State paid too much for mine, audit shows

Since only 60 of the 300 acres can be mined, Florida overpaid by $7.8-million, the Auditor General's Office says.

By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 19, 2003

When Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet voted two years ago to spend $10.2-million to buy a 300-acre mine near Ichetucknee Springs State Park, environmentalists applauded but wondered if the price was too high.

State auditors have answered that question with a resounding yes. The state paid more than four times what the property was worth, auditors concluded in a scathing report released this week.

The lime rock mine about 30 miles northwest of Gainesville was worth $2.4-million, the state Auditor General's Office found. The state paid so much because appraisers assumed all 300 acres could be mined, but only 60 acres was permitted for mining, the auditors said.

State Department of Environmental Protection officials, who oversaw the appraisal and purchase, sharply disagreed with the report Tuesday.

They said they tried repeatedly over several months to convince the auditors the purchase was a deal.

"Those discussions got rather heated with the Auditor General's Office," said Eva Armstrong, the director of DEP's division of state lands.

Although the auditors have criticized DEP's approach to buying environmentally sensitive property, "this is the most scathing audit ever done on the state lands program," said Rob Lovern, Armstrong's deputy director.

Bush has frequently criticized the high prices the state pays for environmental land. The review also found the DEP might have paid too much for five other pieces of land, three of them bought from Florida's largest private landowner, the St. Joe Co.

Lovern suggested the audit was so critical because the Auditor General's Office wants to prove its worth. Bush has proposed merging it with another fiscal watchdog, the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, and halving their $42.8-million budget.

"This is pretty timely coming at a time when the governor wants to get rid of them," Lovern said.

Four months after the governor and DEP Secretary David Struhs canoed the Ichetucknee River and vowed to protect it, the DEP approved a permit for a cement plant near the mine.

The plant and another mine bought by the state were owned by a subsidiary of Anderson Columbia, one of the most politically powerful companies in the state and one that has a poor environmental record,The mine the Cabinet voted to buy in October 2001 was owned by a local family, not Anderson Columbia or its subsidiary.

Struhs touted the purchase as wiping out the last threat from mining to the underground river that feeds Ichetucknee Springs.

"In the event that this item is approved, five days after your approval, all blasting ends in that quarry," Struhs told the governor and Cabinet, who approved the purchase 7-0.

Environmental advocates like Linda Young of the Clean Water Network agreed with the state's effort to buy the mine but questioned the price.

"I think that out of an abundance of caution it's wise to purchase the land. But the price they are paying is too much," Young said at the time.

The auditors agreed, but Armstrong and Lovern say the auditors are wrong. They contend that although only 60 acres of the site was permitted for mining, and DEP officials had vowed to oppose mining in the area, state law is so lax that the state could not have prevented the owners from mining all 300 acres. So appraisers were correct to set a value based on all 300 acres being mined, they said.

The purchase was one of six projects where the state paid too much, the auditors found. For 8,000 acres of St. Joe-owned land on the Wacissa River, the state paid $16.3-million. That was about $1-million less than the higher of the two appraised values and $1-million more than the lower one.

But the auditors noted those appraisals included the possibility of residential use without considering that the property is nearly inaccessible and that almost three-fourths of it is swamp.

Another purchase criticized by the auditors was 371 acres in Liberty County the governor and Cabinet spent $680,000 to buy in January 2001 from St. Joe and to add to Torreya State Park.

The appraiser DEP hired said "rural acreage is currently in a state of very high demand, driven by buyers who are acquiring large acreage tracts within easy commuting distance of major metropolitan communities," the auditors said.

"The appraiser made this statement concerning demand without providing any market evidence," the auditors said. ". . . Elsewhere in the report, the appraiser stated that the county in which the property is located is 'a sparsely populated area that is experiencing moderate to slow growth at best.' "

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright