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Special report: Vanishing wetlands

In Taylor County, it's growth vs. seagrass

To make his condo and marina project in the Big Bend region work, a developer says, he needs to dredge a channel through a seagrass preserve.

By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published June 5, 2006

	[Times photos: Bob Croslin]
	Rick Causey bought his stilt house in Dekle Beach five years ago. He worries that the proposed condominium and marina project would destroy the local ecosystem and recently helped collect signatures against it.
	A great egret hunts in the Gulf of Mexico off Dekle Beach. Taylor County has 19,000 residents; Pruitt’s condo development would bring in 7,000 more.

DEKLE BEACH -- On a stretch of Florida coastline so empty that the Air Force once proposed using it as a bombing range, a prominent St. Petersburg surgeon and a Treasure Island developer with a checkered past want to build a marina and condominium project that would forever change the state’s Big Bend area.

As part of the new Magnolia Bay Marina and Resort, Dr. J. Crayton Pruitt Sr. and Chuck Olson want to build enough condominiums to add 7,000 residents to Taylor County.

They also want to build a hotel, a helicopter landing pad, a public aquarium, a marine science laboratory and 280,000 square feet of commercial space — all on 500 acres of swamp and salt marsh that the locals call Boggy Bay. The golf course and RV park would come later.

“I think it’s going to be a neat thing for Taylor County,” said Pruitt, 74, who has turned a third-floor office in St. Petersburg’s Bayfront Tower into the development’s command center.

To make the marina a success, though, Pruitt and Olson say they must dredge a 7-foot-deep channel 2 miles long and 100 feet wide through the Big Bend Seagrass Aquatic Preserve, the state’s largest aquatic preserve and one of the largest stretches of uninterrupted sea grass in North America.

“We have to have that channel,” Pruitt said. Unless the marina has easy access to the Gulf of Mexico, the development doesn’t work.

State law says that aquatic preserves are supposed to be “set aside forever” for the “benefit of future generations,” Big Bend preserve manager Melissa Charbonneau said in a letter about the project. Destroying 105 acres of coastal wetlands and 36 acres of seagrass in the preserve doesn’t benefit future generations, she wrote.

Living in the Big Bend seagrass beds is Florida’s last big, stable population of bay scallops. The scallops are so plentiful off Dekle Beach that every summer, starting July 1, boaters from across the South swarm down to harvest them.

Cars line up for more than a mile from the two public ramps. Launching a boat can require hours of waiting.

Building a marina with 374 wet slips, dry storage for 499 more boats and a public ramp that can handle up to 300 vessels a day would make access to the Gulf of Mexico far easier, Pruitt said. The 7-foot-deep channel also would keep the boats away from the seagrass, he said.

But marine biologist Bill Arnold of the state Fish and Wildlife Research Institute said the Magnolia Bay proposal would jeopardize the very thing that draws so many people to the area. It would destroy the scallops’ habitat, disrupt the natural flow of water in the preserve and funnel in polluted stormwater runoff, Arnold said.

“It’s sort of ironic that they’ve proposed a development that would seriously threaten the scallop population, but they’re using access to the scallops as justification for it,” he said. “That’s a little frustrating to me.”

Not counting the scallopers, 19,000 people occupy the 1,042 square miles of Taylor County. That’s roughly 18 people per square mile. By contrast, Pinellas County has more than 3,000 people per square mile.

Because Taylor County is so empty, two years ago the Air Force sought to use some 500,000 acres of it as a bombing range. But on a straw ballot, more than 75 percent of Taylor County voters rejected the idea, and the businessmen pushing it went to prison for defrauding their investors.

So Taylor County has remained quiet. One afternoon last week, the only sounds on the future marina site were the wind riffling through the Spartina and needle rush, the cry of a passing osprey and the scuttling of thousands of fiddler crabs as they scurried across the mud flats.

The idea of transforming the site into a mecca for thousands of new residents and visitors is mind-boggling, said Dekle Beach resident Rick Causey, a retired soil scientist from Georgia who bought his stilt house in Dekle Beach five years ago. He opposes the project.

Dekle Beach used to be twice as big as it is now. Seventy houses lined the waterfront in 1993 when the No-Name Storm hit Florida’s coast with a massive tidal surge. Fifty-seven houses were destroyed. Of the 44 people killed by the storm statewide, 10 were killed in Dekle Beach.

In 1996, a timber buyer called Pruitt to say he had some coastal land in Taylor County that was just too pretty to cut. Pruitt drove up the next day and bought more than 3,000 acres.

As a doctor, Pruitt pioneered a type of stroke prevention treatment, inventing a shunt that made him a fortune. This year, he donated $10-million to the University of Florida.

When he began working on plans to develop his Taylor County land three years ago, he hired Treasure Island developer Chuck Olson. Olson, 61, touted his experience developing a subdivision in Oldsmar called the Estuary at Mobbly Bay.

But Pruitt said he did not know until a reporter told him last week that the Oldsmar development wound up mired in lawsuits. Olson’s partners in the venture, Fred Bullard and Van McNeel, blamed Olson for the problems and pushed him out.

“The project turned out very well, but not with him,’’ said McNeel, who with Bullard also developed the BayWalk shopping center in downtown St. Petersburg.

Pruitt said he also did not know until told by a reporter that in 1993 Olson pleaded no contest to a pair of felony charges, conspiracy to traffic in cocaine and attempted cocaine trafficking. He was sentenced to 10 years of probation but completed his time early.

“I have on occasion misjudged people,” Pruitt said. “I guess I should have done some due diligence on him.” But so far, Pruitt has been delighted with Olson’s work, and “I think he’s changed.”

Olson said he would respond only to written questions. In reply to an e-mail, Olson said he did tell Pruitt about his felony convictions. Olson also blamed the problems at the Oldsmar project on what he called misconduct by McNeel and his attorneys. He provided no details and did not respond to further e-mails.

Under Olson’s guidance, the Magnolia Bay project already has run into a few glitches. Last year, the Suwannee River Water Management District slapped a violation notice on the project because work crews began clearing trees without a permit.

Then, after Olson submitted a permit application, Pruitt said he was told that about 800 acres were below the mean high water line. Submerged land belongs to the state.

Pruitt hopes he will be allowed to count that as a donation to the state to make up for all the wetlands and seagrass beds he wants to wipe out.

Causey remains amazed that anyone would think to build a resort in such a hazardous spot. Last year during hurricane season, he said, 4 feet of water rose under his house.

***

The reaction to the Magnolia Bay project has been mixed. In a local newspaper advertisement two months ago, the county’s economic development director called it “a well-planned, environmentally sensitive and beautifully envisioned project.”

But groups such as 1,000 Friends of Florida, the Florida Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club oppose it. Recently, Causey and some friends stood at the Dekle Beach boat ramp and collected more than 200 signatures on an antimarina petition.

Turning Boggy Bay into Magnolia Bay will require lots of government officials to agree. Taylor County must change the rural zoning. The water district and the corps must permit wiping out the wetlands. And the governor  and Cabinet will have to approve the channel.

To help get those permits, Pruitt and Olson have hired a former director of the community planning division for the state Department of Community Affairs, a law firm headed by a onetime chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Tallahassee, and a lobbyist who once headed the state Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

“We’re not trying to sneak anything over on anybody,” Pruitt said. “We’re following all the rules.”

To persuade state and federal officials to approve the project, the developers are making an offer even they acknowledge would be difficult to pull off.

The biggest gap in the Big Bend Seagrass Aquatic Preserve is just off the mouth of the Fenholloway River, where 10 square miles of seagrass have been killed by pollution from the Buckeye pulp mill in Perry.

Pruitt and Olson have proposed taking the seagrass beds that would be destroyed by their channel and transplanting them to the bare spots at the mouth of the Fenholloway.

Charbonneau, the preserve manager, said transplanting seagrass has proved all but impossible. But Pruitt is hopeful.

“We realize that this is fraught with difficulty, and experience shows it may not work,” the surgeon said. “But we think it’s worth a try.”

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

[Last modified December 14, 2006, 18:26:18]