Bowing to resistance from the Department of Corrections, Senate Republicans scaled back their prison privatization plans Wednesday.

But the DOC is still directed to open the new 2,224-bed Blackwater River Correctional Facility as a privately operated facility by the GEO Group.

GEO, which built the $110 million Panhandle prison per state contract, can operate the facility for $5.7 million less per year than the state, according to the Department of Management Services. Those savings are based on GEO's daily contract cost of $41 per inmate vs. $48 projected by the DOC.

While Blackwater would move forward as a privately run facility, a series of amendments watered down savings that Ways and Means Committee Chairman J.D. Alexander had hoped to achieve.

Instead of directing the DOC to privatize a yet-to-be-designated 1,350-bed facility and close others, the department was permitted to retain its operations with state personnel.

The net effect is that the DOC must find savings in its budget to compensate for the $22 million the state will expend on the Blackwater contract in the coming year.

Prison guards represented by the Police Benevolent Association vehemently opposed any privatization efforts that would diminish their ranks.

Complicating Alexander's plan politically, the House of Representatives does not have a comparable privatization initiative in its budget.

Reacting to Alexander's initial plan, Rep. Marti Coley, R-Marianna, said:

“The proposal coming from the Florida Senate regarding the privatization of the Blackwater River Correctional Facility and the resulting transfer of inmates to a private facility will result in the closure of two state prisons.

"These closings will cause as many as 1,400 state corrections officers to lose their jobs and would be catastrophic to a region already reeling from the effects of our current economic crisis."

DOC spokeswoman Gretel Plessinger said closures would have "eliminated 2,400 positions."

Sen. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, said amendments that he and Alexander authored on Wednesday "give the DOC flexibility" to economize.

Officials said it was too soon to say how or where cost-cutting would occur under the Senate's newly amended version, but Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa, suggested that the necessary savings could be achieved through normal attrition and selective closures of specific units.

The sprawling corrections department, with an annual budget of $2.4 billion, loses up to 300 employees per month via retirement and resignations.

"There shouldn't be any mass firings here," Crist said.

Alexander, R-Lake Wales, and proponents of privatization had argued that privately run facilities can save Florida money in the long run. The state approved the construction and operation of Blackwater through a competitive-bid process, and makes the contractor, the GEO Group, responsible for all operational expenses.

The new facility, near Milton in Santa Rosa County, is equipped with the latest security technology as well as air conditioning -- which many of the state's 40- and 50-year-old prisons do not have.

Citing a flattening of Florida's prison population, Alexander had urged the DOC to open Blackwater and decommission aging, inefficient facilities.

"It just makes sense to close facilities that are more costly and less safe," Alexander said.

Instead, the department announced it would mothball the unopened Blackwater facility for another year and keep the status quo elsewhere.

By some estimates, that decision would cost the DOC $1 million just to secure and maintain an empty facility, on top of roughly $10 million in annual debt service for the complex.

Blackwater was built by the GEO Group with public financing. Designed and engineered to the latest state specifications, it can house ailing inmates as well as those with special needs.

Sen. Crist said Blackwater's energy-efficiency standards make it "significantly less expensive to operate" than existing penal facilities.

The GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp., a division of Wackenhut Corp., is the second largest provider of correctional, detention and residential treatment services to federal, state and local governments.