Weeki Wachee update

My Aug. 27 column and blog post dealt with Weeki Wachee Springs, and the question came up in this past Tuesday's live chat about the status of the state's proposed acquisition. Hence the timeliness of the announcement just made public by the attraction a few minutes ago:

WEEKI WACHEE, FL- Yesterday, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Division of Recreation and Parks hosted officials from Weeki Wachee Springs, L.L.C. At the conclusion of the meeting, an agreement was signed by both parties, bringing Weeki Wachee Springs one step closer to becoming a state park. The agreement is now pending approval of the agreement by the Southwest Florida Water Management District.

The (fake) year in review, Part II

The (mostly fake) news of 2007 in review, Part II:

July 4: Pinellas County refuses to buy land from its own elected property appraiser, saying, "This is obviously a sensitive transaction that requires the highest level of caution."

July 13: The treasure-hunting ship Odyssey is seized at sea by Capt. Jack Sparrow.

July 20: A mysterious lack of hurricanes prompts State Farm to cancel another 50,000 customers in Florida.

Aug. 2: NASA discovers a bad valve behind space-shuttle toilet. "Here's yer problem right here," NASA's plumber says, while displaying his own, you know, moon shot.

Aug. 8: A bunch of guys sitting around with nothing else to do decide it would be really neat-o to buy the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Aug. 16: An investigation by Hillsborough County concludes that it's okay that Hillsborough County blew all that money on the lake of a Hillsborough County commissioner, Brian Blair. Well, glad that's settled.

Aug. 17: Florida's entire Panhandle to be paved over for giant airport. "It's not like you're using it," St. Joe Co. executive says. [rest of column]

The (fake) year in review, Part I

The (mostly fake) news of 2007 in review, Part I:

Jan. 20: St. Petersburg police slash tents that had been donated to the homeless. In related news, those who hath two cloaks decide to keep them both.

Jan. 29: Legislature votes to ask insurance companies "pretty please with sugar on top" to cut rates.

Feb. 2: Personal savings rate in U.S. is at the lowest rate since the 1930s. "It's a good thing that the mortgage market is so stable," experts say.

Feb. 6: The nation acquires Too Much Information about astronaut diapers.

Feb. 13: An investigation into Florida State Prison discovers 24 copies of Lethal Injections for Dummies.

Feb. 15: A Pinellas girl gets the hiccups. Fortunately, no media frenzy erupts. [rest of column]

'The Florida Dream,' 9 p.m. Thursday

It's often been said that Floridians lack a sense of being Floridians. With so many of our state's residents originally from someplace else, it's harder for us to have a shared cultural heritage, a sense of "place," a feeling of belonging or deep-seated pride. It also makes it harder for us to feel like stakeholders in the important decisions that have to be made.

The work of historians such as Gary Mormino, the Florida studies professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, can help to create that shared heritage. Mormino's latest book about our state, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, is now the basis of a new public television documentary titled The Florida Dream, which premieres at 9 p.m. Thursday on most of the state's public TV stations.

The Florida Dream is produced by the Florida Humanities Council and Tampa's WEDU-TV, Channel 3, and made by Larry Elliston (you might remember him from his Down Home Florida days on WTVT-TV, Channel 13). The documentary mostly focuses on the story of Florida since World War II -- a war which exposed this thinly populated, sandy state to 2.2-million men and women who trained here at 200 military installations. A lot of them liked what they saw, and would come back as tourists and future residents.

Florida soon enough was being carved up to meet an explosive postwar growth. Entire cities sprang from nothing. For $30 down and $30 a month, middle-class America could have its share of retirement paradise -- even the concept of a "retirement community" was a brand-new idea. In a survey taken in the 1960s, the two most popular vacation spots in the nation were the Grand Canyon -- and Cypress Gardens near Winter Haven. Florida had 5-million visitors a year in 1950; by 2000 the figure was 72-million.

Of course, there was a price. Rivers were straightened and the Everglades fouled. By the 1960s, every major body of water in the state was polluted. More than 50 native species are threatened or endangered. As Mormino notes, perhaps the biggest long-term issue in Florida is not taxes or insurance, but water.

The Florida Dream treads lightly over the specifics of the political and policy choices that Florida faces today, but it sets the stage for them. It's well worth watching. For more information, check out the show's web site at www.wedu.org/floridadream.

Dr. Mormino

Here's more from Gary Mormino, the professor of history at USF-St. Petersburg, an authority on Florida history and author of Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams. He is an inveterate reader of old newspapers -- God bless the man! -- and is always dropping off ecletic clippings from the past. These are from the late 1950s:

Gender history: "And Just Why Shouldn't The City of Tampa Have A Woman Mayor?" asks a patronizing 1959 headline. But a 1959 news article claims that most young women wanted a career as a homemaker -- a rebellion against their World War II-era working mothers!

Sports history: A former governor causes quite a flap by calling the University of Florida football team a "disgrace" after a loss. Meanwhile, did you ever hear of Don Larsen's perfect game pitched in the 1957 World Series? Here was his reward: a $6,000 raise the next spring.

The more things change: One of my predecesors as a Times columnist, Dick Bothwell, tours the beaches and bemoans the conversion from old cottages to a street lined with motels. These days, we're nostalgic for the mom-and-pop motels and bemoan their conversion to condos! And on the right, the Times editorial page muses about whether Pinellas County needs a consolidated government. Hah!

How quaint: the Times seriously proposes using tunnels beneath Tampa Bay as fallout shelters. And on the right, we predict a booming future for the area of St. Petersburg now known as Midtown.

Column: Mermaids And The, Uh, Scales Of Justice

WEEKI WACHEE -- Mermaids have been performing at Weeki Wachee Springs for 60 years. At first, they stood along U.S. 19 in swimsuits, flagging down traffic. Then they would run and jump in the spring to do their underwater act.

The glory years were the 1950s and 1960s, when Weeki Wachee gained worldwide fame. Today the place still has a sort of 1960s, pre-Disney feel, which I mean in a good way - a perfect piece of Florida roadside kitsch, before everything got all modern.

The highlight is the Underwater Theater, of course.

You sit in a curved amphitheater and peer through giant windows into the spring. The mermaids swim and dance and lip-synch to music, breathing through air hoses.

I watched them do The Little Mermaid the other day. At the risk of spoiling the story, I can tell you that the heroine finds her prince and the Wicked Sea Witch is defeated.

Unfortunately for the mermaids of Weeki Wachee, it is easier to defeat fictitious sea witches than to subdue a real-life adversary, namely ...

The Southwest Florida Water Management District. [rest of column]

Weeki Wachee

My Sunday column is about Weeki Wachee Springs, the 60-year-old attraction located on U.S. 19 in Hernando County, famous for its mermaids. Weeki Wachee has been involved in a court fight for three and a half years with the Southwest Florida Water Management District. That's my photo over on the right. Here's a snippet of my own amateur video, too: Download wwsprings_002.avi

I visited the park and talked with folks on both sides of the court fight. The gist of it is that Swiftmud (the nickname for the water district) wants to force Weeki Wachee to negotiate a new lease. At least, that's what the district says that it wants. But one possible outcome is that the mermaids could be evicted. I have the distinct impression that the legal fight has grown into a bitter, personal struggle, like a nasty divorce case.

Just for fun, here's a video I found on YouTube that features the opening of The Little Mermaid Show, which I mention in the column:

Another Gambling Excuse...

There's only one good reason to legalize gambling: because you believe people should be able to gamble if they want to.

Make no mistake -- that's a fine, libertarian reason. I'm all for it.

But we can never just say it that way. Nope, We have to come up with excuses and justifications.

Take Gov. Charlie Crist. In another big reversal from Jeb Bush, Crist says that perhaps Florida should allow more gambling to help raise money for the state.

After all, the state is already negotiating with the Seminole Tribe on what kind of new gambling will be allowed. The feds have given the state a deadline for those talks.

Meanwhile, the state is facing a $1.1-billion budget shortfall...

"I want to be open-minded'' the governor says, "and I want us to be innovative." In other words, he thinks maybe the state should negotiate for a piece of the action.

In general, I don't believe that gambling money is as good a deal as it's made out to be.

I don't believe as much of it is "new" money as folks like to claim. A lot of it is money that tourists -- or Floridians -- would have spent on something else.

Secondly, an expanded gambling culture has many offsetting costs, hidden and otherwise. Those costs include associated crime, addiction, and emphasis on the wrong values.

Thirdly, history shows that gambling revenue tends to replace tax revenue, instead of adding to it. The Florida Lottery's claim that it "helps" education is a perfect example. After we got the Lottery, we just reduced the share of the rest of the state's revenues that went to schools.

There's no such thing as "free" money. But we sure like to think so. We would rather do almost anything than pay taxes.

So, sure, let's have Vegas-style gambling. Let's shoot craps and play roulette and blackjack. I'm all for it.

But spare us the justifications that it's for "economic development" or "good for education" or any of that stuff.

Some say that the speaker of the state House, Marco Rubio, is just sucking up to social conservatives by being opposed to expanded gambling. But I have to say, if he is willing to stay opposed even in the fact of a $1.1-billion budget shortfall, at least there's some consistency there.

Why Grow In A Drought?

One of the most frequent questions I get, and one I've had myself over the years, is why local governments keep allowing new development and construction during a drought and water restrictions. It sure seems dumb, doesn't it?

The other day I asked Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio to explain this. She sent back a detailed reply, but the gist of it is this:

-- We have water restrictions in part because of the capacity of our current system. People put more demand on production capacity during a drought. In the short term, that's the bottleneck. There were restrictions during droughts back in 1967, when Tampa could take only 50 million gallons a day from the Hillsborough River, and there are still restrictions today, when the city can take 82 MGD.

-- So the approval of new development today doesn't have any immediate effect on our short-term capacity problem. What it DOES do is bring us closer and closer to the "ultimate" limit -- the limit on how much water is available to us in Florida if we max out ALL our sources.

"When,'' Iorio asks, "do we stop growth?  One, when regional water supply authorities say there are no longer water supply options.  No more reservoirs, no more desal plants, no more groundwater pumping, no more whatever the new idea has been. Then we can't have more growth. Or, the price of creating these new water supplies becomes so cost prohibitive that it is no longer affordable to live in the state of Florida.''

I would add that this still doesn't mean, and the mayor is not saying, that unrestricted growth is smart. It just means, if you buy this explanation, that it doesn't make our short-term situation worse. 

Because We FEEL Like Lowering Manatee Protection, That's Why

Given the Bush Administration's habit of replacing science with political judgments, I have just about zero confidence in the latest attempt to "downlist" the endangered status of the manatee.

In fact, my colleague Craig Pittman's article on Sunday shows that after the Fish and Wildlife Service assembled "the world's best scientists" to produce criteria for when manatee status might be eased, the service then decided to change two of the scientists' three main criteria, and to eliminate the level of confidence that the scientists had recommended.

To recap, after humanity has managed to wipe out most of a species that once populated much of the Gulf Coast, leaving it clinging to an annual count that we celebrate if the numbers killed each year aren't too bad, we now propose the unprecedented step of changing the status of a species that hasn't met any of its recovery plan goals. The reason, a F&W official says, is to have "a bit more flexibility."

A bit more flexibility! Well, that makes ME feel better.

As Long As It Isn't 'Margaritaville'

Our staffer Melanie Ave writes today about changing the state song, Old Folks At Home (Way down upon the Swanee River...). The song's references to "darkeys'' bemoaning the loss of a lifestyle on the old plantation are, to say the least, a little dated.

I wrote a column about this back in 1992, which produced a sheaf of letters from readers suggesting alternatives -- as well as their own lyrics and even a few cassette tapes. Feel free to make suggestions here and we'll see what folks come up with.

I couldn't help but chuckle at the complaint of state Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, the descendant of a Confederate soldier: "It just seems in this age of multiculturalism we can celebrate everyone's culture but mine."

Well, if the culture was owning other human beings in forced labor, uh...