FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — It’s been an eventful two weeks in the ongoing saga of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration versus Floridians who love state parks.

DeSantis on Aug. 28 aimed to distance himself from controversial park plans and announced that the state Department of Environmental Protection was putting the effort, known as the “Great Outdoors Initiative,” on hold (for now).

Those plans included installing golf courses, 350-room hotels and pickleball courts in some state parks.

Since then, the state DEP whistleblower who leaked the plans has been fired by the department, and a lawyer representing golf legend Jack Nicklaus revealed that both Nicklaus and golfer Tiger Woods were included in the idea to put three golf courses in Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Martin County. The attorney made sure to say that the nonprofit Folds of Honor was driving the plan — the golf deities were merely course designers.

Though the South Florida Sun Sentinel and numerous other news organizations have made public-records requests to the DEP for meetings and emails relating to the plan, neither the DEP nor the DeSantis administration have divulged any information on how this all started, or who might benefit financially or politically.

The initiative enraged so many Floridians that politicians, too, including fellow Republicans, want to know more.

GOP Rep. Brian Mast, whose district contains Jonathan Dickinson State Park, has requested records, and on Thursday a contingent of Democrats, including U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, demanded a formal investigation into how those plans were devised.

DeSantis is widely considered one of most powerful Florida governors in recent history, yet this plan has been crippled, and his administration’s vision undermined by those in his own party, political observers say. It is one of the most dramatic stories in state history of the uproar that results from trying to alter state parks. The motives behind the initiative, motives that seem to have led to misjudgment and not learning from the past, are still a mystery.

Did state DEP act on its own?

DeSantis distanced himself from the plan, saying he hadn’t seen it, and that it was “half-baked” and “not ready for prime time.” But could the state Department of Environmental Protection really have gone about this on its own?

That’s unlikely, said Aubrey Jewett, political scientist at the University of Central Florida.

“The DeSantis administration has been a very top-down administration,” Jewett said. “So it’s hard to imagine that he really didn’t know that there was this major plan that his DEP was going to put out.”

“Gov. DeSantis has had more power than any governor I’ve seen in the last 40 years,” said Democratic Broward County commissioner Steve Geller, who served in the Florida House of Representatives from 1988 to 2008.

“He is used to being the absolute ruler in Tallahassee … because he’s had a Republican Legislature that by and large did whatever he asked, because they all thought there was a good chance he was going to be president, and nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of a future president,” Geller said. “I’ve known governors since before Bob Martinez (1987-1991). I have never seen a governor as powerful as Ron DeSantis.”

Given DeSantis’ grip on power, the Republican backlash to the parks plan may have come as a surprise.

“Over my dead body will there be a golf course at Jonathan Dickinson State Park!” wrote Mast on Facebook.

State Sen. Kathleen Passidomo posted her distaste on X, and U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott called the plan “absolutely ridiculous” in a joint letter. Scott’s protest indicates a change of heart. When he was governor, an initial plan to bulldoze parts of Jonathan Dickinson State Park emerged from the Legislature, but was quashed by public fury.

Geller suspects that if this had happened two years ago, DeSantis’ fellow Republicans might not have been so vocal. “He had just been reelected and was a favorite to become president,” Geller said.

“I think he may have been a little surprised that he’s reverting back to the norms of gubernatorial power, as opposed to the extraordinary (gubernatorial) power that he has exercised.”

The analysis of the DeSantis administration as top-down tracks with whistleblower James Gaddis’ claims. He told the Tampa Bay Times that DeSantis’ deputy chief of staff Cody Farrill was heavily involved in pushing the park plans on behalf of the governor’s office. “Farrill has not responded to text messages asking about his role,” said the Times.

Jewett said the whole episode is a bad look for the governor.

“Either he really was in on this from the beginning, and that really was a mistake, given the public reaction, or if what he says is true, and he really wasn’t in on it, then it suggests that for one of the few times in his tenure, he’s not being an effective manager and leader.”

Dream vs. reality

DeSantis tried to distance himself from the state’s larger “Great Outdoors Initiative,” which would’ve affected various state parks across Florida. “It was not approved by me, I never saw that,” he said during a news conference on Aug. 28. But DeSantis also did list some of what he viewed as the positives about one of the most provocative parts of the parks plan — adding three golf courses in Jonathan Dickinson State Park.

DeSantis, a known avid golfer, talked about the philanthropic connection to the initiative, mentioning the Folds of Honor group.

“We had one charity, Folds of Honor, which uses golf to be able to raise money to be able to support the families of fallen service members and injured service members with scholarships,” he said. “And they also do that for first responders.”

“And so they had a proposal, it wasn’t approved yet,” he said. It would “take an abandoned military base” at Jonathan Dickinson State Park and converted “it into something that would be really nice, that would make the general public be able to afford doing it, because this stuff can be expensive,” he said. “And then take the proceeds and use that to fund the scholarships for the military families and for the first-responder families. But that is what they’re doing. It wasn’t like they were going to make a lot of money.”

During DeSantis’ news conference, the governor acknowledged the outcry over the Martin County plan. “Some people down there, a lot of them were upset about it,” he said. “Some of it was misrepresented as if they were going to try to take away all this unspoiled land. No, there was almost 1,000 buildings on that base back in the day, there’s still some of the remnants of it.”

But some people familiar with the park disagree, saying the proposal was smack in the middle of two rigorous and ongoing conservation efforts: Restoration of rare scrub oak habitat, which the park staff had been working on for decades, and restoration of federally protected Florida scrub-jays to said habitat, which the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had been working on for years.

According to Cornell University’s John Fitzpatrick, who’s been restoring scrub-jays to the park since 2018, the DeSantis plan placed the golf courses directly on top of existing scrub-jay territories.

The DEP did not make park staff available for comment. But Harper Carroll, a fire ecologist who volunteers to help with prescribed burns at Jonathan Dickinson State Park since 2006, said the scrub oak rehabilitation program really took off in the early 2000s.

The burns have restored the scrub oak habitat, said Carroll, and the land where the proposed golf courses would go is home to what Carroll calls “Goldilock species” that love the mosaic of brush, sand and oak. “With that mosaic, you get these Goldilocks species — they need it just right. If you take that out, those species are out of there. They’re gone.”

Conservation experts said the destruction of the scrub-jay habitat, which they share with federally protected gopher tortoises, could have sparked opposition from conservation groups and possibly the Environmental Protection Agency.

As a political observer who is aware of DeSantis’ mostly positive records with environmental issues such as Everglades restoration, Jewett was perplexed. “It gets curiouser and curiouser, as the saying goes. … If you were going to propose something like this, certainly you should be aware of endangered species and habitat protection and what’s required by federal and state law,” Jewett said. “That’s your job.”

The same rationale — that 70 years ago Jonathan Dickinson State Park was a military base — was used in 2011, when a bill that proposed golf in the same park.

“I’ve been out there,” Carroll said. “The scrub has recovered. Mother Nature has kind of healed itself with our help,” he said. “You might find an old chimney, but Mother Nature has reclaimed it.”

Soon after the proposal drew an outcry, the Tuskegee Dunes Foundation, another entity tied to the Jonathan Dickinson State Park plan, wrote: “We have received clear feedback that Jonathan Dickinson State Park is the not the right location. We did not understand the local community landscape and appreciate the clarity. We will not pursue building in the beloved Jonathan Dickinson State Park.”

During the Aug. 28 news conference, DeSantis said, “They’ve withdrawn that proposal, that was the only thing we were interested in, just because it had the connection to the military stuff. So that’s done.”

Shade vs. Sunshine

Given the avalanche of public-records requests, why is there still so much mystery surrounding the genesis of the “Great Outdoor Initiative” and who would benefit from it, either politically or financially? DeSantis and the state DEP are being tight-lipped, but that’s not historically the norm.

“Historically in Florida, the public has a right to know these things,” said Jewett, adding that the state of Florida has been lauded since the 1990s because of strong laws requiring open government.

“But we have seen such an erosion of that over the last few decades,” he said. “ Particularly in the last four or five years, where the Legislatures continually passed more exemptions to the open-record laws, and the governor and the administration have typically taken the view that this is not a requirement anymore, it’s more of a request.”

Geller agrees. “It is fair to say that Gov. DeSantis is less compliant with public-records requests than any governor since (past Florida Gov.) Reubin Askew passed the Sunshine Amendment,” Geller said. The 1976 Sunshine Amendment required full public financial disclosure by all public officials and candidates.

Lessons from the past

In 2011, during the Rick Scott administration, a similar plan was hatched in the Florida House to put golf and even hotels in Jonathan Dickinson State Park. It was sponsored by former state Rep. Patrick Rooney, and included a clause that said every course “must be designed by Jack Nicklaus.”

Like the new proposal this year, the bill sparked widespread outrage. And when golf god Arnold Palmer publicly expressed his distaste for it, the bill disappeared.

At the time, Rooney’s office was flooded with angry emails. In an interview with WPTV last week, Rooney called the debacle a learning experience. “I wish I had done more research on the parks and the fervor with which people that use the parks have,” he said. “It was a mistake to go forward with it. … I quickly grasped how important Jonathan Dickinson State Park is.”

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