Although it’s all around us, most people in Florida never think about where their water comes from. They turn on the faucet, a clear liquid flows out, and that’s all they care about. But Colleen Farmer can’t afford to be so naive.
Farmer lives in Crystal River, and she’s worried that the Florida Department of Transportation and one of its contractors are attacking the source of her drinking water.
You might be inclined to scoff, but something remarkable happened last week to suggest she’s right to be concerned.
Here’s how the Citrus County Chronicle reported it: “A Florida Turnpike contractor operating an excavator at a proposed sand mine site in north Citrus County was suddenly inundated with water last week, forcing the operator to swim to safety, according to witnesses and local residents.”
Holy cow! The excavator sank like the Titanic! Excavator operators don’t normally wear personal flotation devices, but maybe it’s time they started.
The Chronicle, in a follow-up note on Facebook, reported that a DOT division known as the Florida Turnpike Authority “said it confirmed that the construction activity did not affect the underlying aquifer system.”
Yet even after the excavator was pulled loose, “the water in the ‘pond’ is not receding,” Farmer told me. “We know that it is not likely that there was any standing water on that property before they started digging. The water could have only come from one place, the spring below.”
Farmer co-chairs an organization called Stop the Sand Mine in Citrus County. It has now filed a formal complaint with both the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the Southwest Florida Water Management District, seeking “enforcement action concerning unpermitted excavation and groundwater exposure.”
How the Crystal River folks got to this point with the 320-acre mine site, she said, is “a long story with lots of twists and turns.” The one constant, she told me, is this: Nobody in local or state government wants to tell the citizens what’s happening.
Crystal River holds some of Florida’s most fascinating history.
The highest point for miles around, for instance, is a 28-foot-tall temple mound of shells in Crystal River Archaeological State Park. It marks the site of one of the longest continuously occupied pre-Columbian locations in Florida. People who lived there would trade with villages thousands of miles away.
These days, shells are less important. Instead, Crystal River has a manatee-based economy. Manatee signs and figures here are as ubiquitous as Mickey Mouse ears at Disney World. Most are advertising tours to experience manatees first-hand, but that’s not all.
The first time I visited Citrus County, I was astonished at how many businesses had “manatee” in their names, even though they had nothing to do with sea cows. Auto repair, appliance sales, you name it and people were trying to be associated with manatees.
And to top it all off, every January, there’s a two-day Florida Manatee Festival.
Crystal River’s manatee madness started with a scientist named Daniel “Woodie” Hartman, who in the late 1960s and early ’70s repeatedly dove into Kings Bay to conduct the first in-depth studies of the manatees that routinely gathered there.
Hartman became so close with some of his study subjects that from time to time they would grasp his face mask in their flippers and bestow on him something like a kiss.
In 1969, Hartman wrote about his research for National Geographic, which led to a 1972 Jacques Yves-Cousteau TV special on manatees, titled “Forgotten Mermaids.” Cousteau’s special tantalized viewers worldwide and they began flocking to Crystal River to see — and to swim with — the manatees.
The manatees are attracted to Crystal River by the springs that feed Kings Bay. Those springs flow from the aquifer that provides humans with their drinking water. The underground cave system that the aquifer flows through has been known, from time to time, to open up a sinkhole to the surface.
The site where the proposed sand mine is located lies within an area that’s supposed to receive enhanced protection. It’s in the Kings Bay Outstanding Florida Spring Priority Focus Area, as well as an area designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a Special Flood Hazard Area.
A DOT engineer’s report on the sand mine site pointed out that it is “underlain by limestone bedrock that is susceptible to dissolution and the subsequent development of … sinkholes.”
While Farmer and other members of her group are concerned about that, no one in local or state government appears to be.
A crucial part of this sand mine story is the toll road known as the Suncoast Parkway. I’ve been writing about the Suncoast for 25 years — usually about how it’s based on bogus figures.
The first story, published in 2000, reported on how a DOT consultant known as URS Greiner Woodward Clyde, had repeatedly produced inflated traffic projections. Those numbers were used to justify launching the construction of unneeded toll roads around the state.
“In 1992 URS predicted the Suncoast Parkway would be so popular it would make $70 million in 2002 and $119 million in 2010,” the story reported. “That persuaded the state to proceed with planning the highway.”
But then URS repeatedly scaled back its projections until it said the Suncoast would bring in only $14 million in 2002 and $31 million by 2010. If it had given those figures first, the road would never have been built.
“Ten years ago, we were basically guessing,” a URS official told me then, not sounding the least bit embarrassed. “Even two years ago.”
Even those updated projections turned out to be wrong. In 2014, the Suncoast drew so little traffic that it collected only $22 million.
But by then, the DOT was already pushing to build an extension called “Suncoast 2” another 13 miles north through Citrus County. Providing the traffic projections: The same consultant that had been so wrong before.
“There’s very little population in that area so there’s no good reason to build this road,” a member of the Suncoast Sierra Club said then. “It seems like a costly gift to road builders and developers at the expense of the environment — the very opposite of smart growth.”
Now the DOT’s Turnpike Enterprise division is working on extending the unsuccessful Suncoast even further north. To do that, they need a lot of sand, and for their convenience they’d prefer to acquire it from a new sand mine right next door to their right of way.
And that’s where George Southworth comes in.
Southworth isn’t just the owner of the sand mine property. He’s also one of the DOT’s longtime contractors. He runs a Tampa company called Concrete Impressions of Florida that manufactures sound barriers.
“What I do for a living is build walls,” he told WFTS-TV in 2017, when he was offering his company’s help in building Donald Trump’s border wall. (Yes, really.) “For the last 20 years we’ve built millions upon millions of sound barriers along the side of the interstate.”
As Mark Twain might have put it, there’s gold in them thar walls. Southworth has made so much money off that and his other real estate interests that by 2014 he’d become the largest single shareholder in Pilot Bancshares, the parent company of Pilot Bank.
I talked on the phone with Southworth, who told me the people opposed to his sand mine are just a bunch of bored retirees who don’t know what they’re talking about.
“I really do like the environment,” he told me.
That prompted me to ask about his citation for harming a gopher tortoise.
In 2022, Southworth was cited by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for illegally harming or killing a gopher tortoise, classified as a threatened species. Pasco County court records show he pleaded no contest.
He told me this case resulted from a complaint from a vindictive neighbor. He said he pleaded no contest and paid $241 in court costs just to make the case go away. When I asked what he’d done to the gopher tortoise, he blamed one of his employees for damaging a tortoise burrow.
That wasn’t the only accusation he faced from Pasco neighbors. One accused him of illegally cutting down trees, prompting the water district to warn him to stop. The neighbor said he boasted on a conference call that he could “nuke” any wetland on his property and get away with it.
That’s important because on his Crystal River property, where he wants to begin mining sand to sell to the DOT, the Adventure Coast Sierra Club says, “The land has scattered wetlands onsite, and a biological survey found gopher tortoises and Sherman’s fox squirrels.”
Southworth told me repeatedly how his sand mine would be so much better for the aquifer than building another pollution-spewing subdivision or big shopping mall.
When I asked him how the excavator turned into “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he started laughing.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “That has nothing to do with the sand mine.”
He told me the luckless excavator was working for the DOT, digging a retention pond for the toll road.
“For the life of me,” he said, “I can’t understand why he was digging a hole that deep.”
Before I talked to Southworth, I watched a public hearing about the mine site at which he spoke briefly. There were 60 or so people there opposed to the mine. Southworth contended that his apparent unpopularity was misleading.
“The people that are in favor of this don’t come to meetings,” he said. “The only people that come to meetings are the people that care.”
The meeting at which Southworth spoke was held because he was seeking a change in the zoning from “agriculture” to “extractive.” Presiding over this quasi-judicial proceeding was a special master named Christian Waugh.
During the hearing, Southworth’s attorney, Darryl Johnston, repeatedly told Waugh that the mining wouldn’t affect the aquifer or the drinking water of neighbors such as Farmer.
After listening to testimony for three hours, Waugh asked several questions. One was whether, after all the sand is removed, the mining site could be restored to its pristine state, as required by the county’s comprehensive growth plan.
“It obviously cannot be,” Southworth’s engineer, George Foster, replied. “It’s gonna be a lake.”
To restore the mine to its original condition, Foster said, would require digging up tons of sand from somewhere else and dumping it back on Southworth’s property.
“I was very shocked to hear that,” Waugh said. “Until that point, I was prepared to recommend approval, but I can’t go against the comp plan.”
Waugh’s recommendation that the county deny Southworth’s zoning change was a wrinkle that neither Southworth nor the DOT expected.
When I asked Southworth about it, he insisted that Waugh interpreted the comp plan language incorrectly and added, “Whether he was politically influenced or just wrong, I don’t know.”
He said everyone better just get used to the DOT doing whatever it wants.
“Florida is growing, and they’re building this turnpike to promote and accommodate the growth,” he said.
The DOT is now acquiring about 50 acres of Southworth’s parcel. The agency seems prepared to push ahead with the mine. As DOT district secretary Justin Hall told Citrus County commissioners, the DOT is not bound by local land-use regulations.
But the state agency that spreads pavement wherever it goes is supposed to be bound by the state and federal regulations that protect both the aquifer and Kings Bay.
A couple of weeks ago, before that excavator turned into “The Poseidon Adventure,” the DOT held a public hearing in Crystal River. The hearing was about its next Suncoast Parkway extension.
Two Sierra Club volunteers, Robin Orlandi and P.J. Aufhammer, showed up and asked lots of questions. I talked to both of them.
Orlandi told me one of the DOT experts at the hearing suggested that the agency might use Southworth’s site for a retention pond for the new toll road.
“It sounded like they were going to create a sand mine without calling it a sand mine,” she told me.
The DOT folks made it clear to the pair that this latest iteration of the Suncoast would be built despite any public opposition. It is as inevitable as the villainous Thanos in “Avengers: Endgame.” That’s because if it’s not connected to U.S. 19, the truncated Suncoast will continue to fail to attract traffic.
But that doesn’t mean Southworth’s sand mine is inevitable.
Orlandi said she’d like to see that property wind up as part of the Florida Wildlife Corridor, which has run into a roadblock (pun intended) in that part of Citrus County.
Farmer told me something similar, but less specific.
“This land sits over the water that gives life to Kings Bay and our community,” she told me. “We want it protected — not mined, not paved, not filled with septic tanks. It should stay … safe for our springs.”
All I know is, the DOT better fix this situation before everyone’s faucets start producing something that no one will want to swallow.
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.
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