From Florida Phoenix:
COMMENTARY
National park proposed for Florida springs doesn’t spring from desire to fix problems
Thousands of petition signers are not fine with Rep. Randy Fine’s proposal for a park.
Juniper Springs in the Ocala National Forest, where Congressman Randy Fine held his press conference to tout his national parks idea. (Ocala-Marion County webpage)
Florida has three national parks — Everglades, Biscayne, and Dry Tortugas, all in the southern end of the state. Now newbie U.S. Rep. Randy Fine of Brevard County wants to create a fourth one, this time in the north end, for Florida’s springs.
He’s filed a bill, H.R.4656, called the “Path to Florida Springs National Park Act.” It directs the secretary of the Interior Department to conduct a study to “determine the suitability and feasibility of establishing Florida Springs National Park in Central and North Florida.”
“When I saw these Florida springs, places unlike anything else you’ll find in Florida, unlike anything else you’ll find in America, unlike anything else you’ll find in the world, I thought these, too, are worthy of designation,” Fine said during an Aug. 25 press conference at Juniper Springs to unveil his bill. “We literally are the Yellowstone of springs.”
The study area, spelled out in Fine’s bill, covers about 2,800 square miles between Jacksonville, Orlando, and Gainesville. That’s bigger than Biscayne (270 square miles), Dry Tortugas (100 square miles), and even Everglades National Park (2,350 square miles).
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But not everybody thinks Fine’s bill is so fine.
In fact, as the Daytona Beach News Journal reported last week, there’s now a petition opposing it. As of Wednesday, the number of signatures topped 8,000.
“While we value public access to natural spaces, this bill threatens the long-term health of one of Florida’s most ecologically sensitive regions,” says the Change.org petition.
They’re concerned that Fine’s park plan is just a ploy to promote commercial development in areas that are now quite placid.
I wondered, who’s right? Whose vision for the springs truly springs from a desire to do right by these natural gems?
Measureless caverns
I have to say that Fine is not wrong about the wonderful qualities of our springs.
We have more springs gushing up from our aquifer than any other place on earth. Florida’s ancient inhabitants regarded them as sacred places.
“One has to look at springs as the first Floridians would have, seemingly magical waters rising from the forest to provide a source of perpetual fresh water and food and a place to stay,” Doug Stamm, author of the authoritative guidebook “Springs of Florida,” once told me. “Who would not think that was a sacred gift of the Creator to be treasured?”
Pioneering naturalist William Bartram’s account of Florida’s springsinspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem about Kubla Khan and his “caverns measureless to man.”
The springs were our earliest tourist attraction. Unscrupulous hucksters convinced wealthy Northerners that the cure for what ailed them was to sit and soak in Florida’s therapeutic waters, even the ones thatsmelled like rotten eggs.
They’re still a major tourist draw. Who wouldn’t want to splash around in cool, bubbling waters on a hot summer day? Florida State University says just one, Wakulla Springs State Park, contributes about $20 million annually in tourism spending. Think of how much a dozen or so bring in!
Yet former Gov. Rick Scott and sitting Gov. Ron DeSantis have done an incredibly poor job of taking care of them. Lots of our springs now suffer from a loss of flow due to overpumping from the aquifer, as well as pollution caused by leaky sewer lines and septic tanks plus fertilizer and animal poop in stormwater runoff.
The springs were showing a steep decline in 2016 when the Legislature became alarmed. Legislators passed a law that said the Department of Environmental Protection “shall adopt uniform rules for issuing permits which prevent groundwater withdrawals that are harmful to the water resources and adopt by rule a uniform definition of the term ‘harmful to the water resources’ to provide water management districts with minimum standards necessary to be consistent with the overall water policy of the state.”
The law said the DEP had to complete that assignment by 2017. Instead, the agency gave itself another year, then another, then another, and so on. They kept hitting the snooze button, meanwhile issuing more and more of those damaging permits.
Imagine if you could do that with any law or order you didn’t like: “Sorry, Gov. D, I know you want this rainbow crosswalk painted out, but I’m giving myself another three years to comply.” It wouldn’t go over well, would it?
Then, in 2022, the DEP finally unveiled its new rules. They were pretty much the same rules as the ones in 2016 that had doomed the springs.
An environmental group, the Florida Springs Council, has been fighting for years to get DEP to follow the law, so far with little success. I was curious about what their longtime executive director, Ryan Smart, thought of Fine’s national park proposal.
The answer: Not much.
“I can’t see any way in which it will benefit Florida’s springs,” he told me.
Restoring the springs
The idea of creating a national park featuring a lot of Florida springs has been floating around for several years, Smart told me. To him, it’s never made much sense.
For one thing, all of the springs within the proposed park are already permanently protected. They’re part of various state parks, state preserves, state forests, and national forests.
The ones that are state parks will be protected even better than a national park might, Smart said. Just this year, the Florida Legislature passed a new law to block any efforts — by the governor or anyone else —to bring golf courses, fancy lodges, pickleball, or some other not-a-park use. That means no commercial development can threaten them.
The state parks have another advantage over the national kind, he said. Local residents have input on management plans for the state parks. National parks are managed from Washington.
“Changing state parks or state forests into national forests or national parks,” Smart said, “doesn’t do any of the things that need to be done to actually restore the springs.”
Hopeful but doubtful
I talked to some more smart people besides just Smart.
Stamm told me that he thinks the national park study might be a good idea. But it would probably take too long and cost too much money to do the springs any good.
“I’m hopeful,” he told me, “but I doubt it will ever happen.”
I made sure to call Clay Henderson, a former Florida Audubon president who has also written the definitive history of environmental land preservation in Florida, “Forces of Nature.”
He pointed out that a chunk of the study area lies within the Ocala National Forest,established in 1908 by order of President Teddy Roosevelt.
Thousands of people live within the forest boundaries, and they’re allowed to hunt there. If it were a national park, they would have to put their guns away.
“You can’t hunt in a national park,” he said.
He also reminded me that, under the sitting president — who Fine endorsed and who returned the favor when Fine ran for Congress — the budget and personnel for the National Park Service have been slashed to the bone.
Since the goal of the park service these days is to downsize, not add new parks, he said, “I don’t expect to see a favorable report.”
Re-run of a reject
The most interesting insights came from Haley Moody, executive director of the Howard T. Odom Florida Springs Institute. First opened 15 years ago, the institute in High Springs has done more than anyone else to take a deep dive into what makes the springs work and what’s harming them.
According to Moody, her organization has already looked into protecting the springs by creating a national park — and rejected the idea.
“In 2021, we got a small grant from the National Parks Conservation Association,” Moody told me. “We worked on it for a couple of years to see if the idea had legs. We held several stakeholders’ meetings.”
A lot of the folks who live in the area “were not receptive to the idea of the federal government acquiring all the land,” she said. That doomed it.
Instead, she said, her organization is proposing something different: a Florida Springs National Heritage Area, which would not be as restrictive as a national park. It would cover the northern two-thirds of the state — everything north of Lake Okeechobee, basically. And the people who live in the area could contribute ideas on how best to protect it.
Fine would know all that if he’d just asked.
But he didn’t, so now we’re headed for a re-run of what the Florida Springs Institute rejected.
An expert visitor
I had a telephone chat with the congressman about all this. I confess I approached the call with some trepidation. When he was in the Legislature, Fine was widely regarded as the biggest hothead since the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch.
But perhaps being elected to Congress cooled him off. Rep. Fine and I had a very civil discussion, by which I mean he insulted other people but not me.
He told me he became interested in the national parks because he’s been taking his kids to visit as many of them as possible. So far, they’ve traveled to 61 out of the 63.
“I consider myself an expert on the national parks as a visitor,” he told me.
When he first saw the magnificence of a Florida spring, “I thought that the Florida springs should have a national designation too.”
When I asked why he didn’t consult any springs experts, he said that’s why he’s calling for a study. Let the experts weigh in then, not before the study gets off the ground.
When I mentioned the Change.org petition opposing his bill, he snapped, “How many are real people?” He compared the thousands of petitioners to the thousands of chatbots who follow his X account.
“The feedback I’ve gotten from actual humans has been good,” he told me.
He conceded that one of the petitioners’ concerns — that a national park would attract commercial development – is legitimate. But he had a response for that.
“I thought there was a desire for more economic development,” he told me. “You can get a factory in there, or you can get something that protects the natural resources.”
When I mentioned some of the reservations I’d heard from people like Smart, he didn’t want to hear it.
“This bill should not be controversial on its face,” he said. “Anyone who opposes this idea is not a real environmentalist.”
Stop wasting time
When Fine told me he didn’t talk to any springs experts, he didn’t mean he didn’t discuss this with anyone, period. One person who did consult with the congressman on it was Jonathan Rubin, executive director and president of the Clean Earth Initiative.
Moody met him at the congressman’s press conference. She’d never heard of his organization before. Neither had Smart.
Maybe that’s because Rubin’s organization is fairly new. The Palm Beach County native started it less than a year ago. Before that, he spent four years running an organization in Boca Raton called Fresh Florida Farms to promote hydroponic crops.
Clean Earth Initiative’s website says it was set up to bring together a lot of different Florida environmental groups because “together, our voice is stronger and more effective.”
The 25 organizations who have joined so far range from the well-known Tropical Audubon Society to more obscure ones, such as the Crustacean Plantation. None of them are specifically for springs. In fact, most are from the southern half of the state.
Now Rubin is pushing the Florida Springs National Park and has even produced a video about it featuring Fine.
It occurred to me that the Clean Earth Institute might get the contract to do the study called for in Fine’s bill. When I asked Rubin about that, he said the decision would be up to the National Park Service.
I asked Rubin if he wrote the bill for Fine. After some hemming and hawing, he said he did not write it, but “I provided the proposal that his staff used to write the bill.”
He said the study will need to address important questions: “Do we close some of it to hunting or all of it? Do we allow commercial development on it or none?”
But those are questions that the Florida Springs Institute has already addressed. Why spend money that the National Park Service doesn’t have now, to study something that’s already been reviewed and rejected?
What would make more sense is if Fine were to use his clout with the Trump administration to put pressure on DeSantis to do his job. Maybe the White House could encourage him to focus on fixing the springs’ flow and pollution problems, instead of wasting his time painting over all those colorful crosswalks.
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