‘Back to the drawing board’: Gov. DeSantis calls park proposal ‘half-baked’

Gov. Ron DeSantis says he did not approve a plan to develop golf courses and lodges at state parks, and would prefer the state not pay for it.

“A lot of that stuff was just half-baked and it was not ready for prime time when it was,” he said at a press conference. “And it was intentionally leaked out to a left-wing group to try to create a narrative.”

But the plan to put more active uses at nine state parks was announced by DeSantis’ own Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) as part of its Great Outdoors Initiative. The plan started receiving bipartisan criticism after a report in the Tampa Bay Times prompted pushback by Republican Cabinet members Jimmy Patronis and Wilton Simpson.

In the week since the initiative was announced, DEP has delayed planned workshops on proposals, which were originally set for Aug. 27 simultaneously at eight locales around Florida. The agency now has started accepting input for larger venues to meet on proposals in early September.

But DeSantis stressed that none of the plans are likely to be set into motion until at least next year.

“They’re going back to the drawing board,” DeSantis said. “Talk to your local communities. Here’s the thing, I’d rather not spend any money on this.”

After the plans were first announced, DeSantis’ communications team defended the proposals, but the Governor has not publicly addressed them until now.

He did discuss a controversial proposal for golf courses at Jonathan Dickinson State Park, which the Tuskegee Dunes Foundation has since withdrawn. That foundation is connected to Folds of Honor, which benefits from a Michigan golf course called American Dunes.

“We had one charity, Folds of Honor, which uses golf to be able to raise money to support the families of fallen service members and injured service members with scholarships,” DeSantis said. “They also do that for first responders, those killed in the line of duty and those injured in the line of duty.

“So they had a proposal, it wasn’t approved yet. There was a lot of vetting that needed to be done to take this abandoned military base in Martin County, convert it into something that can be really nice that would make the general public be able to afford doing it — because this stuff can be expensive — and then take the proceeds and use that to fund the scholarships for the military families and for the first responder families.”

He said critics have misrepresented the state park as a pristine environment.

“No, there was almost 1,000 buildings on that base back in the day,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis said that part of the parks plan was “the only thing we were interested in, just because it had the connection to the military stuff.”

He still lauded an idea for a golf course that pays tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen.

“Those are the types of things that we worked awful hard on in the state of Florida, and if we can leverage some of these resources to do it, that could have big benefits for the state,” DeSantis said.

“Now, not going to happen at the Camp Murphy site at Jonathan Dickinson, but maybe they will be able to find a site, maybe an existing course where they can rehab, show it some love. They’re going to have to raise a lot of money, and even what they were proposing at Camp Murphy, the state was not going to give any money. They were going to have to raise tens of millions of dollars to do it. I don’t know if that was ever even feasible. But the economics of this can be very tough.”

He said similar efforts have been successful in Palm Beach County, but only thanks to philanthropy of the wealthy residents there.

“We don’t necessarily have that in every part of this state or every part of this country,” he said.