by Robert “Hutch” Hutchinson
A nearly secret proposal to build golf courses, hotels, and recreational facilities in nine state parks was exposed by a whistleblower within Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The subsequent uproar and protests caused quick backpedaling by state officials, who then began pointing the fingers at anybody else. One long-time DEP employee told me there was no way that agency officials would have proposed these projects if the orders had not come from the highest levels of government. Fortunately, the fired state employee became a hero, and his GoFundMe campaign, which has raised over $200,000, provides a strong signal to other bureaucrats that doing the right thing shouldn’t damage them financially.
When the first Wild Spaces/Public Places referendum was being considered in Alachua County, it was during the Not-So-Great Recession in 2008. The Tea Party was in its ascendancy, and within that movement were vocal proponents for selling public parks and conservation lands. Florida’s Governor and numerous elected and appointed officials, some local, began working on this agenda.
This was dampening the enthusiasm for future land conservation efforts, and so our state-wide think tank on these issues, the Conservation Clinic associated with UF’s Law School, and staff from Alachua County and Alachua Conservation Trust, studied a range of options to permanently protect government owned lands from disposition or conversion to other uses. It turns out there is no way to absolutely ban the sale or conversion of public lands by their governing boards.
So we invented a tool that did the next best thing, and called it the “Registry of Protected Public Places.” Voters in Gainesville and Alachua County amended our charters to create it, and here’s how it works: Publicly owned lands are placed on this Registry after a super-majority vote of the Alachua County or Gainesville City commissions. Once on the Registry, the land cannot be sold, swapped, or converted to a non-conservation use without a prior vote of the electorate in a general election. There is no de minimus amount of land that is not subject to this provision, so before properties are listed, their future uses are carefully considered.
Today, numerous City and County properties are on their Registries of Protected Public Places. This extra level of protection should give everybody confidence that we will protect the investment in these lands for the long-term public interest.
State and federal conservation lands do not have this protection; they can be sold, swapped, or developed at the whim of elected or appointed officials. When the Florida Forever statewide constitutional amendment, to fund land conservation, passed nearly two decades ago, 3/4 of Florida voters approved it. This was not enough of a mandate to keep Gov. Rick Scott, and now DeSantis, from robbing the program every budget year, gutting the environmental agencies, and every so often coming up with bone-headed notions of developing or selling state parks and preserves.
What is less obvious is how the State Park and Water Management District staffs have been privatized by replacing government park rangers with contractors to do much of the land management work. Some do a good job, but many are mercenaries with little accountability.
It’s heartening to see the roaring pushback from Floridians who are fed up with the rape and pillage of our state parks. The real solution to this need for constant vigilance and repetitive fights is to replace our current crop of jugheads with responsible elected and appointed officials who share the values of the vast majority of their constituents which include protecting the wild heart of Florida. test
Robert Hutchinson is a retired land trust director and former Alachua County Commissioner.