A Sweet Deal Soured

It was the blockbuster environmental deal of a lifetime: Florida Governor Charlie Crist announced in 2008 that the state was going to buy 180,000 acres of wetlands from United States Sugar Corporation. The purchase would effectively close U.S. Sugar's doors for good and restore a critical drainage pathway for water flowing out of Lake Okeechobee and into Florida's sprawling, threatened Everglades.

But according to a brilliant piece of investigative journalism in the New York Times on Monday, the deal had begun to unravel even before Crist announced it to the public for the first time in June 2008. The governor painted in grand, dramatic strokes of rhetoric, saying the purchase was to be "as monumental as the creation of our first national park, Yellowstone ... [and] represents, if we’re successful, and I believe we will be, the largest conservation purchase in the history of the state of Florida."

What Crist neglected to mention was that the $1.75 billion purchase was going to funnel money away from ongoing restoration projects in the Everglades, and threatened to leave the South Florida Water Management District without a dime to fix up U.S. Sugar's land -- land that had for decades been polluted and altered to suit the needs of industrial agriculture. Dexter Lehtinen, a lawyer for the native American Miccosukee Tribe said, "This is a death warrant for the Everglades. It sucks away all the money devoted to projects now in the pipeline."

Such dissenting opinions were marginalized. The deal moved forward.

By November of 2008, the financial crisis was in full swing and real estate prices plummeted. The deal was downsized to $1.34 billion, but that still left Florida taxpayers shelling out $7,000 an acre for land that was maybe worth $4,000.

It might've been worth it -- overpaying for land that would drive a major industrial interest out of a sensitive environmental habitat isn't necessarily a bad thing.

But then last April, Crist downsized the project again, announcing the state would purchase just 72,800 acres for $536 million. Suddenly U.S. Sugar found themselves sitting pretty -- they could offload only their least desirable land to the state, raise money to pay off corporate debt, and then get back to business as usual.

The sprawling NYT story paints a picture that makes U.S. Sugar and Crist look like they were in this together, with Crist trying to score political points and the company's leadership simply trying to wriggle out of a financial quagmire they'd been in for years.

Does it all add up to the biggest environmental swindle of the decade? Could be, and it could be a knife in the back of environmental groups and citizens who had thought their governor was crusading to save Florida's most precious natural treasure.

But before judgment is passed, consider that even in its much-reduced form, Crist's now "semi-sweet" deal to buy U.S. Sugar's land is still the largest land purchase ever for the Everglades. It makes you wonder whether he has a point when he argues:

“But what are they doing to try and preserve the Everglades, other than complain about it?” he said. “What are they doing in a productive way to move forward and preserve this national treasure that exists nowhere else on the face of the earth? Nothing but complain. I rest my case.”

Image: Wikimedia Commons