Clyde Butcher rallies opposition to off-road vehicle park at Big Cypress

Mary Wozniak

World-famous photographer and environmental activist Clyde Butcher is rallying residents to attend a Collier County commission meeting at 9 a.m. Wednesday to protest a proposed off-road vehicle park in the Big Cypress National Preserve.

The park is proposed by Miami-Dade County on 1,600 acres in the eastern end of the preserve. Since some of the land is in Collier County, Collier also has to approve it.

The park would include a visitors center, RV parking, campgrounds, two fishing piers, an archery range and hiking trails.

Butcher sees it as a thinly disguised effort by the counties to get a foot in the door for further development.

"If you get this, then they get mining, then they say - oh, we could have some industrial park there. Oh, there's an airport right here," he said. "And all of a sudden the whole thing is back where it was in the 1960s. People just don't give up, they just don't give up. It's amazing. It's greed."

The park site is within a 25,000-acre area known as the "jetport," also owned by Miami-Dade, which began building a massive international airport there in the 1960s. The project was thwarted by environmentalists and some government officials.

But the attempt prompted the late Everglades activist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas to form Friends of the Everglades, and launched the Save the Everglades movement.

It also prompted Congress to create the Big Cypress National Preserve in 1974. Environmentalists say it is habitat for the Florida panther and other animals, home to several listed species of flora and fauna, and important for Everglades hydrology.

The Collier commission unanimously approved the park in January against advice of its staff.

Agencies opposed include the Southwest Florida Water Management District, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and the Sierra Club.

"It's disappointing, the lack of support for it," said commissioner Jim Coletta. "I think it was a knee-jerk reaction to why the Big Cypress was originally formed and the impact the jetport was going to make."

Kevin Asher, a parks planner for Miami-Dade, said people think the park will be developed without regard for the environment and endangered species, "And that is not true," Asher said.

If Collier approves it again Wednesday, the plan will go to the state Department of Community Affairs, which previously weighed in with a solid "no."

If the department again recommends against it, Miami-Dade could appeal the ruling and the issue could wind up in a judicial hearing, Asher said.

Off-road vehicle use in the preserve has been controversial for years. The use is allowed because it was grandfathered in by Congress when the preserve was created, along with hunting, grazing and other uses.

Brian Hurford, 28, of Cape Coral, said his three-year-old ATV often sits unused because he has to travel as far as Okeechobee. "The tracks are too far away and too expensive," he said.

Hurford said he would use the proposed Big Cypress park. "It's good to find more places to ride," he said.

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Source: http://www.marcoislandflorida.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100726/GREEN/7260329/1075/Lionfish-headed-to-Lee-waters?/Clyde-Butcher-rallies-opposition-to-off-road-vehicle-park-at-Big-Cypress

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