Jono  Miller's editorial from the Sarasota Herald Tribune

Regarding: Myakka River State Park in Peril Again

Monday, Feb. 27, 2017

If there’s any local natural destination that can challenge Sarasota’s award-winning beaches, it has to be Myakka River State Park. For more than 80 years, the park has offered citizens and visitors a welcome antidote to the developed coast. The park, now more than 58 square miles, forms the nucleus of 110,000 acres of protected land called Myakka Island.

As the heart of this visible-from-space “Island”, the management of Myakka Park is paramount and the Park’s management plan (called a Unit Management Plan, or UMP) is now being updated. Part of the process involves updating facts and figures, but it also includes prescriptions for the future of the park. 

And after decades of love, the park is showing signs of wear and tear. Visitation keeps increasing while staff levels have dropped, which diverts staff from managing/restoring the natural resources to unclogging toilets or officiating road rage. The Concession Area at the Upper Lake can have more parking problems than Walmart on Black Friday. The UMP recommends improvements to address many of these issues, including a new visitors center.

But the proposed changes to the plan also include efforts to generate revenue by harvesting natural resources from the park and that eyebrow-raising proposition is making many Myakka Park lovers nervous. 

You may remember a recent effort to allow cattle grazing in the Park. Not a small herd of historic Florida Scrub cattle such as may be seen at Kissimmee Prairie State Park, but a commercial cattle operation south of Highway 72 in an area of globally imperiled dry prairie habitat. Public outcry (and the fact that it didn’t make much sense) led to cattle ranching being taking off the table. But timber harvesting, fuel and stump harvesting, and palm frond harvesting are now all being proposed, not as a form of management, but as a potential source of revenue. Former employees and others familiar with Myakka Park don’t believe these could ever produce much revenue, but they do represent a foot in the door for future commercialization of not only Myakka Park, but all 174 state park units. 

Advocates for this new extractive, consumptive revenue generation scheme point out some pines or stumps may need to be removed to reach legitimate management goals and the revenue generated through their sale could be ploughed back into park coffers. They would like you to believe this is a valuable source of income, but most of the stumps and pines are too scattered to attract bidders. And the remaining pines that might yield actually some money won’t do so for another decade.

So these resource harvesting schemes aren’t about generating revenue, but in opening the door for the public’s park resources to be exported from the park for private gain. How can I tell? Because of those dang palm fronds. While there may occasionally be legitimate management reasons to remove pines or stumps, there is no known management goal served by cutting green fronds from our state tree, the cabbage palm. So the inclusion of palm frond harvest is functionally equivalent to the park selling Spanish moss, or mistletoe. Heck, they might just as well sell rights to take bromeliads or native orchids. It furthers no management goal at the expense of depriving the public of their right to see natural Florida. So these meager harvesting schemes are just a foot in the door for more ominous extractive schemes in the future.

Myakka Park already generates more money that it costs to operate (although more should be spent on operation). If increasing income was the real goal, modest adjustments such more competitive charges for RV camping or seasonal campground pricing would generate far more money. And remember that Amendment 1 we passed? Manatee and Sarasota Counties are sending $35 million a year to Tallahassee and some (not a lot) has been coming back to aid in Myakka park restoration efforts. 

Is it too late to challenge this radical change? No. The Division of Recreation and Parks will be holding an “Open House” hearing at the Suncoast Community Church Activity Center, 8000 Hawkins Road, Sarasota, Florida 34241 Thursday, March 2, 2017 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. I’ll see you there -- with my palm frond.

 

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Jono Miller, a longtime Sarasota community leader, is a contributing columnist (and cabbage palm expert).

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