Jeb Bush, FPL Glades Power Plant, Ave Maria University, and Scripps by gimleteye

We have highlighted close connections between ex-Florida Governor Jeb Bush and production home builders, who formed his political base.

The Bush terms as governor coincided with the biggest housing boom in Florida history.

For Bush and campaign contributors, success was a mix of the incremental, depending on “streamlining” zoning and permitting in environmentally sensitive lands and water infrastructure for massive new growth, and big, bold initiatives to stimulate growth.

It is helpful to understand something about Florida’s geography to have a good picture of where Governor Bush and developers pushed Florida’s future growth.

Florida’s coastal property has been aggressively built-out with condominium developments. Along major highway infrastructure near the coasts, development has filled in, except along underutilized rail lines on the east coast.

For Jeb, the biggest challenge was planning for big new cities in Everglades wetlands owned by Big Sugar at the edges of Lake Okeechobee and in South Miami Dade County, outside the Urban Development Boundary, and in eastern Collier County in hundreds of thousands of flat and fertile acres ready to be new cities if only infrastructure can be provided and permits obtained.

In order for this to happen, Governor Bush had to make sure that water infrastructure was in place. It also meant ensuring that rules governing pollution did not prohibit the moving of dirty water from one section, or water body, to another.

This ordering of priorities was according to his belief that economic growth is the condition precedent for protecting the envrionment--a view that neatly accomodates massive campaign fund raising machinery as well.

Thus, the projects called Acceler8—a multi-billion dollar state investment that ordered priorities along the lines of water supply for growth, first, and the environment, second. Also, major litigation all the way to the US Supreme Court to ensure that the state government would not be liable for pollution from cities or agriculture into the Everglades.

But in addition to incremental steps reinforced by massive infrastructure priorities and in addition to litigation, Jeb Bush also pushed big developments in buffer lands near the Everglades that could be job attractors and satisfy the appetites of big developers and production home builders on a massive scale.

Along these lines, Jeb’s biggest disappointment was failing to establish the Scripps Institute in thousands of acres to the far western reaches of Palm Beach County. It was not for want of trying, or even, of suppressing science and agency staff who disobeyed manager's instructions to violate environmental laws.

After years of effort in 2006, environmental groups succeeded in litigation that stopped Scripps from the far western site called Mecca Farms, where it would have anchored massive new growth stretching toward sugar lands.

But one place that Jeb succeeded was the insertion of a faith-based community and educational institution at the edge of the Everglades in Collier County.

Over the weekend, the Miami Herald featured a story on a new city arising in Collier County to benefit Ave Maria University, a Catholic college in a Catholic town founded by Dominos Pizza baron Thomas Monaghan.

It is a classic story. Government agencies were marshaled to avoid consideration of important environmental impacts, like the fact that Ave Maria University is squarely in the midst of habitat for the Florida panther.

The Herald report features prospective buyers touring the construction site in trolley cars, the same way they did in 1920 in Coral Gables. Buyers lured with flags and demonstration units and incentives, surrounded by functional wetlands turned into stormwater ditches.

To make these big bold development strokes, Governor Bush also needed energy. Not energy conservation. New energy plants.

Providing for distribution of natural gas across the state or large coal-burning plants where massive new demand will be generated takes a lot of planning, a lot of forethought, and a determination to stop citizens from getting in the way to the maximum extent provided by law.

In the last year of the Jeb Bush administration, Florida Power and Light set in motion a permitting project for a massive new, polluting coal-fired electricy plant in Glades County. Behind closed doors, the company and county officials colluded to change zoning in the area—without public input or required hearings.

On March 15th, the St. Pete Times wrote, “Tampa-based Lykes Brothers and Florida’s largest utility cut a deal with Glades County officials to illegally rezone 400,000 acres of Lykes land to allow the utility to build a power plant at the edge of the Everglades, an environmental group charged in a lawsuit filed late Tuesday. The Lykes land, which covers 90 percent of Glades County, had been zoned for agriculture. The rezoning, quietly approved by Glades officials last year, inserted the letter “P” into line number 1,745 of a 2,100-line table in its land-use ordinance, the suit contends. That small alteration changed the used permitted in agricultural areas to include power plants.”

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/03/15/Business/Tiny_change_leads_to_.shtml
http://www.uspirg.org/news-releases/clean-air/clean-air2/groups-oppose-huge-coal-plant-near-everglades

The FPL proposal for the Glades power plant is provoking a huge public backlash.

The Sierra Club and three other environmental groups have told state utility regulators that if FPL conserved more energy, it wouldn’t have to build the plant, or any other. And Governor Charlie Crist recently told the Palm Beach Post editorial board that “he’s very unexcited about the suite of coal plants planned for Florida over the next 10 years, including FPL’s, which would be near the Everglades—an area he’s vowed to clean up.”

Where Scripps failed in Mecca Farms, Ave Maria succeeded in Collier County.

Ave Maria shows it is possible to have big, bold developments in the Everglades, proving either that faith makes anything possible, or, that money changers will always have a foot in Florida's temple.