Florida: State $$$$ to Restore Everglades Instead Benefits Private Sugar Corp

[amborin]

FIELDS OF CANE United States Sugar's Clewiston sugar cane refinery. A $1.75 billion deal to sell land and assets to Florida was reduced to 72,800 acres, in separate parcels, for $536 million


Deal to Save Everglades May Help Sugar Firm

"When Gov. Charlie Crist announced Florida’s $1.75 billion plan to save the Everglades by buying out a major landowner, United States Sugar, he declared that the deal would be remembered as a public acquisition “as monumental as the creation of the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone.”

Standing amid the marshes at the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in June 2008, Mr. Crist said, “I can envision no better gift to the Everglades, the people of Florida and the people of America — as well as our planet — than to place in public ownership this missing link that represents the key to true restoration.”

Nearly two years later, the governor’s ambitious plan to reclaim the river of grass, as the famed wetlands are known, is instead on track to rescue the fortunes of United States Sugar.

The proposal was downsized only five months after it was announced. By April 2009, amid the deepening recession, the state said it could afford to purchase only 72,800 acres of United States Sugar’s land, for $536 million. The company would stay in business and the state would retain the option of buying the remaining 107,000 acres at a future date.

United States Sugar dictated many of the terms of the deal as state officials repeatedly made decisions against the immediate needs of the Everglades and the interests of taxpayers, an examination of thousands of state e-mail messages and records and more than 60 interviews showed.

Efforts to restore the Everglades have picked up urgency in the last decade: the sprawling subtropical wetland, the only ecosystem of its kind, is dying for lack of clean water. Many environmentalists remain convinced that Mr. Crist’s deal with United States Sugar, even in its downsized form, offers the Everglades its best hope.

But documents and interviews suggest that the price tag and terms of the deal could set back Everglades restoration for years, or even decades.

Negotiations favored United States Sugar from the start, when the state accepted two outside firms’ appraisals of the company’s land that used figures from the height of the real estate market, according to documents."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/us/08everglades.html?hp

[zonkers]

1. Florida -- the state that favors jet skis over manatees.

[tosh]

2. "When Gov. Charlie Crist announced Florida’s $1.75 billion plan ..."

this DUer was extremely skeptical.

NOTHING that involves United States Sugar is ever gonna work out like that was supposed to.