Pleading with Santa to Help with Our Crumbling Florida State Parks

Dear Santa,

I know you’re already in the air delivering gifts around the world, but I hope you’ve got an emergency miracle stuffed in your big bag. Our Florida state parks could sure use your help.

You generally reserve your presents for boys and girls whose goodness is worth rewarding. Trust me when I tell you the parks are reeeeeeally good. They’re incredibly popular, drawing 28 million visitors every year and generating $75 million in revenue. Plus, they’ve won national awards four times, more than any other state park system.

Yet they’ve been treated oh so badly by the people in charge of Florida.

Last year our Duffer-in-Chief, Gov. Ron DeSantis, tried to put golf courses, hotels, and pickleball courts in several of the parks. In the uproar that ensued, the Legislature passed a law that said no governor could do something so stupid ever again. That wasn’t the exact wording, but it was certainly the intent.

The Legislature also told the Department of Environmental Protection to compile a list of all the things that the parks DO need. We finally got the DEP report, Santa, and it’s a doozy.

“Florida state parks face $759 million backlog of needed repairs, state report finds,” read the headline in the Tampa Bay Times story.

The money is needed to “address aging infrastructure, safety improvements, accessibility upgrades and modernization of essential facilities such as restrooms, trails, utilities and visitor centers across Florida’s 175 state parks,” the DEP report says. (It’s actually 176, but who’s counting?)

Santa, I read the report and said that word that gets Ralphie in so much trouble in “A Christmas Story.” No, not fudge.

Reading the report was like seeing an online review of a once-great hotel that’s gone to seed. The elevators get stuck, the kitchen constantly runs out of crucial ingredients, and the bathroom plumbing backs up once a week.

The list of what’s in need of repair includes the parks’ visitor centers, cabins, pavilions, boardwalks, fences, restrooms, boat ramps — you name it. Not to mention trying to protect or improve the water quality in the springs, rivers, lakes, and beaches owned by us taxpayers.

I’m not going to tell you that everything in the report is the gospel truth. For instance, I noticed that for the state’s most popular park, Honeymoon Island in Gov. DeSantis’ hometown of Dunedin, the report says the campsites need repair. Honeymoon Island is a wonderful place to visit, but only during the day. It has no campground.

Nevertheless, enough of the report is so dead on that I think it should be required reading for everyone who has any control over the state’s purse strings. Santa, this is such an emergency, I’m ready to dial both 911 and the law offices of Morgan & Morgan.

Instead of regarding the report’s findings as a staggering burden, though, “this is a real opportunity,” said Sierra Club Florida Chapter Director Susannah Randolph, — no, not Rudolph, Santa, I said RANdolph.

Her organization is lobbying for the state to start filling all these needs like an empty stocking hanging from the mantle. To make this wish come true, Mr. Kringle, may require a miracle or two.

Now the question is: Will the nitwits who let Florida’s greatest treasures get so terribly tarnished be willing to spend the money to polish them back to a bright shine?

Tell me you closed it

Santa, did you know that Florida’s state park system is a wild wonder? It gives us a glimpse of what the state looked like before so much ugly sprawl paved over everything.

You should come check it out once you’re done with your worldwide run. Replace your toasty red suit with a vented fishing shirt, some cargo shorts, and flip-flops. You can choose from sites spanning nearly 800,000 acres and go camping, hiking, biking, canoeing, kayaking, or simply gazing in open-mouthed wonder.

There’s also plenty of quirky kitsch, as befits a Florida institution. What other state can claim to have a park employing a school of professional mermaids like Weeki Wachee Springs State Park?

The first Florida state parks that preserved natural sites date to the 1930s. They were not created out of some grand vision to attract tourists. They were make-work projects for the Civilian Conservation Corps, an agency that was part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to beat the Great Depression. The work turned out pretty well, if you ask me.

Those first parks, including Hillsborough River State Park, Highlands Hammock State Park, and Myakka River State Park, are all still amazing places to visit. These are all gifts from the past for us modern-day Floridians, a reminder of what our state once looked like.

With the state’s oldest parks nearing the century mark, you’d think the state would be sprucing everything up for the celebration like the buffers, stuffers, and stylists of Oz prepping Dorothy and her pals to meet the Wizard.

Alas, Santa, some of the best parts of the parks are closed for repairs or replacement and have been for some time.

Take, for instance, the Hobe Mountain Tower in Jonathan Dickinson State Park — the park near Hobe Sound where, just last year, the governor wanted to build not one, not two, but THREE golf courses.

The 27-foot tower sits atop an ancient sand dune that rises 86 feet above sea level. Thanks to that impressive elevation, it provides some of the greatest views anywhere in our flat-as-Flat-Stanley state.

But the tower has been shut down since last year. That’s when an engineer’s report spelled out how badly deteriorated it had become.

“The report documented the rot in the wooden parts and rust in the steel parts,” said Jim Howe, president of the Friends of Jonathan Dickinson State Park. “Many bolts have rusted to the point they no longer provide real connection.”

Howe told me he read the engineer’s report sitting in the park manager’s office. Halfway through, Howe said, he looked up at the park manager and said, “Tell me you’ve closed it.”

The manager replied, “The minute I finished reading that.”

The friends group has been trying to raise the money to tear down the old tower and build a replacement. So far, they’ve collected about $25,000, Howe said. That’s not nearly enough.

“I think when it’s all done it may be a half million or more,” he told me.

Gee Santa, wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of trying to put golf courses in there, the state instead paid to put up a new tower?

How we got here

Now Santa, you may be wondering: How did we manage to let our parks get into such sorry shape?

When I asked Florida State Parks Foundation president Matt Caldwell that question, he was quick to blame our recent spate of storms with names like Matthew, Ian, Helene, and Milton.

“A lot of our parks were right on the front lines for impact from the hurricanes,” the former legislator told me. Repairing the damage from those impacts took precedence over the routine maintenance and additional expansion, he said.

As always when the subject involves parks, I contacted Eric Draper, a Florida native who served as Florida state parks director from 2017 until 2021.

To Draper, one of the signs that we have serious problems is the amount of work that the staff’s own cabins and offices need. Nearly every page of the DEP report names staff housing as derelict and in need of repair.

Year after year, Draper said, the staff would ask for money to make the repairs and improvements mentioned in the DEP report. Year after year, he said, the money they needed was not forthcoming from the Legislature.

I suspect the problem was that our fine legislators misconstrued what state park funding stood for. They looked at it as a sop to the environmentalists, never a favored group with our lawmakers. The greens never bring them enough green, if you know what I mean.

But that’s like thinking that only members of the local Tourism Development Council care about tourism. Lots of businesses depend on tourism to meet their bottom lines, and the same is true for the parks. Lots of businesses depend on it.

I think the legislators should have grasped that by fixing the parks, they would be employing ecology to boost our economy. The parks are a major tourist draw. Keeping them in good working order ensures the tourists have a good experience and are likely to come back.

Do the folks at Disney or Universal let those attractions fall into disrepair? They do not.

But we have, and now the bill has come due.

What happens next

The big question, Santa, is whether our elected leaders will take this report as a road map to fix the problem. Or will they ignore it, the way they did the scientific report on how to clean up our toxic algae bloom problem.

The sponsor of the bill that called for the report says she’s ready to get to work on its findings.

“This gives us the basis to start planning and putting resources into our parks,” state Sen. Gayle Harrell, R-Stuart, told the Times. “It’s a first step to making sure our parks remain the best in the country, and it gives us a starting point.”

We shall soon see if she’s able to build enough support to start paying for some of the necessary work. Remember, though, that in the session that happened earlier this year, the Legislature didn’t want to spend more than a mere $15 million on park facilities improvement.

They also went back on their word from the year before and repealed a requirement that the millions of dollars rolling in from Seminole sports gambling would be spent on buying property that needed to be preserved.

Meanwhile, the legislators enabled a Louisiana developer to get an $83 million payday for 4 acres of land in Destin that wasn’t on anybody’s preservation list. Paying a campaign contributor was worth more to them than rebuilding our broken parks. Does that make any sense to you? Me neither.

There is one bright spot in all this, and in a most unlikely place.

I know you’re probably planning to dump 16 tons of coal at the Governor’s Mansion. He’s certainly due some serious payback for siphoning millions from needy kids to pay political consultants. But hold up a second.

I don’t know how you did it, Santa — did you send the Ghost of Christmas Past? The Ghost of Christmas Present? The Ghost of No Political Future? Whatever you did, it worked. Gov. DeSantis recently announced he’s proposing $50 million to be spent on the state parks facilities in 2026.

“That’s a big ask,” Draper told me.

Randolph of the Sierra Club took DeSantis’ support for a good sign too, and said, “We’re going to push it all the way.”

So, Santa, I hope you can bring our current crop of lawmakers the intestinal fortitude to follow Harrell’s lead and start fixing the parks. A new spine and a noisy conscience would help, too. Fixing this park repair backlog would be the greatest gift you could give all 23 million of us Floridians.

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country, which won a gold medal from the Florida Book Awards. His latest, published in 2021, is The State You’re In: Florida Men, Florida Women, and Other Wildlife. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the “Welcome to Florida” podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.