The state has offered Jesse James Hardy millions of dollars for his property, which would be returned to its natural state as a flooded plain.
By Associated Press
Published August 29, 2004
NAPLES, Fla. - State environmental officials moved to buy Everglades property from a man who has refused to sell the land to make way for an environmental restoration project, but said they continued to negotiate for another solution.
The state Department of Environmental Protection filed papers Friday in state court in Naples to start eminent domain proceedings against landowner Jesse James Hardy. The law allows government to force people to sell private land for a public purpose.
Hardy, a 68-year-old disabled Navy veteran, bought 160 remote acres in 1976 and lives in a wooden house he built himself. The state has unsuccessfully tried to buy the land from Hardy for years, making escalating offers reaching into the millions of dollars.
Restoring the Everglades means turning Hardy's land back into its natural state as a flooded plain, before developers backfilled, dredged and carved canals through an ecosystem that once stretched uninterrupted from a chain of lakes near Orlando to the Florida Bay.
Ernie Barnett, the state's director of ecosystem restoration, said Friday's filing doesn't mean the end of negotiations with Hardy, just that the department had to meet a deadline for filing the paperwork.
In May, Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet gave the department the authority to file the case against Hardy by waiving its normal ban on using eminent domain against homesteaded landowners. That authority runs out Tuesday.
"We wanted to ensure that that deadline didn't come and go," Barnett said. "We're beating the bushes for a whole bunch of alternatives we might do to get an amicable solution."
Hardy said he was disappointed by Friday's move.
"If this is what they wanted to do, let them go ahead and do it," Hardy said.
