Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Paving the way for Everglades annihilation

By DIANE ROBERTS
Published July 1, 2005

This is a Florida land story, so don't expect it to end well - or even to make sense.

The state is evicting Jesse James Hardy from Big Cypress Swamp: him and his rusted trucks and his propane tanks and his fishing poles. He'd been living in the western Everglades for 29 years, off the grid and pretty much off the map. The state says his rock-mining business impedes progress in the $9-billion restoration of the River of Grass.

Meanwhile, on the eastern side of the Glades, the state is doing its damnedest to open up 10,000-15,000 acres to development of epidemic proportions. There will be super Targets and super Wal-Marts, gated communities and McMansions on land vital to Everglades restoration, lands at the headwaters of the wild Loxahatchee, one of America's last free-flowing subtropical rivers.

In 2003, Jeb Bush cut a secret deal with the Scripps Institute. He'd grease their biomedical wheels with $370-million in public money. You'd think Scripps would build its tech wonderland in Miami or Gainesville or Tampa, with their medical research facilities, universities, pre-existing roads, restaurants, working sewer systems. If you were a scientist, wouldn't you want to live where you could get a decent plate of sushi?

But no. Remember that the governor is a developer. To him, beaches look better with condos; wetlands look better paved. He decreed that Scripps should spring up in the hinterlands of Palm Beach County, at Mecca Farms, a remote 2,000-acre ex-orange grove full of nada. Never fear: The Palm Beach County Commission is subsidizing Scripps to the tune of $500-million, building roads, sewers and waterlines way out yonder, literally paving the way for high-density development on top of the Everglades.

That would be the same Everglades which is costing us $9-billion to fix damage done by development.

"It's like a Carl Hiaasen novel," sighs Janet Bowman, legal director of 1,000 Friends of Florida.

Scripps is another in a long line of Florida land scams, a handsome, taxpayer-funded Trojan Horse in whose sleek belly lurks an army of real estate entrepreneurs who can't believe their luck. They've got an oblivious public, a venal County Commission who has decided that violating the Growth Management Act is okay if the money's big enough, and a governor impatient with participatory democracy - there was no public input into the selection of the Scripps site.

"Having Scripps is fine with us," says Manley Fuller, president of the Florida Wildlife Federation, "It's just in the wrong place. The Mecca site promotes sprawl and exacerbates problems in the conservation area."

That's an understatement. Mecca would look more like a lake than a "farm" if not for a pump which holds the water table 4.5 feet below what it wants to be. Indeed, the South Florida Water Management District and the county agreed that the area should be used for Everglades water conservation. Or they did until the Scripps deal came along. The Florida Wildlife Federation, 1,000 Friends and others who care about the Glades suggest that Scripps go up at the Briger Tract site, 620 acres (more than Scripps says it needs) not far from Florida Atlantic University. But the governor insists on having his way.

Here's why: It isn't just Mecca Farms. The 4,800-acre Vavrus Ranch next door is also due to be developed, piggybacking on that taxpayer-funded infrastructure. The county bought the Loxahatchee Slough with conservation money but now plans to put a six-laned highway through it. A piece of the Corbett Wildlife Management Area has been requisitioned for an electrical substation. And the Fanjul family, the Mister Bigs of Big Sugar, would like to make more of the Everglades Agricultural Area - 700,000 acres - available for development. "The dominoes are falling," says Bowman.

Whatever harm Hardy did to the Everglades pales in comparison to the devastation tens of thousands of new people with new roads and new houses will bring - think of all those sewers, all those lawns with all that fertilizer and insecticide, all that runoff.

Jesse James Hardy will be all right: He got $4-million for his 160 acres. The developers will be all right: Even if a judge forces them to tear up their roads and tear down their buildings (as is happening in the wetland restoration projects on the other side of the Glades), they'll always find somewhere to put up a gated community. Jeb Bush will be all right: Developers will either welcome him back into the brotherhood of the bulldozer or contribute big-time to his presidential campaign.

The Everglades, on the other hand - well, maybe we can save enough to make a theme park and give the Yankees air boat rides in the last few acres of saw grass.

Diane Roberts is author of Dream State, a book about Florida.

[Last modified July 1, 2005, 10:00:05]