Keep industry out of old jetport site

November 16, 2009

This op-ed appeared Nov. 12 in the Miami Herald.

By: Jack E. Davis
Jack E. Davis is associate professor of history and Waldo W. Neikirk 2009-10 Term Professor at the University of Florida. He is the author of An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century.

It’s like an old wound that some hack doctor keeps digging at. Just as it’s healing, he goes back in. As always, with dirty hands. He is told to keep them out, but he doesn’t listen and the wound never heals.

This has been the history of a scarred swath of the Everglades since 1968, when the earth-moving equipment of the Dade County Port Authority’s grim notion of concrete-and-asphalt progress began churning up a controversy known as the Everglades jetport.

The Authority’s directors launched eminent domain proceedings for the 37-square-mile site in virtual secrecy. They even failed to inform the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District of their real estate doings. That despite plans to hustle millions of luggage-burdened passengers at 175 miles per hour out from the urban fringe across Conservation Area 3 on an air-cushioned tram.

The condemned property included the ceremonial site of the Miccosukee Tribe’s ritual Green Corn dance. But that did not seem to matter to the Authority. It did not matter that Everglades National Park lay a few miles from the jetport. Park officials first learned about the project from newspaper reports.

It did not matter that the jetport was a twisting knife in the ecological heart of the Everglades, already arrested by restricted water flow, polluted runoff and relentless resource exploitation.

World’s biggest airport

What mattered was the proclaimed biggest airport in the world. It would service both coasts and central Florida, siphoning off tourist dollars that the magnetic Disney World, then under construction, was expected to attract.

But concerned residents had a different vision of progress. Initially caught off guard by the jetport construction, they were finalizing a hard-fought agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to route a minimum water supply to the national park.

They were also challenging Florida Power & Light over thermal pollution in Biscayne Bay and had recently stopped the development of an oil refinery and supertanker port (imagine Biscayne Bay today as a 45-year-old oil-distribution center).

They were not simply environmentalists or “butterfly chasers,” as the director of the Authority derisively called them. These were good-government residents who advocated wise planning that growth merchants had historically denied them in their noisy, polluted, traffic-jammed cities. Fishermen, hunters and the Miccosukee Tribe opposed the jetport, too. So did airboat and off-road-vehicle enthusiasts.

The coalition defeated the Port Authority, which remained utterly indifferent to public opinion until the end. And then the coalition went on to create Big Cypress National Preserve to try to fend off future jetport-like follies.

But over the years proposals to convert the old jetport into a full-fledged facility or into some moneymaking venture continually resurfaced. Each time, residents said no.

Now comes the Miami-Dade Aviation Department proposing rock mining and oil drilling on the site. The public has been clear about poking that old wound. Residents want industry and development out of the Everglades.

Economics are on their side, too, the side of not having to fix tomorrow the expensive mess of bad decision-making today.

Ecological insults

The current suggestions for mining and drilling constitute ecological insults waiting for the Aviation Department’s regressive go ahead. They also violate the public trust.

Furthermore, oil drilling is not a way out of economic darkness; it is a socially irresponsible contribution to civilization’s carbon footprint and a tiresome retreat from more inventive ideas.

Unfortunately, public officials and developers sometimes listen as poorly as the hack doctor when told to let the wound alone. Worse, they think their heedlessness is good for the region’s quality of life.

As South Florida residents look at the Everglades and consider giving faith to the leadership of public officials and the old stable of growth merchants, including Collier Resources, they should find one particular fact revealing.

When one of the Port Authority’s headstrong champions of the jetport retired, he left the gray pavement of overdeveloped Miami for the quiet green 350 miles north at Cedar Key, a coveted vestige of old and natural Florida.