Parks plan shelved, but DeSantis needs to kill it

By the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board

The thousands of Floridians who made themselves heard have saved Florida’s state parks, if only for this year, from the golf courses, hotels and pickleball courts that Gov. Ron DeSantis had in store for nine of them.

Glory be to the people. Public opinion still has real power. Advocacy still matters. But it’s no time to let up.

It took the governor eight days to react to immense public criticism. DeSantis finally called a pause with an unpersuasive attempt to disown the scheme in words that made clear that it’s still not dead.

“A lot of that stuff was just half-baked and it was not ready for prime time,” DeSantis said in Winter Haven Wednesday. “This is something that was leaked. It was not approved by me.”

With his typical gracelessness, he blamed the furor on a “left-wing group,” by which he apparently meant Audubon Florida. Alerted by a tip from inside the agency, it was among the first to sound alarms over what the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) planned to rush through for him.

Ignoring our own history

DeSantis, 45, is too young to remember how Republicans, including Gov. Claude Kirk and his adviser, Nathaniel Reed of Hobe Sound, were in the vanguard of the bipartisan environmental crusade that took hold in Florida in the 1960s and 1970s.

That’s when the seeds of the nation’s finest state park system were planted, when Florida began to protect forests, wetlands, beaches and coastlines from rapacious development.

Many Republicans still hold those values dear, so DeSantis should be careful about whom he calls “left-wing.”

Republicans across Florida joined the universal clamor against his park plan, helping to doom its survival — for now.

Among them was state Sen. Gayle Harrell, R-Stuart, who said she will file legislation in the 2025 session to protect the parks from such “misguided ideas.” She was one of those who protested at Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Hobe Sound.

A drawing board for what?

New legislation is necessary because DeSantis made it clear that the park scheme is lying low while he waits for the clamor to subside.

He said the DEP is “going back to the drawing board.” A drawing board? For what?

It’s outrageous that cutting down a scrub-jay habitat for an 18-hole golf course would be an improvement, or to suggest that pickleball courts would improve the peaceful ambience of a nature walk or a pristine lake.

Harrell says she will make clear in the law that recreation in state parks must respect the objectives of preserving or restoring their natural origins, to protect them for future generations.

“We need to do what we can to make sure that we’re using each park for the best purpose,” Harrell told the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board.

Florida’s governor seems distressingly unfamiliar with the park system. His office said that “it’s high time we made public lands more accessible to the public.”

A four-time champion

More accessible? There are 175 parks, memorials and preserves in America’s only state park system that has been voted the nation’s best four times. They’re in every part of the state and in nearly every county. Two targeted parks are so popular that the gates are sometimes closed — in the summer.

Florida law requires its parks to be “compatible with the conservation and protection of public lands.” It specifies 15 appropriate activities such as fishing, camping and boating, but with a glaring “not limited to” loophole that Harrell’s legislation must close.

The next session begins in March, but committees start meeting in January. Harrell is vice chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Natural Resources.

Among the questions legislators should ask:

• How did the plan swell from a proposal affecting just one park to a scheme aimed at nine of them?
• Why did DeSantis and the Cabinet agree without discussion on June 12 to swap 324 acres of Florida Wildlife Corridor in the Withlacoochee State Forest for 861 acres of timberland in Levy County? The deal benefits a private company’s proposed golf course.
• Is it too easy to declare that state land is no longer needed for conservation? That was the pretext for the June 12 vote. This isn’t the first time that issue has come up.

Two Cabinet members who approved that land swap, Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson and Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, are loud critics of the park plan.

But it’s hard to discern a difference between the two. Either way, trees would be cut down for the sake of golf, and one seems as dubious as the other. Floridians, keep up the pressure.

This opinion piece was originally published by the Sun Sentinel, which is a media partner of The Invading Sea. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee.

If you are interested in submitting an opinion piece to The Invading Sea, email Editor Nathan Crabbe at ncrabbe@fau.edu. Sign up for The Invading Sea newsletter by visiting here.