Thank you for the informative and balanced article in last Friday's Brandon Times. However, as a former county employee with detailed knowledge of the history of the agreement between Durant High School and the County Parks and Recreation Department, I would like to offer some additional information.
The entire Alderman's Ford Preserve has always been available for all students and the general public for educational activities, as well as other "compatible" uses that will not damage the site's environmental resources. This includes hiking, horseback riding and canoeing. In fact, virtually all of the approximately 30 newly acquired preserve sites, almost 40,000 acres scattered throughout Hillsborough County, are open to the public for exploration on foot during daylight hours.
Some sites, like the Alderman's Ford Preserve, are adjacent to schools and are regularly used for educational field trips.
What makes the situation with Durant different is the nature of the school's request. Initially, the agriculture program staff sought to graze cattle and cut hay in an area that was undergoing native habitat restoration. Since the proposed uses would have obviously conflicted with the county's management objectives, the request was denied.
The county did, however, make a very generous counter offer. Not only did the school get to use 23 acres of the preserve next to the school, the county also offered a nearby, 200-acre parcel for use on an interim basis.
The county proposed that, eventually, the restored area would be made available for low-density cattle grazing. The County Commission and the School Board both seemed to be satisfied with this arrangement, outlined in a formal agreement approved several years ago. Unfortunately, Dover nurseryman Roy Davis was not.
Davis, then a member of the Parks and Recreation Department's advisory board, objected strongly to restoring native habitat as a "waste of productive land." The agreement was approved over his objections.
As stated in the Times article, the agreement not only provides formal approval for certain uses of the preserve, it also outlines a cooperative effort to expedite the restoration of the site on a faster schedule than would otherwise occur.
When the restoration effort fell behind schedule, Davis accused the county of deliberately delaying and obstructing implementation of the agreement. He demanded that the school immediately be allowed to use the entire site for cattle grazing and hay cutting.
Unfortunately, Ed Radice, then director of the Parks Department, decided that Davis was right and ordered his staff to abandon the original plan for site restoration and management. Radice also opted to give the school a greatly enlarged area to use for grazing cattle, even though by then the agricultural staff had moved all of their cattle to the new, 200-acre site and did not need additional land. If more cattle had been placed on the preserve, it would have reversed more than 10 years of restoration progress.
Fortunately, during all this local maneuvering, ownership of the entire 1,000 acres of the Alderman's Ford Preserve was transferred from Hillsborough County to the state of Florida. The end result: Management decisions at the local level now need to be reviewed and approved at the state level.
We can only hope that this results in those decisions being made in a slightly more rational, scientific atmosphere, less subject to the rantings of anti-preservation crusaders.
