Florida lawmakers try to move aquatic preserve’s boundary to benefit developer – Florida Phoenix

Hollywood is famous for its ability to spin colorful worlds of wild fantasy. Elves and dwarves fight over jewelry in “The Lord of the Rings”! Drug addicts ride giant worms in “Dune”! Old dudes battle with big flashlights in “Star Wars”!

But nothing compares to the unbelievable flights of fancy spun by our fine Florida Legislature. Protecting Confederate monuments is saving history while we ban history books! Rainbow flags are a bigger threat to our children than guns! Lots of plastic litter is better for business than a clean landscape!

Over the weekend, I heard about one that was new to me. It’s a bill to cut a chunk out of one of the state’s aquatic preserves. It’s being pushed as a way to help hurricane victims by clearing up an error on an old map. Actually, it’s being done for the benefit of a developer.

“It’s not a clarification,” said James Douglass, a marine science professor at Florida Gulf Coast University. “It’s a steal.”

The bill in question is SB 1210, sponsored by Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Landgrab. As it turns out, Martin’s also the sponsor of the bills to protect Rebel monuments, ban Pride flags, and promote plastic litter. He may be a Fort Myers lawyer by trade, but I think he missed his true calling as a screenwriter. The man clearly has enough imagination for a dozen George Lucases!

I got an earful about Martin’s bill and its House companion, HB 957, from a variety of outraged Southwest Florida environmental advocates. They view it as an attack on one of their area’s most precious natural assets, Estero Bay — a sneak attack, in fact.

“None of us knew what was going on,” said Terry Cain, president of the Estero Bay Buddies, an environmental nonprofit focused on that estuary. “We didn’t have any explanation for what was happening.”

The first preserve

The 13,000-acre Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve, created in 1966, isn’t just any old aquatic preserve. It was the first of Florida’s 42 aquatic preserves.

“It was the first aquatic preserve in the world, and it formed the model for all the rest that would follow,” said Jim Beever, a retired biologist and planner who once headed the Estero Bay Agency on Bay Management.

Back then, the water was so clear, anglers said, that you could drop in a coin and when it landed on the bottom, you could tell if it was heads or tails. The fishing was diverse and the catches plentiful.

Then, in the 1950s, along came a developer who wanted to turn the beautiful bay into a city of thousands of people. The plan called for walling off 18 miles of the coastline and dumping in 17 million cubic yards of fill. So long to the clear water and the tasty fish.

An avid Fort Myers angler named Bill Mellor, a square-jawed World War II veteran, didn’t like the idea of ruining such a pristine and productive waterway just for someone to make a profit. He organized a group called the Lee County Conservation Association to save Estero Bay.

Mellor’s organization became so popular that more than half the county’s voters joined. They could see the damage being done to other bays around the state and didn’t want that to happen in their own back yard.

They fought for eight years and, according to the Fort Myers News-Press, “along the way, Mellor’s phone was tapped and he gathered a handful of death threats.” Opponents hurled insults at them, like “Communist” — a powerful accusation in the ’50s and early ’60s.

But they won, thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court precedent from the 1800s that said any land below the tide line belongs to the public, not a private owner. That blocked any attempt at filling it in. The Legislature then passed a bill to create the preserve.

“The Legislature listened to the citizens,” Beever said. (Boy, how times have changed!)

Estero Bay’s preserve worked so well that in 1975 lawmakers passed a second bill to establish other preserves around the state. Our aquatic preserve system now protects about 2.2 million watery acres.

By sparing Estero Bay, Mellor and his fellow advocates made sure it would be one Florida waterway where you can still find lots of mangroves and seagrass beds, with abundant marine and bird life all around.

“For years, everything had been operating just fine,” Beever told me.

And then, last fall, came the first inkling of trouble.

As fictional as the Skywalker saga

Maybe it’s because I’ve been a Florida journalist for such a long time, but it seems to me that whenever people try to hide what they’re up to, what they’re up to is no good.

Everyone I talked to about Estero Bay said the first clue there would be an attack on the preserve arrived in November. That’s when they saw a cryptic public notice in the Fort Myers News Press.

“Notice is hereby given,” it said, “of intent to apply to the Florida Legislature, in the 2024 regular or any special or extended legislative sessions, for passage of an act relating to aquatic preserves, amending Chapter 75-172 or Section 258.39(28), Florida Statutes, relating to the boundaries of the Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve.”

That was it. A big wad of gobbledygook with no specifics about what sort of change there would be or who would be pursuing it.

“No one knew what it was,” said Nicole Johnson of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.

Phone calls and emails to the region’s lawmakers went unanswered, and other elected officials professed ignorance.

The Lee County legislative delegation held not one but two public meetings to talk about their bills for the coming session. The boundary of the Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve didn’t come up once. The lawmakers’ intentions remained hidden.

“It seems blatantly obvious that they were trying to sneak this through before anybody caught on,” said Charlie Whitehead, former president of the Fort Myers Beach Area Civic Association.

But then, just after New Year’s Day, Martin and Rep. Adam Botana of Bonita Springs filed the bills that revealed the plot at last..

“This cuts 255 acres out of the aquatic preserve,” said Cain. She called that large of an amputation “radical.”

But Martin, in two Senate committee hearings, said it was just a correction to a teeny-tiny mapping mistake.

“This [area] was never intended to be part of the aquatic preserve,” Martin told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Agriculture, Environment, and General Government last week. “This fixes that glitch.”

He told them the “glitch” was hurting shrimpers on San Carlos Island. The shrimpers there boast of being the Gulf of Mexico’s largest commercial fishing fleet. Because of the preserve rules, they couldn’t rebuild the docks that had been wrecked by Hurricane Ian, he told his fellow senators.

That’s why those poor storm victims needed the Legislature’s help, he explained. By taking their little sliver of the bay out of the preserve, the lawmakers could help these poor commercial fishermen rebuild their multi-generational livelihood.

Sen. Martin spun a similarly sad tale to the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee last month. He didn’t hand out hankies to committee members, but that was about all he didn’t do as he labored to emphasize the purity of his intentions.

Because he pitched his bill as a mundane matter to help storm victims, neither committee spent more than five minutes on it and everyone in both parties voted for it. Although Botana’s bill has stalled, Martin’s has just one more committee stop before it reaches the Senate floor.

There’s one problem with Martin’s story to his fellow senators: It’s as fictional as the saga of the Skywalkers.

“It’s just blatantly false,” Whitehead said. “I hate to call the man a liar, but he’s a liar.”

No glitch at all

Let’s start with what the bill will actually do to the preserve.

According to the Estero Bay Buddies, the proposed exemption includes not only the commercial docks Martin mentioned “but the waters and seagrasses of Matanzas Pass, the mangrove forest areas of the west end of San Carlos Island, the entire northern shoreline of San Carlos Island, and the waters, seagrasses, and mangrove islands of Hurricane Bay. All these submerged resources that have been afforded protection for over 58 years will lose that protection.”

You can see why Cain called it “radical.”

The rules of the preserve don’t prevent dock repairs for the shrimpers or even maintenance dredging of the channel they use, Cain told me. They can still obtain the state permits they need to fix what the hurricane broke, she said.

As for Martin’s claim that old maps show that area was never intended to be part of the preserve: That’s what’s technically known as a load of hooey. If Martin was Pinocchio, his nose would be five feet long.

As the son of a land surveyor, I know a little something about land. What counts is what’s in the legal description of the property.

The area that Martin wants to cut out has been included in the legal description of the preserve since its creation in 1966, according to the Estero Bay Buddies. If it was intended to be excluded from the preserve, as Martin claimed, it would not have been mentioned in the legal description. There was no glitch that needed fixing.

“The written legal description is very clear,” Cain told me.

The secrecy around Martin’s and Botana’s bills was a dead giveaway that the lawmakers were pulling a fast one, Whitehead said.

“If it was legitimately fixing a glitch, then why not vet it through all the public hearings?” he said. “Let all the environmental groups have a chance to comment on it. Instead, they tried to sneak it through.”

So, what’s really going on here?

A favor for a developer, of course.

An award for storytelling

The News-Press figured this out before I did. It reported that there was a planned 300-slip marina project on San Carlos Island called Bay Harbor Marina Village LLC that would be the real beneficiary of the Botana and Martin bills.

To make that marina work, Bay Harbor wants to dredge a sizeable channel through an area that’s been protected for five decades. Among other things, such a channel would likely destroy a large sandbar that’s known as a roosting spot for lots of seabirds.

“They want to dredge it so people can get their yachts in,” said FGCU biology professor Nora Demers, who told me she likes to watch the wildlife gather on the sandbar.

Such a major dredging project would be devastating not just to the sandbar but to the preserve as a whole, Douglass told me. It would affect the bay’s water quality, the mangroves, the seagrass beds, and the marine life that depends on all of those factors.

Not even the part of Martin’s story about the hurricane is accurate. This marina project started a couple of years before Hurricane Ian hit, according to James Ink, an engineer who’s been working on the project.

“It’s all about the dredging and the ability for the dredging to occur,” Ink told me. “It’s damn near impossible to [get a] permit [for] a dredging project in an aquatic preserve.”

Ink said he could see why a lot of people felt blindsided by the attempt to change the preserve boundaries, but that wasn’t his decision. He recommended talking to Martin and Botana about why they chose to make an end run around the public.

I tried to reach both of them, but they were apparently playing another round of legislative hide-and-seek and didn’t respond.

Their attempt to move the Estero Bay preserve’s boundaries to accommodate a developer is indicative of what that whole southwestern region is going through right now, Demers said.

“We’re at a fork in the road to determine how we recover from the hurricane,” she told me.

The barrier islands can rebuild the way they were or developers can turn them into overpriced concrete condo and hotel canyons that working people like the shrimpers can’t afford, she explained.

This is just another example of how the word “preserve” in Florida doesn’t mean what Mr. Webster’s dictionary says it means. We declare some lovely parcel like Serenova, Split Oak Forest, or Point Washington to be an important preserve. But as soon as some developer needs a piece of it, the “preserve” isn’t preserved anymore.

As for Sen. Martin, if he worked in Hollywood, I’m sure he’d be vying for an Oscar for best screenplay. I think someone should create a similar award to salute his creative storytelling abilities in his current job. How much would it cost for a bust of Pinocchio with an adjustable nose?