By Craig Pittman
Hello, is this the Florida Department of Governmental Efficiency, aka FLO-DOGE? I’ve got a hot tip for you on an incredibly wasteful government project. It’s called “Alligator Alcatraz.”
I know DOGE has been hounding city and county officials — especially the ones who have ticked off developers — looking for wasted taxpayer money. You really should look into this one. It’s HUUUUUGE.
Gov. Ron DeSantis decided to blow millions in taxpayer money on a tent-and-fence camp in the middle of a major nature preserve. Believe it or not, he did it without doing one single thing to check its impact on our endangered panthers, our clean water, or our recovering Everglades.
Instead, he just rushed to build it as fast as possible, spending $218 million. He had to truck in everything the staff and inmates needed, from portable toilets that repeatedly overflowed to blinding lights that ruined one of the few dark-sky places left in our state.
Some of the contractors he hired to build and run the place were, in a word, shady. Five of them “have links to allegations of improper business practices and misuse of public funds,” the Miami Herald reported recently.
This is the kind of willful wastefulness that used to drive DOGE’s boss, new CFO Blaise Ingoglia, howling mad back when was the “Government Gone Wild” guy.
To no one’s surprise, this slapdash structure faced a serious legal challenge from Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe, which lives nearby. After hearing extensive testimony — including from a scientist who said that 800,000 square feet of new paving had been put in at the soggy site — a federal judge ruled for the environmental groups and Native Americans.
The judge found that federal law required an environmental assessment before construction began, but the evidence showed the people who built this thing “did not engage with a single step of the environmental review process.”
I hear the guv whined about an “activist judge” expecting him to follow the law. Poor baby!
The judge ordered Ronnie’s Folly shut down in 60 days, at an estimated cost of another $15 to $20 million in taxpayer money. Two months after it opened, the whole place is being dismantled and everyone transferred elsewhere. It just boggles the mind.
Imagine what we could have done with that money instead of this short-lived mess that put a premium on skeevy marketing over environmental and economic stewardship.
Better than burning it
What should I call you — just Mr. DOGE? You’ll find this fascinating, Mr. DOGE.
Poking around in the wreckage of Ronnie’s Folly, investigative journalist Jason Garcia found records showing how badly the taxpayers were ripped off.
“Altogether, updated procurement records show that Florida has awarded more than $350 million in contracts and purchase orders connected with the Everglades camp, which contractors raced to build in just eight days,” Garcia wrote in his “Seeking Rents” Substack.
He added that DeSantis & Co. “actually would have done a lot less harm … if they had simply set the cash on fire.”
That’s one option, I suppose. But let’s be more imaginative and consider what we could have spent that money on instead of this dismal dog’s breakfast.
Take environmental land acquisition, for instance.
I asked Eve Samples of the Friends of the Everglades what she would have spent the money on. Her answer: Buying up as much of the Everglades Agricultural Area as possible and converting it back into the River of Grass. She even pointed me toward a petition that her organization is circulating to push Florida officials to take that step.
Former Florida Audubon president Clay Henderson, suggested an even broader effort.
In 2022 the Legislature approved spending $100 million in recurring revenue for the Florida Forever land-buying fund. But this year, despite the obvious signs that Florida’s voters cherish our parks and preserves, our legislators ignored that promise and only funded $18 million.
They also voted to repeal a law that created a big source of funding for buying even more environmentally sensitive land. It’s a law they had passed unanimously and with great fanfare just a year before: the Seminole Gaming Compact. Now that gambling money will go into general revenue instead.
There went another $100 million for the Florida environment that everyone thought was guaranteed.
“Florida’s growth rate now results in the loss of 100,000 acres a year to development,” said Henderson, author of a terrific history of Florida environmental land preservation called “Forces of Nature.” “Providing $300 million for Florida Forever would allow us to protect as many acres as will be destroyed.”
Oil and water
Mr. DOGE, I consulted a bunch of other folks about better things to spend these millions on. I told people I was especially interested in anything that would have improved the Big Cypress National Preserve instead of polluting it.
One of the best suggestions came from Matthew Schwartz of the South Florida Wildlands Association.
Forty-plus ago, when the federal government bought the Big Cypress Swamp and created the 729,000-acre preserve, the government left a loophole that makes the word “preserve” somewhat misleading.
While the National Park Service took charge of the land, the feds did not buy the mineral rights under it. Those still belong to the Collier Resources Co., owned by descendants of the founder of Collier County, onetime advertising kingpin Barron Collier. In the 1920s, he was Florida’s largest private landowner. The Legislature named the whole county after him.
Despite its preserve status, Collier Resources has been operating two low-producing oil fields there. The feds have talked about acquiring Collier’s mineral rights since the 1990s, but every attempt has fallen short.
“Back in 2002,” Schwartz said, “a deal was close that would have bought out almost 500,000 acres of Collier Resources’ mineral rights in the Big Cypress National Preserve. That deal fell through …, but $300 million would likely have been more than enough to resurrect it.”
Just think, Mr. DOGE, what a difference Gov. Ron could have made for the Big Cypress! I hope that guilty knowledge dogs his thoughts for the rest of his days.
Saving the sawfish
Mr. DOGE, there are sooooo many better things that DeSantis could have spent $350 million on.
For instance, Nicole Johnson from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida pointed out to me that using the money to help imperiled species would have been wonderful, not wasteful.
“We have been asking the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to continue funding for endangered smalltooth sawfish research, as well as to reinstate funding for trash management programs to coexist with Florida black bears (instead of hunting them),” she told me.
Smalltooth sawfish look like they leaped out of a Fred Flintstone cartoon. They get their names from their saw-like rostrum.
Since 2024, dozens of these prehistoric-looking aquatic species have either washed up dead or been seen spinning crazily before they expired. At least 64 have been found dead so far.
Additional research funding would help the scientists figure out what’s making them crazy — the sawfish, I mean, not the scientists. Or us taxpayers.
As for the bears, that’s just common sense. When they can’t find enough of the food they prefer, they go looking for human garbage as a dietary source. To manage the bears, we’d better manage our human garbage.
Although I think the FWC would still be pushing the bear hunt, despite the fact that there are slightly fewer bears now than there were before the last hunt a decade ago.
A very old error
Mr. DOGE, I hope you’re as dogged as some of the folks I talked to. Cris Costello of the Sierra Club told me that the governor should have spent those millions fixing an error made six decades ago.
In 1968, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the 7,200-foot-long Rodman Dam as part of the controversial Cross-Florida Barge Canal.
The dam halted the flow of the wild Ocklawaha River into the Silver and St. Johns rivers and blocked a regular manatee migration path. Meanwhile, the reservoir created by the dam drowned 9,000 acres of the Ocala National Forest and smothered 20 freshwater springs.
Canal opponents, led by Marjorie Harris Carr, pointed out that the big ditch would damage the aquifer that supplies Florida’s drinking water. They were able to halt its construction by convincing a federal judge to issue an injunction (sound familiar?). Then-President Richard Nixon canceled funding for it.
Carr and others spent years trying to get the dam removed. It still stands today, albeit in far worse shape than when it was new. The Legislature has twice voted to take the first step toward tearing it down, only to hit an inexplicable roadblock.
That’s why Costello says it would have been wonderful to see those wasted millions spent instead on “the breach of Rodman Dam and the reuniting of the Ocklawaha, Silver, and St. John’s rivers and the restoration of so many springs and the surrounding landscape.”
Yet our fine governor didn’t see that as being nearly as important as his polluting pile of putrefaction in the Big Cypress.
Springs and a tower
Last but far from least, it would have been nice to see these millions spent on fixing up our state parks.
You may recall that just last year, another pointless project called for putting golf courses, hotels, and pickleball courts in our state parks. Fortunately, the widespread public outrage convinced the golfers to back out and the Legislature to guarantee that would never happen again.
Several popular parks are centered on our incredible springs. Yet our springs are in serious trouble these days, as Estus Whitfield, who served as the top environmental adviser to five Florida governors from both parties, pointed out to me. The springs are in danger right now from rampant pollution that fouls their cleanliness and uncontrolled water consumption that limits their flow.
There was a time, back when Jeb Bush was governor, that Florida launched a drive to clean up and save our springs. Then Rick Scott came along and ditched all that.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had used that $350 million to revive those springs?
Or we could have repaired some of our other big park problems. For instance, there’s the Hobe Mountain Tower at Jonathan Dickinson State Park, the park where DeSantis tried to put three golf courses last year.
The tower, which sits on top of an ancient sand dune, provides a breathtaking view of the entire park. The tower needs saving — and it won’t be cheap.
“Initial estimates suggest that simply repairing or rebuilding the tower as it stands would cost between $150,000 and $200,000,” the Friends of Jonathan Dickinson State Park website says.
Fixing Hobe Mountain Tower would have been cheaper than building Ronnie’s Folly. And it probably would have lasted longer than two months.
Another name for DOGE
Say, Mr. DOGE, I notice that you’ve gotten awfully quiet. Could that be because you’re busy writing up a lengthy memo to Mr. Ingoglia about what an atrocious waste of money this was?
Could your memo be endorsing the idea of investigating why Ronnie’s Folly was built instead of all the far more worthy projects I’ve mentioned?
Or were you perhaps reflecting on the difficulty of investigating the guy who appointed Ingoglia to his current position?
Because here’s the problem we have, Mr. DOGE.
Instead of DOGE, Ingoglia referred to it recently as FAFO — “Florida Agency for Fiscal Oversight,” he called it. We knew what he meant. But I think he’s the one who’s about to find out.
Whatever y’all come up with as “wasteful spending” by local governments — especially if it’s involving climate change or other legitimate concerns — is likely to pale in comparison to the $350 million for what the governor built in the Big Cypress that lasted only two months.
If FLO-DOGE or FAFO or whatever it’s called next week comes up with a bunch of questionable receipts from, say, Orange County, but ignores this latest DeSantis disaster, nobody can pretend that Ingoglia’s doing his budget-busting in good faith.
They’ll think DOGE is too dodgy. In fact, I bet the next time he demands cooperation from local governments, they’ll just laugh in his face and tell him, “Get along, little DOGE.”
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.
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