Miscalculating financial and environmental risk and Miami International Airport... by gimleteye

The Miami Herald noted our blog and post on the Everglades Jetport controversy in today's front page, top of the fold story by Curtis Morgan:

The county commission was scheduled to take up the question of rock mining, oil drilling, or otherwise exploiting property owned by the county in the middle of Big Cypress National Preserve in order to pay down debt incurred by the expansion of Miami International Airport.

A decade ago, I lead the campaign to stop the conversion of the Homestead Air Force Base into a major "reliever" airport for Miami International; a deal memorialized as another scheme gone awry by the same unreformable majority of the county commission whose principals sit on the dais today. The public was told-- hyped by the misinformation generated by economists and forecasters and the engineering cartel hired by political insiders who had reconstituted from the board of directors of the Latin Builders Association--that even with the expansion of Miami International, that our economy could not survive without more capacity from a new airport at Homestead.

It is exactly the kind of miscalculation of risk that motivated the citizens of Florida and Miami-Dade, forty years ago, to stop the expansion of suburbia into the Everglades through a nonsensical scheme to put the world's largest airport in the middle of the Everglades. Stopping the Everglades Jetport motivated Marjory Stoneman Douglas-- author of "River of Grass"-- to join other civic leaders in founding Friends of the Everglades (I am conservation chair of that organization). The Everglades Jetport controversy engaged politics in the United States, and the mainstream media, all the way to the White House. It seems incredible to me that the Miami Dade County Commission could send us back to plow over all that old history.

One thing that environmentalists have learned: when it comes to money and the law and the environment, the imperative of money usually wins, no matter the risk. The waste of resources-- both human and financial and of natural resources, too-- is nothing short of amazing. Yet, some profit. The lobbyists cheer another cause to gin fees from. The engineers fill the hours of planners emptied by the housing market bust. The county commissioners see opportunities "expanding the tax base". This is how the game is played.

Maybe I will go back and retrieve the statistics used by Miami Dade Aviation on passenger landings to plead for the Homestead Air Force Base with the county commission. Or, maybe, the media will go back and review just how did the cost-overruns of the MIA expansion mushroom into the billions, and what were the precise terms that benefited the group of lobbyists who incorporated in order to "consult" the billion dollar expansion. One might also ask if any of those lobbyists are also land speculators at the edge of the Everglades and would any of them stand to profit through any expansion of commercial or recreational uses into the lands of the Everglades Jetport. Honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up.