Guest Author
Dear legislator:
A number of years ago I was playing golf at Solivita, a community near Poinciana on the Polk County side of Osceola County. The area looked strangely familiar, especially the cypress swamps and pine woods between the holes.
As I came up one fairway and looked into an oak hammock, I saw the remnants of a rusted-out camper and a few boards nailed across a couple of trees. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: this was the old Johnson Island Hunting Camp that I had been a part of as a kid, the place where, as a 16-year old, I shot my first deer, learned how to drive a stick shift and listened to stories told around the campfire from men who were then the age I am now.
Except for a nudist colony not far away, a place where we would, interestingly, often find our lost dogs when they’d leave the property in hot pursuit of a deer, Poinciana was nothing back then except a spot of the map. Still, it started to grow, and we soon lost our camp to development. The same group of families from my hometown leased another hunting spot for a year or two across the street and a little to the west, a property we called “The Huckleberry,” but it fell by the wayside too, as growth in Osceola County increased.
Once again the same families leased 10,300 acres in Volusia County, the southwest quadrant of where SR 44 goes underneath Interstate 95. We enjoyed that camp for more than 30 years, and I grew into a man during the time we had that lease. After I married and had daughters, my father got the camp rules changed so that women were allowed to be there year-round, so my kids were able to enjoy it, too. My goodness, what great experiences we had there, and what a fun and safe place it was for kids to learn the ways of the woods and guns and camp life.
Samsula was the nearest town to this camp, and it consisted mostly of just a car racetrack and a small corner convenience store. But, inevitably, growth pushed its way west from New Smyrna and east from Deland and we began losing land. My family dropped out, and the camp is now but a remnant of itself, downsized because of housing subdivisions and commercial development.
Today I mostly fish because hunting leases in Florida are too expensive anymore, so gone are the days when a group of families from Central Florida could lease a big piece of land within a two-hour drive and find the kind of Florida in which I grew up. Don’t feel sorry for me, though; I had my fun and so did my kids, but that’s probably the end of the line. If I’m blessed with grandkids they will most likely never know the experiences of belonging to a hunting camp like Johnson Island, The Huckleberry or New Smyrna.
I am 59 years old. I can remember Florida as it was 50 years ago, and it was vastly different. Frankly, it was better. Florida with 6 million people was much better than Florida with 20 million people. For the same reason, Florida with 20 million people will be better than Florida with 30 million people, yet some elected officials believe that population growth is good, regardless of consequences.
If you aren’t from Florida originally you probably wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, as Carl Hiaasen said in one of his novels, regardless of how bad Florida gets it will still be much better than where most people come from. Still, as I have tried to demonstrate by showing how one hunting camp after another was squeezed out, the steady decline of Florida environmentally because of population growth is real, and where will that put us in another 50 years, or 50 years after that?
Our blessing and our curse is that everyone wants to live here, so stopping growth is probably not possible; a certain amount of expanding concrete and asphalt is inevitable, but you have the chance to preserve what is left of natural Florida.
Please fund Amendment 1 as the voters intended. Buy as much land and purchase as many conservation easements as you can while it is possible. If it turns out that we purchased too much, we can deal with it then, but like the hunting camps I described, once development moves in the ability to do anything else with the land is gone forever.
Sincerely,
Rick Dantzler
Rick Dantzler was a member of the Florida House of Representatives from 1982 to 1990 and a member of the Florida Senate from 1990 to 1998.
