Campaign contributor skips line, gets big payday from Florida governor and Cabinet

When you were in elementary school, did you ever have to deal with some rude student who tried skipping to the front of the line? Something like that just happened with Florida’s popular land preservation program.

Normally, land being considered for addition to our parks, forests, beaches, and springs goes through a long vetting process. Their value is appraised by independent experts to make sure the taxpayers won’t be gouged. Each parcel must pass muster at several stops before finally winning approval, a process that can take years.

But that’s not how a sliver of land in the Panhandle town of Destin suddenly hopscotched to the head of the queue to become one of the most expensive acquisitions in Florida history.

“State environmental officials are recommending the Cabinet buy nearly 4 acres of waterfront property in Destin for more than $80 million as part of a proposed deal inserted into the state budget,” Politico Florida reported last week.

A lot of Florida environmental activists — people normally in favor of saving every acre from our out-of-control sprawl machine — have objected to this purchase. Many waved a red flag because there are much more deserving parcels all over the state. Some questioned whether the Destin land is even worth preserving.

Florida Native Plant Society President Eugene Kelly, for instance, complained to state officials that “the lands in question have virtually NO actual conservation value.”

Yet I watched Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Cabinet ram this through Tuesday morning in just two minutes, without even a pause for public comment.

One Cabinet official, CFO Blaise Ingoglia, confessed to having some heartburn over the purchase. He wanted to vote no. DeSantis giggled at the notion.

DeSantis shut Ingoglia down. The governor pointed out that the Destin item had been bundled with other conservation purchases everyone supported. When Ingoglia held his tongue, DeSantis told him, “We’ll take that as a yes and your objection is noted on that one.”

There are a lot of things wrong with the way this all happened, but let’s start with what Barbara Albrecht with the Panhandle Watershed Alliance told me: “The price seems way over-inflated, and that’s a nice way of putting it.”

A profitable business model

Ingoglia has been running around the state bragging about cutting government waste. Yet when a wasteful project unfolded right in front of him, he balked.

What may have caused Ingoglia’s brief freakout is that the current landowner bought that property a decade ago for a mere $8 million.

“The land acquisition process laid out in the statutes prioritizes environmental resources,” former Florida State Parks director Eric Draper told me. “No one familiar with the legal appraisal process believes that this deal is clean.”  

Who’s making such an outsized profit? The landowners are two companies, Pointe Mezzanine LLC and Pointe Resort LLC, “both of which are registered in state corporate filings to Robert Guidry, a Louisiana business owner,” the Tampa Bay Times reported. “Guidry is a prominent donor to state politicians and local officials in the Panhandle county where his property is located.”

One of the politicians to benefit from Guidry’s generosity: DeSantis. The Louisiana man donated $250,000 to a DeSantis campaign committee.

By investing thousands in several Florida politicians, Guidry could count on them handing him millions in tax money.

How’s that for a profitable business model?

The Great Wall of Florida

My first newspaper job, around the Cretaceous Period, involved covering Destin. Back then, it was an unincorporated town in Okaloosa County that called itself “the World’s Luckiest Fishing Village.”

The founder probably didn’t feel all that lucky.

Capt. Leonard Destin from Connecticut began fishing in Gulf waters in the 1830s, but then, according to the city’s official history, “through a series of mishaps, permanently settled in Destin in about 1850-1852.”

Now Destin is better known as home to the Great Wall of Florida, aka the line of massive condominiums that have been built along this once-wild coastline.

Destin’s politics are still pretty wild, though. Just three years ago, a councilwoman with the mellifluous name of Prebble Ramswell scuffled at her house with deputies serving a search warrant.

“Efforts to detain Ramswell and place her in handcuffs would ultimately involve all three law officers at the scene,” the Northwest Florida Daily News reported, quoting the arrest report. “During the struggle, Ramswell was pinned against the stairs of the home and ‘used her right leg and foot to horse kick’ one of the investigators.”

Her arrest for failure to turn over public records grew out of a lawsuit filed by Guidry.

He was suing a local activist for slander because the man had criticized his plans to build a condo on the property that’s now slated for preservation. The lawsuit wound up being dismissed because of this odd thing called “the First Amendment,” which seems to be out of fashion in Florida these days.

The councilwoman ended up pleading guilty to a couple of misdemeanors and serving probation. Meanwhile, the person the other council members picked to replace her is now the mayor.

As far as I can tell, he’s one of the few Okaloosa County politicians who haven’t collected campaign contributions from Guidry. The ones who have include the sheriff, school board members, and county commissioners — all of whom seem very supportive of the state buying Guidry’s property.

Despite his criminal record.

Dirty money

Guidry first made a fortune ferrying goods to offshore oil rigs. What made major headlines in Louisiana was his work with another kind of boating — a riverboat gambling license.

“Riverboat gambling” carries a romantic image, like you’re channeling Kenny Rogers crooning about when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. But it’s got a seamy side, too. To get the license, Guidry bribed then-Gov. Edwin Edwards with $1.5 million, delivered in bags of cash that he dropped off in dumpsters.

The money was literally dirty!

Summoned to testify to a grand jury, Guidry at first denied he’d done anything wrong. Called a second time, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination (known in Florida as “the Rick Scott Defense”).

But federal wiretaps of Edwards’ phone provided prosecutors with beaucoup evidence of how Guidry obtained the license, which he then sold for $170 million.

Guidry became a star witness against Edwards, putting him in prison. In exchange, Guidry pleaded guilty to just one count of conspiracy to commit extortion and had to pay $3.5 million.

Despite the bribes and penalties, he still managed to make a profit on the riverboat deal.

But not nearly the astounding percentage of profit he’ll make on selling this Destin property to the taxpayers.

The buy-back

Nobody knows more about Florida environmental land preservation than Clay Henderson, a lawyer and former Florida Audubon president. He literally wrote the book on the subject. It’s called “Forces of Nature” and every politician in the state should read it.

When I checked with Henderson about the Destin property, he pointed out how the land is even more overpriced than it seems.

“The initial appraisal in April came in at $55 million, but the appraiser supplemented that by $12 million to include the docks,” he told me. “What is unusual about that is the docks are a leasehold interest with the state because they are on sovereignty lands. The second appraisal also came in at $55 million with $13 million addition for the docks on sovereignty lands.”

“Sovereignty lands” mean submerged land that’s already owned by the state.

The governor and Cabinet voted to spend millions of dollars buying land the taxpayers already own.

It’s like a buy-back — except it didn’t really need to be bought.

Also, about those appraisals: They were not ordered by anyone with the state Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees state land purchases. They were done on behalf of Guidry, the owner.

That odd provision was the work of our fine Legislature, which passed the budget language that allowed Guidry to jump the line on everyone else. The money was supposed to be spent for the Florida Wildlife Corridor, which runs nowhere near Destin.

Based on the per acre values from recent Cabinet meetings, Henderson said, $83 million would have bought 60,000 acres of conservation easements or 25,000 acres of land sold outright — a lot more than the 4 acres we’re getting.

The people who engineered this purchase, Henderson said, did so “to the detriment of every other important conservation site in Florida endangered by development.” 

The second resignation

I tried several times to reach Guidry for comment, to no avail. As a result, I can’t say for sure why he changed his mind about adding another condo to the Great Wall of Florida.

My guess is that he noticed that Florida real estate seems to be headed for a slump, hurt by both climate-fueled hurricanes and hurricane-fueled insurance rates. Suppose he built his condo and nobody wanted to buy it?

Selling that land to the state would be a safer — and more profitable — option.

That’s why, late in this year’s legislative session, Panama City’s Republican Sen. Jay Trumbull slipped a requirement into the budget for the state to purchase Guidry’s property and use appraisals arranged by Guidry.

That was fine with the legislative leaders who cut the amount for total preservation purchases to just $18 million instead of the expected $100 million. But Trumbull omitted any mention of the amount, according to those leaders.

“Why are we spending $83 million on a raw piece of land [when] that could buy thousands of acres of pristine land that needs conservation today?” former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, now a GOP gubernatorial candidate, told the Times.

Trumbull tried to convince Politico Florida of the purity of his intentions. “This is a worthy and exciting project preserving public access that could otherwise be lost forever with the development of high-rise condos,” he said.

When he’s not legislating, Trumbull works at his family’s business, which owns seven Culligan dealerships in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. But I think we all know who he was carrying water for on this piece of legislation.

The only person who appeared to be unwilling to go along with this bad deal for the taxpayers was the DEP’s interim manager of state lands, Andrew Fleener.

He just resigned — the second person in that slot to quit this year.

Getting DeSantis’ attention

DeSantis’ persistence in messing with the state’s preserved properties mystifies me.

You’d think he would have learned his lesson last year when his attempt to build golf courses at a state park led to statewide protests and a new law preventing him from ever trying such a thing again.

He sure could have handled this one differently. DeSantis could have vetoed this Destin line item from the state budget.

He could have ordered two new appraisals that would leave out the state-owned submerged land.

At the very least, he could have listened to Ingoglia’s objections and invited the public to comment. After all, it’s our money, not his.

Maybe someone should paint the crosswalks around the governor’s mansion with the words SEND DESTIN TO THE BACK OF THE LINE. That seems to be the only form of protest that grabs his attention.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.