The Florida Roundup - Special edition of The Florida Roundup: Growing Up With Guns & Bright Lit Place

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

This week on The Florida Roundup, we bring you two special reports: Growing Up With Guns, a series from WUSF examining the way guns can endanger kids' lives and futures (10:40), and Bright Lit Place, a podcast from WLRN News that explores what fixing the Everglades would mean for Florida and the world (19:21).

This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Thanks for being along with us this week. Today on our program, two special reporting projects. More children in Florida are getting their hands on guns, and even if they do not intend to use those weapons for violence, it can have serious consequences for them, their communities, and their families. violence, it can have serious consequences for them, their communities, and their families. I would never get a chance to talk to her, touch her, see her, pull up to the woman she was sitting here to be. That's Ashley Alexander. Her 14-year-old daughter, Nylexia, was murdered in 2022 in Tampa.

Those working to prevent youth gun violence in Florida say every time they feel like they're making progress, another tragedy strikes. And that's kind of why we need help it's never-ending. Growing Up With Guns is a reporting project from our partner station WUSF exploring the way guns can endanger kids lives and futures. Also this hour come with us to the Everglades. Retrace the decades-long fight over land, water, and willpower to save what's left of the Everglades. On a sticky summer morning, Evelyn Geyser and I sit beneath a canopy of mangroves along Shark River. We're not far from where the mouth of the river dumps into the Gulf of Mexico. That's the final stop for the River of Grass.

Excerpts from the podcast Bright Lit Place from our partner station WLRN in Miami are coming up later this hour. First, children with guns. More teens are getting arrested with guns. Children with guns. More teens are getting arrested with guns. Stephanie Colombini from WUSF in Tampa begins her reporting with a program in Hillsborough County aiming to help turn their lives around. Damari was scared. Crime is high in his East Tampa neighborhood. And he says men hanging by the bus stop would harass him on his way to and from high school. The 16-year-old says he started carrying a loaded handgun with him everywhere he went. Because I knew like if nobody else could protect me then I could protect myself.

If nobody else was going to be there at that time then I would have my back. Then Damari got caught with a gun at school in January. Police say he hadn't threatened anyone with it. They arrested him and charged him with felony possession of a firearm on school property. Damari spent 21 days in a juvenile detention center and couldn't go back to finish his sophomore year. It was scary. I didn't know what was going to happen to my life because I was in college classes and advanced classes and everything. We're not using Damari's last name because he fears that would harm future job opportunities. Had he shot someone, the state attorney might have transferred him to adult court, where punishment is much worse. But instead, the prosecutor, public defender, and judge agreed. They'd offer him a second chance.

First, he had to complete a program. Everybody, come in and sit down. Let's go, let's sit down. Eight teenage boys shuffle into a rec center in Tampa one evening after wrapping up a game of basketball outside. They plop down at desks and begrudgingly put away their cell phones at their supervisor's request. I know every couple of Thursdays we have some gentlemen in to come give us some guidance and some wisdom. This is the Youth Gun Offender Program. Teens like Damari are court-ordered to be here.

A group called Safe and Sound Hillsborough used about $100,000 in county funds to launch the program about a year ago. Executive Director Freddie Barton says it's about preventing gun violence. Unfortunately, we saw a sharp increase in the number of kids being arrested on gun-related crimes. Americans have been buying guns at record high levels, and that's increased the risk of weapons falling into the wrong hands. More than 1,700 kids were arrested in Florida for possessing a weapon or firearm in the year leading up to July 2022. The Department of Juvenile Justice reports that's a 44 percent increase from the year before.

Black males were disproportionately affected. Some kids, like Damari, take guns from home. Others steal them from unlocked cars. Barton's program mostly focuses on kids who've been carrying guns but haven't hurt anybody with them yet. We hear that people say, oh, you know, these are just bad kids. No, these kids are making bad decisions. And everyone can have an opportunity to change their stars and change their life and so that's what we're trying to work with them as early as possible. Teens attend the program for six months and then are monitored for another six. They go to funeral homes and hospital trauma

centers to glimpse at the horrors gun violence can cause and on this evening at the rec center they received a visit from men who'd killed people with guns. Do me a favor and repeat this. 39 years, 39 years and two days. That's how long James Cobon spent in prison for murder. He's 61 now and has been out on parole for just over a year. There's five generations so far, there's five generations of people that have been affected by what I did. generations so far, there's five generations of people that have been affected by what I did. Barton explains gun violence often stems from underlying issues like family trauma or money problems. So participants in his program get anger management counseling and can get referred to

other mental health services. Mentors help them continue their education and connect them with job opportunities. So we look at all of the things that could possibly cause someone to fall down and we address those things. And that's the public health approach of working with these kids here. Guiding the group most evenings is Thaddeus Wright. The boys call him Mr. Thaddeus. They're looking for someone to relate to them.

They're looking for someone to show an interest because a lot of them feel that no one cares about what they think or what they want. The former Marine came out of retirement to manage the program. It's a job that extends well past the few hours kids spend there each evening. Wright drives kids to and from the center and if they need a ride to say a court hearing or therapy appointment he'll help if he can. He teaches them how to do things like tie a tie or change a tire, and once in a while he'll take them out bowling or to the movies. Because a lot of these kids don't have positive male role models in their lives, 95 percent of the kids that come in when I do the orientation,

they come in with their mothers or grandmothers. So we try to fill that void as best we can. The extra support can be a huge help for parents like Damari's mom Dee. We're also not using her last name to protect his identity. She says dealing with Damari's arrest in the court system was really stressful. Because I'm working a full-time job, I have another child, I was going to school at that time, so it was just like, how in the world am I going to be getting this kid to and from this program that's court-ordered so that he can complete it? Dee says she saw Damari transform over the six months he spent in the program. He'd come home talking about career advice he'd received or community service he enjoyed doing.

In September, a judge dismissed Damari's case. This is a second chance for him to have a clean slate to be able to live a full-fledged life. In its first year, Hillsboro's youth gun offender program served 36 kids. Damari is one of 16 who successfully completed it. Others are still enrolled, while four were discharged for getting in trouble again. It's too soon to tell whether that will stick, but studies show diversion programs like this are usually more effective at keeping kids from re-offending than traditional punishment, and they're cheaper to run. Safe and Sound plans to partner with researchers to examine whether the program

also improves families' well-being. also improves family's well-being. Damari's 17 now and in the monitoring phase of the program. He spent the last few months preparing to take the GED exam and helping his mom with the community garden she runs in Tampa. Help out more with the labor stuff than actually doing the little seeds. So watering and then building these beds, that's what I build. He picked vines from the fence one recent afternoon and reflected on what's changed since his arrest.

Damari says he understands how reckless it was to walk around with a loaded gun. And he feels more comfortable turning to adults like his mom or Mr. Thaddeus for help. This month, Damari earned his high school diploma. He hopes to attend trade school and pursue a career in HVAC or as an electrician. And he'd like to stay connected with the program and maybe mentor

other kids one day. I just wish people would stay out of trouble, make it a better community, try to make your community the best community. Damari's life isn't panning out the way he expected it to a year ago, but he plans to make the most of his second chance. he expected it to a year ago, but he plans to make the most of his second chance. Some criminal justice reform advocates in Florida are working hard to steer young people away from violence, but resources are often limited while demand for help grows. Stephanie Colombini continues her series, Growing Up With Guns, with a look at efforts to guide kids who've gotten trouble with guns. Freddie Barton is slammed. He helps kids who get arrested in the Tampa area stay out of more trouble, and it's often a 24-7 job. Every morning, even

Christmas, Barton's in court. He's looking for kids to join diversion programs he runs as executive director of the non-profit Safe and Sound Hillsboro. One focuses on teens arrested on gun charges. The goal is to keep them from committing violent crimes. But then also pairing them up with a mentor or a guide that's going to follow them and see what else they need in order to not just not reoffend, but also be better and productive. The Youth Gun Offender Program involves six months of court-ordered education and support services, plus another six of monitoring. It launched about a year ago, as Florida experienced a roughly 40 percent jump in kids getting arrested on weapons charges.

Barton says they use about $100,000 in county funds, plus some state funding to pay for the program. Stakeholders like police officials, judges, and prosecutors applaud the effort as an effective alternative to jailing kids. Here's Irene Maslanek with the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office. We have a huge outbreak of kids possessing guns and we wanted to do something to respond to that and something that's proactive and helps them rehabilitate, which is the whole point of juvenile justice, right? A lot goes into running these initiatives. Barton and his colleague Thaddeus Wright teach teens anger management and other life skills. They spend hours coordinating with parents and community partners. To make it easier for kids to participate, they give them rides to and from the program and free meals. Barton says interns

and volunteers help, but the bulk of the work falls on them. You're talking about case management, you're talking about navigating the judicial process, you're talking about feeding them, so it takes quite a bit of resources. And then there are the unofficial duties. One morning, Wright was attending court via Zoom when he got a phone call. Hey, what's going on, bud? A teen they're working with was in a tough spot. He'd recently been arrested stealing a gun from an unlocked car. On this day, he showed up to his high school but wasn't allowed on campus because of his charge. His mom couldn't get off work to pick him up.

So he called Wright and asked to come to the center where they work. They find comfort in coming here. They know that we have their best interests at heart. Wright ubered him to the center and gave him some advice. He didn't have to do this, but Wright says many of the guys they work with don't have a lot of support. Their families may be struggling financially, and even parents who want to be involved often need help themselves. This will go on all day day and that's kind of why we need help. It's never ending and help is coming

safe and sound is receiving some state and federal grants to hire mentors and assist families who need extra support. The money will also fund research into how well the program works. It comes out to more than $1,000,000 over the next few years. Another donation recently paid for vans to take kids to and from the program.

Barton and Wright had been using their own cars before. But they barely had time to celebrate before tragedy brought national attention to gun violence in Tampa. A breaking story that we are following out of Central Florida at this hour. Celebrations in Tampa turned deadly after an argument led to gunfire. A man is now charged with second degree murder in the shooting that killed two people and injured 16 others. The shooting happened just before Halloween after a fight broke out between young people on the streets of Ybor City, a popular nightlife area. A 22 year old and 14 year old face murder charges. One victim was 20, the other also 14.

He was armed too. Barton helped organize a vigil for the victims. When we hear that there's a tragic loss of life, especially 14 years of age, no matter what the circumstance, you know, it really takes a wind out of our sails. He says some of the kids in his program knew the boy who died.

He wishes they had a licensed therapist on the team better suited to address moments of trauma like this. Just two weeks after the Ebor shooting, another teen was killed in Tampa. We need to get to our kids. We need to get to our parents. We need to bring law enforcement and all of our community agencies together. If we don't continue to keep doing that and let up off the gas, we're going to see more and more of these events happen. Barton says he knows Safe and Sound faces an uphill battle when it comes to curbing community violence, but they're determined to keep at it. You're listening to Growing Up With Guns on the Florida Roundup. It's a special reporting project from our partner station WUSF in Tampa. I'm Tom

Hudson. Gun violence rips through families and communities, and the grief may never go away, especially for parents forced to mourn the death of a child lost to gun violence. Stephanie Colombini continues her series now on how one group of grieving parents are channeling their pain into action. Good evening. First and foremost, I'd like to say thank you for showing up for this kind of live visual. Johnny Johnson's in an East Tampa park surrounded by about a dozen people. The local activist is wearing a T-shirt with a teenage boy's face on it. Johnny Johnson's in an East Tampa park surrounded by about a dozen people. The local activist is wearing a t-shirt with a teenage boy's face on it, his son, Jaquan. He died on New Year's Day nearly seven years ago.

Jaquan was a high school sophomore and rising basketball star. The 17-year-old was shot and killed during a drug deal. My life was never the same since that phone call even though I had plenty of my peers kids was murdered gunned down and stuff so it wasn't new to me but it's a difference when it's knocked on your door. Close to 6,000 children ages 17 and younger have been killed or injured by guns in the U.S. so far this year. The Gun Violence Archive reports that's a roughly 50 percent increase from 2017 when Johnson's son died. Black children are most at risk. In Florida, more than 70 kids have died in shootings this year, while dozens more have been hurt. Johnson has devoted himself to honoring these victims. He helps run the group Rise Up for Peace.

They host vigils like this and invite other parents to open up about their loss. Ashley Alexander timidly steps in front of the group. Her daughter, Nylexia, was murdered in May 2022. She was just 14. The group listens intently as Alexander talks about Nylexia's mental health issues. She ran away before she died. I question myself what I did to my mom. I'm out of it talking, so I apologize. I get emotional, too. Thank you, buddy, because it still brings tears to my eyes. I would never get a chance to talk to her, touch her, see her, come up to the woman she was sitting here to be. The goal of Rise Up for Peace is to support parents like Alexander in their

grief. Johnson's friend Patricia Brown founded it after her own son was killed by a stray bullet in 2020. Tampa police asked her to help raise awareness about gun violence. I asked them, what can I do? I said, my heart is so full and so happy. I don't want to see another parent going through the heartache that I'm going through or losing a child through since it's gun violence. Police officials will sometimes connect Brown and Johnson with families who've lost loved ones to crime. Johnson says these deaths can be especially traumatic. Families might have to hear graphic details of assault.

Investigations and legal proceedings can drag out for years. Brown and Johnson direct parents to resources and offer the emotional support they wish they had when their kids died. We've been sentenced to life without our loved ones just like them, so that makes us always available. 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. I just talked to a family the other night at 12 a.m. I was lying in my bed and I got a phone call.

My mother was having a breakdown. Johnson says it's been hard to make progress as a grassroots organization. He's often frustrated when the public devotes a lot of attention to some shootings, like the recent one in Tampa's Ybor City that killed two young people and injured 16. But others are largely ignored. As he spoke, Patricia Brown began crying next to him. It's heartbreaking. It hurts. It hurts. She couldn't speak for several minutes. This, Johnson said, is the toll of community violence. You see that instant trauma that this tragic cause and that uphill battle that families and friends and communities have to deal with.

And you stand there and ask yourself, why is no one is outraged? Some small changes are happening. The Tampa Police Department hired its first ever victim advocate last year to help families after crimes. victim advocate last year to help families after crimes. And in January, Rise Up for Peace will partner with a local grief counseling center to offer mental health services to families on their terms. We want to be sensitive towards the family and be there when they need us. Not, okay, it's counseling here, take it or leave it, right? Because everyone move or gather their selves at different times. Mourning is nothing that you can measure. There's no measuring scale for mourning.

And the group has another mission, stopping the cycle of gun violence. One evening this summer, Johnson shared his son's story with a group of teenage boys who'd recently been arrested on gun charges. Your life is on the line, and I love and care about you. He told the group he wasn't proud of his son's actions the night he died, but he'd do anything to have him back. He warned the teens messing around with guns could cost them their lives and leave their families in his position. So think about it the next time you put yourself in a situation where you're going to hurt more than yourself. One boy asked Johnson if he could reach out to him for help.

Johnson smiled and shared his contact with everyone. I really appreciate y'all again, man. I can't thank you enough. Like I said, y'all do more for me. He says this is what motivates him to keep fighting for change. Still to come in our program, the young survivors of gun violence. You're listening to The Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Thanks for being along with us this week. Today on our program, come with us on the long journey to save the Everglades. The way the light is dabbling across the mangrove prep routes and all the birds we're hearing,

it's just amazing that you can come out here and be absolutely in the middle of nowhere. That's in a few minutes. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children in the United States and even when kids survive there can be life-altering consequences. Reporter Stephanie Colombini with our partner station in Tampa WUSF finishes her reporting series Growing Up With Guns. Aaron Hunter is pushing himself through a leg workout. He's 13 and at a physical therapy appointment in Sarasota. Aaron's lying on a machine and has to use his legs to thrust his body off a platform. He's having a tough time.

But it's night and day from this summer when simply walking was a challenge. Aaron was shot in the head in June. Well, I don't really know. All I remember is I was picking mangoes with a friend and I came back to my other friend's house and then I remember waking up in the hospital. His mom, Erica Dorsey, says Aaron's a well-behaved kid. He likes football and video games and eating his favorite foods, quesadillas and McDonald's. Sarasota police are still investigating what happened, but Dorsey thinks she knows. The kids were playing around with a gun. Things went wrong, Erin got hurt, and then a boy from the neighborhood came knocking on her door in a panic.

I just didn't believe it at first, but then the kid said, you hear those sirens? You could hear sirens in the distance, and he said, you hear that? Those are for him. They coming to pick him up. I was like, oh Lord. A helicopter rushed Aaron to Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg. Brain surgeon George Jallo performed the complex operation. He says it took hours to control Aaron's bleeding and to clear the debris the bullet left when it entered just above his right ear and lodged halfway into his brain. Aaron was stable but there were still a lot of questions. I know he's alive but I don't know if he's going to be able to talk. I don't know if he might not be able to move an arm or a leg or I don't know if he's going to be able to see out of one eye. Aaron is one of 15 patients All Children's has treated so far this year for gunshot wounds,

up from just five in 2019. And data from the Florida Department of Health shows an increase statewide. The number of residents ages 19 and younger hospitalized with gun injuries jumped about 40 percent in 2020 from previous years and stayed high. These were cases where patients didn't die and many were accidents like Aaron seemed to be, but others fared worse. Dr. Chris Snyder leads the trauma program at All Children's. You can imagine if you get like a toddler that, you know, finds grandpa's handgun and if they shoot themselves. We had a case where a toddler was shot through the heart just a few months ago. No amount of special equipment or training is going to save the patient at that point. Some research suggests most kids who get shot do survive,

but those injuries can cause long-lasting trauma and financial burden. A study published this fall in the journal Health Affairs finds kids with gun wounds are significantly more likely to develop pain and mental health disorders, and survivors' health care spending increased 17-fold. Erin's mom, Erica Dorsey, can relate. Months after her son was released from the hospital, his injury still dominates their lives. It's exhausting because it's like therapy, doctor's appointments. It's the follow-up. The bullet damaged Aaron's vision and caused weakness and balance issues on one side of his body.

He still has a fragment in his brain his surgeon felt was too dangerous to remove. That puts him at risk for seizures, so he's on medication to prevent them. He's in school full-time but has to leave four times a week for physical therapy. but has to leave four times a week for physical therapy. I'm going to hang on to it. Aaron's balance has definitely improved. On this day, he held his own on a wobbly platform while bouncing a ball off a trampoline. He's getting faster. You better hurry up.

Two more. One, two. Good job. Good job. The team at All Children's calls Aaron a miracle for how well he's recovered. Dorsey knows her family's blessed. I just feel like any chance that I can, I'm going to stand up for the moms who kids didn't make it. She's urging parents who own guns to store them safely and educate kids about the harm they can cause. Aaron says he's staying away from guns. He says other kids should too.

For Health News Florida, I'm Stephanie Columbini. You can find all the reporting, including photos of many of the voices you've heard, by visiting WUSF.org. For the past 23 years, since the start of this century, the federal government has partnered with the state of Florida on one of the world's largest environmental restoration projects, fixing the Everglades. But the compromises that made the project possible are threatening to undo it. Through the decades, ambitions for restoration have shrunk, even as the price tag has ballooned. Climate change has made the effort all that more urgent. Jenny Stoletovich is the environment editor at our partner station in South Florida, WLRN. She explores what fixing

the Everglades means for Florida and the world in Bright Lit Place, a podcast from WLRN News distributed by the NPR Network with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. As a boy, Michael Frank lived on a tree island surrounded by miles of sawgrass in the Everglades. Islands like his once dotted the vast shallow river of grass that spilled over the banks of Lake Okeechobee and flowed south towards the place where we're walking, across the sawgrass marshes and south to the tip of Florida. The marshes formed a bowl between the coastal ridge along south Florida's east coast and the cypress and mangrove swamps to the west before dumping into the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay.

If you feel a soft spot, there's a hole in the lime rock. Frank is showing me how to find water in the dry season by digging a hole. It's kind of like a well. What you would do, you go ahead and make your hole. Put the mud on the side, this way you know where it is. And during the dry season, the only way you can get water is through that hole. season, the only way you can get water is through that hole. And not only you, the rest of the animals would congregate at that hole. Oh.

So you want to go further or are you? Yeah, yeah. My knees are gone, so that's why I gotta walk deadly. Frank's an old man now. He's a tribal elder with the Miccosukee tribe, and the world he grew up in is mostly gone. The sprawling river was dammed up to make way for farms and a booming real estate market. This part of the Everglades is just a sliver

of the tribe's ancestral homelands, making up the 75,000- acre Alligator Alley Reservation here in the center of the Everglades. The tribe has a special name for it. It's shining, the water from the sun. How it lit, say how it lit. How it lit means light. It's lit up. We need to change.

We keep doing the same thing year after year after year. Historically, the Everglades covered nearly 4,000 square miles, a river of grass 100 miles long and 40 miles across. Now only a fifth of that wilderness is left. The rest has been carved into pieces to provide a massive system for water supply and flood control. That infrastructure paved the way for modern South Florida. It's also what's now killing the Everglades. Too much water

gets stored in some places, other parts are dying of thirst. We have lived according with nature and with the animals and the birds. But development, people want more land, people want more access from here to there. That comes first. With climate change making natural events like hurricanes and wildfires worse, we now know that getting our natural systems, like the Everglades, to work again is more important than ever. But reversing the damage in the Everglades has been an epic fight. We're dealing with an environmental crisis. So when we start finger-pointing, we're just going to go all the way back to the colonization

of America. We're going to focus on the biggest effort yet, a sprawling comprehensive Everglades restoration plan approved by Congress in 2000. It's often called SERP. The plan is like a giant puzzle trying to reconnect the pieces of the Everglades now divided by levees and canals and farms and cities. Originally it was expected to cost just under eight billion dollars split between the US government and Florida. At the end of 20 years more than 60 projects were supposed to save the wilderness. It could have also given Florida a head start on

fighting climate change, but that's not what happened. Growing up, Frank's family lived on a tree island called Highland. And when one of my grandfather's friends told him, hey there's a there's an island over here where nobody ever lived. It's got a lot of trees and it's high. And when the water's high, it never goes underwater. So that's when we moved from Castelapo

all the way to that island. And that's where I was born and most of our brothers and sisters. The Everglades is where the tribe lived and sought refuge during multiple wars. There were more of the tree islands then and they were bigger. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins all lived in airy chickies and farmed corn or raised pigs. But these days the islands that are left are smaller. That's because the bright lit

place now sits in an area that's regularly flooded and hemmed in by levees. It's used to hold the water that replenishes South Florida's drinking water aquifer and to keep the coast from flooding. Instead of a wide river of grass flowing across ridges and sloughs like corrugated cardboard, the water gets squeezed into canals and compartments where it can remain unnaturally high.

My island's always about a foot underwater every year. But during the heavy hurricane season, it's about two, three feet underwater every year. All the big trees, the reason why we went to the island, because there was big trees, they don't exist no more. They're all dead. They're all dead. Frank's literally watching his homeland wash away.

My way of life, living in the Everglades, it's gone. It's beautiful, but it's just a skeleton compared to what it used to be. By the 1980s, it was clear that Florida's effort to bring nature to heal was damaging the very things that drew people to the state in the first place. It's clear waters, rich soil and the largest lake in the southeast United States. To reverse course, Florida unrolled an ambitious plan to restore the Everglades and reconnect the River of Grass. But that grand bargain came at a cost. I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station. Let's pick up the story of Bright Lit Place, a podcast by Jenny Stiletovich,

the environment editor at our Miami partner station, WLRN. The first time Terrence Rock Salt tried to quit the Everglades was in 1993. Life was full and good. Salt had been the colonel in charge of the Army Corps District in Jacksonville that includes the Everglades. He decided to retire from the military after 32 years. I never had a job in the Army that I didn't love. Some of them were hard. Some of them were painful. Some of them, going to Vietnam was not fun.

Then, the job opened up for the first Everglades Czar at the U.S. Department of Interior. The mission? Launch a plan to undo decades of damage to a swampy wilderness the size of Connecticut. As the Jacksonville commander, Salt had a reputation for getting people on opposite sides to agree. Interior officials had offered the Everglades Czar position to three people. They all turned it down.

So Salt volunteered. It was only after he got the job that he realized what he'd signed up for. I can remember sitting at my desk, no staff, no portfolio, no assignment letter, no here's what we want you to do letter, nothing. Just blank sheets of paper all around. Now what? And I remember thinking it's like that, the last Indiana Jones movie where they came to the chasm. That was nearly 30 years ago. The population of South Florida has since nearly doubled.

There's more pressure than ever to pave over the Everglades. but the chasm, it's still there, and Salt is still peering over the edge. He's nearly 80 and still mired in the Everglades. Attending meeting? Okay, guys. After meeting? When your name is called, please calm down. Terrence Rock Salt. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. So I will call your name Terrene Salt. After meeting. Hello, my name is Rock Salt. Mr. Rock Salt. We have about a half dozen, starting with Rock Salt. Former district engineer with the Corps in Jacksonville. Served Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

Instead of enjoying his retirement or playing with his grandkids, Rock Salt is standing in line to speak at a seven-hour public hearing. Rock Salt, Director, Rock Salt University, Colorado, Throughout the life of this whole adventure, I don't know if you asked me why do people keep doing this? Ninety-one. Thirty-two years. Is that right? Ninety-one, 2001, 2011?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It has been so serendipitous. It has not been. It's just challenging, rewarding. Salt isn't the only one. There's a lot of gray hair at meetings about the Everglades. There are scientists who've spent entire careers working to unspool the mess caused

when the Everglades was dredged and drained. A lot of them thought the fight was won 23 years ago, when the comprehensive restorationades was dredged and drained. A lot of them thought the fight was won 23 years ago when the comprehensive restoration plan was passed. But all these years later, we're still hearing the same dire warnings that work is moving too slowly. You know, 30 years after that, we're still fighting the battle

that started almost 80 years ago. We all can plan for the next 20 years, but we need to get something in the ground. I mean, I still cannot believe where we are. I mean, it's great to see some projects happening, but we need so much more, and it's so slow. None of them expected Everglades' work to be a life sentence, and now it's getting

outpaced by another threat, climate change. If we look back in history, it wouldn't be the first time scientists warned about a threat, got ignored, and the consequences unfolded with painful predictability. Johnny Jones called me up on the phone and said, you need to go up to the Black Cat newsstand and pick up the latest issue of Sports Illustrated. Estes Whitfield was the environmental advisor to Governor Bob Graham. This was in 1981 and two years into Graham's first term. Jones was a plumber and hunter who'd sold his business to become one of the state's most outspoken environmentalists. He said, you're going to need that before your 730 meeting this morning with

the governor and crew. So I went up and got that magazine and Christy Brinkley was on the cover in a swimsuit. It was the height of Brinkley's fame. It was her third cover for the swimsuit issue, the magazine's best-selling issue. And some of those many swimsuit fans might also be reading the magazine. Whitfield flipped past the pictures of Brinkley in a pink and purple bikini to get to a story on the back pages. It was titled, There's Trouble in Paradise. I showed it to Governor Graham and I said, Governor, the good news is on the front cover.

The bad news is on page 82. And so he smiled and turned and started reading. And when he finished reading it, he said, we're going to save the Everglades. Still to come, restoring the Everglades was supposed to be a banner of compromise, but then it started to fall apart. It's next as we continue with Bright Lit Place. You're listening to The Florida Rup from your Florida Public Radio station. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Restoring the Everglades was supposed to be a great triumph of compromise. But when progress stalled, the pack started to fall apart.

We pick up the podcast Bright Lit Place now in 2000 after Congress passed a comprehensive plan to replumb the River of Grass, but then nothing. Environment editor at our partner station WLRN in Miami, Jenny Stoletovich, is the podcast's host. attention to in Florida were its hanging chads. Here's Florida Governor Jeb Bush trying to celebrate at a press conference outside the White House after Bill Clinton signed the plan. ...to implement the Army Corps' plans, which is a very solid one. How do you feel about your brothers? If the U.S. Supreme Court were to remand back the Florida Supreme Court...

You're going the wrong way on that one. ...a standard for which to count these votes, would Republicans in Florida support that? We're here to talk way on that one....a standard for which to count these votes. Would Republicans in Florida support that? We're here to talk about something that is going to be long-lasting, way past counting votes. This is the restoration of a treasure for our country. At least I'm here for that. Sir, have you ordered local election officials for a train to Tampa?

Let me step back here. Any other Everglades questions? Tampa. Let me step back here. Any other Everglades questions? The next day, the U.S. Supreme Court called off Florida's recount and handed the presidency to Bush's brother. Meanwhile, in Washington, lawmakers were having doubts. The Army Corps already had a massive backlog of projects. George Voinovich was a Republican senator from Ohio who had a reputation for being a tightwad. George Voinovich, Former U.S. Secretary of State for the United States, Currently, the Corps has a backlog of over 500 active authorized projects with a federal cost of about $38 billion.

I want to emphasize the words active projects. These are projects that have been recently funded, economically justified, and supported by a non-federal sponsor. Like President George Bush, he worried about Congress adding even more to the Corps' to-do list and making promises it couldn't keep. It would take 25 years, 25 years to complete the active projects in the backlog without even considering additional project authorizations. Under the Everglades plan, if the price of a project rose too much

after it was authorized, it had to come back to Congress to be reauthorized again. So that ended up being a real stumbling block. Land prices in Florida were skyrocketing amid a major real estate boom. Between 2000 and 2005, housing prices rose more than 82%. By 2005, the price tag for SERP had risen by $3 billion.

So what happened in that window of time from 2000 to beyond, when all costs rose exponentially, pretty much none of the projects were able to be done under the current costs that were approved and authorized in that bill. And so they had to go back to Congress. Julie Hill Gabriel arrived in Florida in 2003 as a 1L at the University of Miami Law School. At the time, it was looking like restoration might wind up in line behind all the other core projects collecting dust. You have what is pegged as the world's largest ecosystem restoration effort

that had really just begun, you know, only a couple years in at this time. And at the same time, the land that is currently still available in the Everglades is being targeted to be drained. And I remember even then not knowing enough about it, thinking, it's so interesting. So we're going to initiate the world's largest effort to restore wetlands while at the same time we're filling in and destroying the wetlands that were made. When the plan came out, it included more than 60 massive projects to correct the natural plumbing destroyed by flood control. State and federal planners expected batches of the projects to be authorized by Congress every two years. The court thought all those authorizations would be done by 2014. Instead, after the plan passed, the Bush administration wouldn't unlock the money for Everglades restoration

projects for another seven years. Nature isn't the only thing at stake in figuring out how to fix the Everglades. A prominent Everglades scientist has been in federal court facing six-figure legal bills and up to a year in jail. On his last day working at the Everglades Foundation after nearly 17 years, Tom Van Lint posted a tweet that took a jab at his bosses. We'll soon work with the friends of the Everglades who put facts over politics. who put facts over politics. Van Lint had been a chief scientist at the foundation, a power player in Florida conservation politics with billionaires on its board of directors. But after years of growing more and more frustrated

with the way the foundation worked and being sidelined as its top science expert, in 2022, Van Lint decided to quit and go work with Friends. Friends was the much smaller, scrappier group founded by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, one of the biggest champions for saving the Everglades. I trust them. That little tweet would bring a world of trouble

for the serious and normally soft-spoken scientists. Okay, let me make sure I understand this. First of all, we've already established you had friction with Eric Eikenberg, correct? Yes. This is Van Lent being cross-examined by attorney George Piedra in a virtual courtroom 15 months after he quit and tweeted that zinger. Eric Eikenberg is the CEO of the Everglades Foundation. Told you he didn't trust you, correct? I don't remember him saying his exact words. Objection mischaracterizes the testimony. Overruled. Van Lant was an infrequent tweeter. He has just a couple of hundred followers, but that tweet got a lot of attention. Two months later, the foundation sued him, claiming he stole trade secrets. This fight between a well-regarded

scientist and the skilled political strategist he worked for pulls back the curtain on just how much politics has shaped the massive and very much behind-schedule plan to restore the Everglades. Before answering that last question, Do you believe that the Everglades Foundation puts politics over science? Van Lent paused for 12 long seconds. Yes, and I can give you specific examples. I don't need examples. I just needed an answer to that question. Can you please explain?

That's not, examples is not an explanation. Mr. Raymond? No. Okay, so when you put out a tweet that says you're going to go work for an organization that puts science over politics, you are surprised that anybody would interpret that as an attack on the organization that you are leaving. On the one side of the fight is Eichenberg, who ran his first Republican congressional campaign at 23. He's still usually in khakis and a button-down, running Restoration like a political campaign. The only way that Everglades Restoration is successful is for the political side of the house to effectively work with us.

Other environmental nonprofits also concede Eichenberg is one of the rare conservation lobbyists Republican politicians listen to. We have Eric Eichenberg. Where's Eric? Governor Ron DeSantis made Eichenberg part of his transition team after he won in 2018. Good morning. I want to take us back to January the 8th, 2019, just after high noon, when the governor made it very clear that we were not going to allow foot draggers to stand in our way. On the other is Van Lent, a double major in civil engineering and French literature. He runs marathons, reads Icelandic poetry, and paddles through the remotest part of the Everglades for a week at a time.

It's the place he's spent his whole career trying to protect. I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio Station. Mangroves that line much of the coast around Florida's upper glades provide a powerful defense against sea level rise, but without enough freshwater flowing down the river of grass, they could vanish. We rejoin the podcast, Bright Lit Place, and host Jenny Stoletovich at the tip of the peninsula. On a sticky summer morning, Evelyn Geiser and I sit beneath a canopy of mangroves along Shark River. We're not far from where the mouth of the river dumps into the Gulf of Mexico.

That's the final stop for the River of Grass. It's also where scientists have been monitoring restoration progress and climate change for decades. A tower that rises above the forest canopy collects data on carbon, while computerized samplers suck up river water at high and low tide to document salinity. Geyser is shrouded in a netted hood

to keep away vicious blood-sucking marsh mosquitoes, but that's not what she's thinking about. It's just so gloriously beautiful. I mean, look at this place. We've just made a precarious walk along narrow planks crisscrossed by spider webs. The planks are raised above the mangrove prop roots that cover the swampy forest floor like spaghetti. The monitoring station at the end is completely cocooned by the forest. The way the light is dabbling across the mangrove

crop roots and all the birds we're hearing, it's just amazing that you can come out here and be absolutely in the middle of nowhere in a part of the world where there's 9 million people just not too far away. Geiser is a wetlands ecologist at Florida International University. She spent her career studying Shark River and the freshwater wetlands that feed the towering mangroves around us. They can grow as high as a four-story building. She was lured to South Florida

in the late 1990s by the opportunity to work in one of the world's largest wetlands. At the time, some of the most exciting new science was unfolding in the Everglades. I came in at the time when we were writing the yellow book, the plan for fixing everything. It seemed to all be very carefully planned. All these different contingencies were planned. All these complicated trade-offs were understood. You know, people were really careful in trying to get that plan right, and it was exciting to launch it. And all these years later, she's dismayed that so little is done. It is not what's happening. It's happening in small areas, but it needs to be that on a massive scale, on the scale that created the problem in the first place.

I mean, I still cannot believe where we are. I mean, it's great to see some projects happening, bridging on the trail and the curtain wall in the eastern boundary and more water in Taylor's Saloo as a result. But we need so much more, and it's so slow. Work that could have given Florida a 20-year head start on fighting climate change. That's Jenny Stoletovich, environment editor at our partner station in Miami. These are excerpts from Bright Lit Place, a podcast from WLRN distributed by the NPR Network with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. That's our program for today. It's produced by WLRN Public Media in Miami and WUSF Public Media in Tampa. Bridget O'Brien produced the program.

WLRN's Vice President of Radio is Peter Mayers, engineering help from Doug Peterson and Charles Michaels. Our theme music is provided by Miami jazz guitarist Aaron Leibos at aaronleibos.com. Thanks for listening and supporting public radio. I'm Tom Hudson. Have a terrific weekend.