. That's exactly what they did in New Mexico. Yes, today, they do it slightly cheaper, but when we put ourselves in a position where there is no competition for the private prisons, they will gouge us big time. Those trips to Mexico are not cheap.
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DRIBBLE DOWN ECONOMICS

The Oklahoma legislature again followed lobbyist money instead of the interests of their constituents when they voted to give the owners of the Sonics a 60 million dollar tax break by passing HB1819 last session. To see how much your legislator received from Sonic lobbyists, check out this website (http://davidhglover.googlepages.com/reverserobinhood)

Overall lobbyists for the tax credit gave about $600,000.00 in campaign contributions to legislators while encouraging them to vote for a 60 million dollar tax break. I sure wish I could get even half that on my investments. If you do an in depth calculation on the voting patterns; it shows that Representatives voting YES on the bill received an average of $3,167 in contributions while legislators voting No on the bill only received $1820. Senators voting YES were a little more expensive. They received an average of $7,100.00 while Senators voting no only received $3950. .

Meanwhile the infrastructure in our state is falling apart. The ASCE web site, http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/page.cfm?id=76, calculated in 2005 that the total bill to bring our bridges, roads, water and sewage systems up to par would be over 2.34 billion dollars. I have a feeling it is going to be very hard to get there if our legislature continues to let the lobbyists run our state.