How things work in Florida, by gimleteye

Some of you will remember the controversial plan to turn over the Homestead Air Force Base to a group of politically connected insiders in Miami-Dade County, and the scrambling for political advantage that stretched all the way to the White House. There can be a lot of profit in turbulence, and that is especially true when it comes to siting big infrastructure projects in wetlands. Think Scripps, rock mining, zero lot line housing.

Well another version of an airport battle is unspooling, right now, on the order of promises made by former Governor Jeb Bush to friends and allies at the St. Joe Company--a publicly traded corporation that is one of the largest land owners in Florida with its own deep connections to Miami.

Diane Roberts captures the essence in a weekend editorial that appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat .

Curious that this appealing editorial tone of Ms. Roberts never appears on The Miami Herald editorial page, except through Carl Hiaasen's infrequent diatribes.

St. Joe's flight plan: Buckle up, there's turbulence ahead

By Diane Roberts
MY VIEW

"Florida is like Lewis Carroll's Looking-Glass Land, a place where up
is down, where ignorance is strength, where we must destroy this
environment in order to save it. So when the Army Corps of Engineers,
whose job it is to protect America's wetlands, grants a permit for the
obliteration of thousands of acres of wetlands for an unnecessary and
unwanted new Panama City airport, I guess that's looking-glass logic.


Panama City already has an airport, conveniently located in Panama
City. The argument for replacing it - the public argument, that is -
rests on the claim that the runway is too short (thus unsafe); never
mind that, according to the FAA, 40 percent of the nation's airports
have this same problem. Yet they are not all rushing to build new
airports, especially in ecologically fragile areas.

The local captains of capitalism insist that the people of Bay County
are clamoring for a facility bigger than Tampa International. But
Panama City runs exactly 13 flights a day, down from a high of 22 in
2001. The new multimillion-dollar terminal is quiet as an Alabama
liquor store on Sunday, and the control tower shuts down at 10 p.m.

There's also the inconvenient fact that, when Bay County citizens had
a chance to vote in a nonbinding referendum in 2004, they rejected the
new airport. Curiouser and curiouser. What part of NO do the allegedly
democracy-loving Chamber of Commerce types not understand?

Now, a suspicious person might wonder what's really going down on the
other side of the mirror. If I tell you that the St. Joe Company
donated the 4,000 acres for the replacement airport - a parcel 30
miles away from the populace it purports to serve, but coincidentally
smack in the middle of land St. Joe wants to develop - does that bring
the thing into focus?

It gets weirder: The outfit overseeing the building of the airport (if
it gets past a slew of lawsuits) is Kellogg, Brown and Root, raiders
of the public purse. In Iraq, KBR was handed no-bid "rebuilding"
contracts the way guys at a frat party hand beers to girls. In the
Balkans, it charged $85.98 each for sheets of plywood that ought to go
for 14 bucks, according to the watchdog CorpWatch. It also agreed to
pay $2 million in a suit alleging that it improperly charged the
government for services.

So the Army Corps of Engineers, the people whose shoddy levee-building
brought you the Katrina floods, is enabling KBR to land us with a
behemoth of an airport to benefit St. Joe, the company that brought
you Disneyfied developments such as SouthWood. As for the old Panama
City airportÐwaterfront property, by the way - it's due to be sold to
a real estate developer from Pittsburgh.

I hear Jeb Bush laughing in the background.

The cream of the jest is that you, the citizens of Florida, will pay
for it: about $300 million at first, then much, much more as the St.
Joe Company turns its vast acreage in West Florida into ersatz
villages for rich folks dreaming of a bucolic existence with a freeway
and a megamall nearby.

St. Joe., its political minions and the Bay County Chamber
cheerleaders fall all over themselves insisting that, as the airport
referendum falsely claimed, this will magically happen "at no cost to
taxpayers." It's money from governmental agencies, they say.

But the FAA and the DOT don't get their appropriations from bake sales
and raffles. You will shell out for new roads, new water systems,
sewer and power services. You are the cash cow for this almighty
boondoggle.

And what will Florida get in return for this lavish corporate welfare?
The new airport and surrounding development will kill more than 10,000
acres of springs, feeder creeks and deep swamps that keep West Bay a
vibrant estuarine ecosystem. The wetlands that act as a storm water
filtering system will be wiped out.

But hey, ever since the announcement of the Corps permit, St. Joe
share prices have gone up. Stockholders are happy. So everything's
fine. Big is good; concrete is beautiful. " 'The question is,' said
Humpty-Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.' "

Diane Roberts is a Florida native and author of "Dream State." She
teaches creative writing at Florida State University. Contact her at
droberts@english.fsu.edu.