Surfrider protests: use it, or, lose it, by gimleteye

As Americans become more urbanized, and especially more bound indoors by the internet, it is harder to persuade people to invest in time spent outdoors-- recreating or in the wilderness, hunting or fishing or bird watching. That was a story on NBC Nightly News a few days ago, but it has to be familiar to anyone who has ever considered why it is so hard for Miami-Dade County and Miami's cities to protect wetlands, water quality, beaches, and the Everglades.

These "amenities" are losing constituents at a time that constituents for the environment are more important than ever. (It is great news to hear about the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation giving $200 million to the arts, as in this AM's paper, but has the foundation ever given a dollar to the Everglades? Not a cent.)

On the other side of the environment are lobbyists like Ron Book, who represents the City of Bal Harbor and Miami Dade County, among a long list of clients whose main concern about the environment is that it doesn't screw up their development plans.

So it was heartening to read that 200 surfers showed up on the causeway over Haulover Inlet last Saturday, protesting the failure of Miami Dade County to require that the City of Bal Harbor provide required public access to the beaches surfers use immediately to the south of the jetty.

That is more people than any south Florida environmental group has been able to muster at a rally lately. (Most groups are pinned down in what one observer trenchantly called, the "environmental industrial complex".)

I hope the surfers and their organization, Surfrider Foundation, keep up the protests. For more on the issue, read on:

In 2004, at the height of the housing bubble and construction bubble, the City of Bal Harbor allowed one of the prime institgators of overdevelopment in Florida, WCI Communities -- a company whose chairman, Al Hoffman, had been finance chair of both Jeb Bush and George W. Bush political campaigns-- to commandeer the only public parking lot providing access to the surfer's beach.

That was four years ago.

To allow another condo complex to rise, the City of Bal Harbor and local police began to push citizens off the parking lot, preventing surfers from accessing the beach. There are innumerable cases where surfers' vehicles were ticketed heavily while construction trade vehicles and their work products were allowed to indefinitely park on the site without penalty.

Miami Dade Department of Environmental Protection (DERM) is falling down on the job. Now DERM would say, look-- we have to weigh priorities, we have billions of dollars in environmental initiatives we have to monitor and you're bringing me the problem of a parking lot: which is more important?

But the devil is always in the details, and in this particular case, the absence of attention by DERM shows that it is truly an agency that cares more about servicing the development industry than the taxpayers who fund its operations.

The Village Council of Bal Harbor is a disaster: its employees have colluded with the developer and against the issue of preserving beach access even through a construction period. WCI? One of the main villains in the housing market implosion in Florida, and, nationally by extension of its (former) political influence.

It turns out that guaranteeing public access to the beach is also a requirement of federal law, applying to beach renourishment projects that are the lifeblood of tourism and real estate throughout the beaches area.

In other words, the City of Bal Harbor--and likely Miami Dade County--is breaking the law.

But citizens pay the price: for parking, for unfunded infrastructure, for a building boom that made a few WCI executives rich and tossed the company in the salad-bowl of insolvency.

The bottom line: what Bal Harbor is doing, sucks. Congratulations for the surfers for becoming activists and recognize that it is going to take a whole lot more protesting to tip the pendulum anything close to the promise of democracy: use it, or lose it.