A federal judge on Tuesday slapped $50,000 a day in fines on Texas’ protective services agency for flouting her orders on nighttime watches of foster children in group settings.

Fines begin Friday, and will double on Nov. 15, U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack said after blistering the state for obstructing her attempts to safeguard about 11,000 abused and neglected children who are in long-term foster care.

The fines will continue, Jack said, until her court-appointed monitors confirm that all children placed in group care settings are being watched over 24/7 by an adult who’s awake — something she’s been trying to achieve for four years.

“I can no longer find DFPS credible,” Jack said, referring to the Department of Family and Protective Services. “They’ve lied to me at almost every level [and] this is just shameful.”

Jack said she reluctantly must deny a request by plaintiffs that she also find the state in contempt of court for failing to move forward with a central element of the case: conducting workload studies to determine reasonable working conditions for three categories of state employees who are critical to foster children’s safety and well-being.

She said she was “stunned” to learn the state wanted to hire a consultant to perform the studies who testified in a similar lawsuit in Rhode Island that he believes there’s no correlation between caps on state child-welfare workers’ caseloads and better outcomes for children.

Both she and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based their opinion in the Texas case on that assumption, she noted. She said last month’s proposal by the department to base the studies on statistical analysis that looks only at the incidence of child maltreatment, and not at how long it takes workers to perform various duties, “is the worst proposal I ever saw.”

However, Jack said she couldn’t sustain penalties against the state for dragging its feet on the workload studies for Child Protective Services conservatorship caseworkers and Residential Child Care abuse investigators and licensing inspectors.

“No matter how weak the effort was, it was made,” she said of the department’s plan to use as its workload-studies consultant professor John Fluke of the University of Colorado at Denver.

“I was stunned that you would put someone in charge of the workload program who didn’t believe in their efficacy,” she said of Fluke and caseload caps — or in the Texas case, “guidelines” for what should be a maximum workload.

On Tuesday, Jack heard testimony on various alleged shortcomings by the state — as well as plaintiffs’ protest that the department recently missed a deadline for creating a checkbox in its computerized case records to show if a foster child is a confirmed victim of sexual abuse.

“Defendants are dragging their feet on an issue vital to child safety,” plaintiffs said of the sexual abuse checkbox in a last-minute motion filed Friday.

“DFPS and HHSC sought clarification concerning the broad order at issue in this case and demonstrated that they are working expeditiously to comply with the court’s order," said Marc Rylander, director of communications for the attorney general’s office. "Our children deserve reasonable provisions that make that care more safe and accessible, and we are dedicated to working with all parties toward that goal.”

Judge says state moving too slowly

State lawyers said the department’s working on that improvement to its electronic data system but wants to get it right — and it won’t be ready until Dec. 19. They said CPS caseworkers know the children’s histories, so there isn’t a safety concern.

Jack brushed aside state officials’ explanations, expressing irritation at the slow pace.

“The whole thing is the safety of these children,” she said. “I don’t care about all the technical stuff.”

She gave the department until 5 p.m. Friday to verify to monitors Kevin Ryan and Deborah Fowler that all caregivers have been notified about children who have been confirmed as either sexually aggressive or victims of past sexual abuse.

Jack delayed ruling on plaintiffs lawyers’ requests for more than $21 million in fees and expenses they say have accrued since 2009, when New York-based Children’s Rights began ginning up the long-running class-action suit. It was filed in 2011.

Gov. Greg Abbott, acting Family and Protective Services Commissioner Trevor Woodruff and Health and Human Services Commission chief Courtney Phillips are the defendants.

The Dallas Morning News has reported that the state has spent more than $10 million of attorneys’ time and other costs fighting the suit.

The monitoring by Jack’s special masters Ryan and Fowler will now vastly increase — another expense for state taxpayers.

Jack, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton who is on senior status, said it grieves her as a state taxpayer to see the legal and monitoring costs spiral.

“This is my state, too, and I am so sorry that we have come to this," she said, looking at Woodruff and state lawyers Andrew Stephens, Christopher Hilton, Thomas Albright and Summer Lee. “These are the most vulnerable children" and the state has shown little to no concern for them, she said.

The state has been recalcitrant, Jack said. Texas has fought Children’s Rights harder than the 16 other states it has sued, The News has reported.

Jack upbraided several department witnesses during their testimony, saying they and their predecessors have demonstrated no interest in finding out the actual conditions in long-term foster care, which is mostly provided by private entities that contract with the state.

“You have created a crisis [and] you want to blame it on somebody else,” she said at one point. At another: “This is obstruction, obstruction, obstruction.”

She was referring to a deal proposed by the monitors that she said would save taxpayers about $1 million: Don’t hire a fancy consultant to perform the workload study. Just agree that the goal is to drive down workloads so caseworkers and foster-care investigators are responsible for no more than 17 children at a time. Jack noted that Fort Worth-based ACH Child and Family Services, the lead vendor in a “foster care redesign” effort in that area, won a contract concession from the department that gives private social workers no more than 14 kids apiece.

“It’s not a cap,” Kristene Blackstone, the department’s associate commissioner for CPS, said of the Fort Worth arrangement.

Albright, who handles complex litigation for the attorney general’s office, explained the state’s rejection of a 17-child-per-worker goal for CPS conservatorship workers and residential child care investigators.

“The concern was that by somehow agreeing to 17, 17 then morphs into a cap [and] not a guideline,” he said.

Lawyers’ fees an issue

On fees for plaintiffs’ lawyers, Jack said she would whittle down — by a considerable amount, she suggested — Children’s Rights’ request for more than $14.3 million. It comprises two-thirds of the plaintiffs’ total ask.

“I was not impressed by Children’s Rights,” she said.

But she said “I don’t see anything outrageous” about the $6 million of attorney’s fees sought by Yetter Coleman of Houston or the $1.6 million requested by Haynes and Boone of Dallas. Both firms have said they want to donate any reimbursements toward “the benefit of present or future foster children." They’ll follow direction from child advocacy groups and Jack’s monitors, they said.

A Better Childhood, a New York nonprofit created during the lawsuit by Children’s Rights founder Marcia Robinson Lowry, put in for $684,000. Jack called Lowry’s fees “fair and reasonable.”

On Thursday, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a brief arguing the plaintiffs were overbilling — charging fees above those approved in recent lawsuits against the state over abortion and same-sex marriage, and far above the going rates in Corpus Christi, where a bench trial in the foster-care case was held in 2014.

Fees should be further discounted for frivolous claims the plaintiffs pursued, Paxton said.

“Overall, plaintiffs lost on 75% of their claims,” he wrote.

On Tuesday, however, Jack said plaintiffs “were successful on the merits, they won this case. They may not have gotten all the remedies that they wanted and I wanted.”

Her orders include 47 remedies, “which is quite a few more remedies than other states that actually settled.”

Jack apparently held the hearing in Dallas because it has more airline flights and is easier to reach for some lawyers in the case and Ryan and his staff, who are based in New Jersey.