Buying the farm
Every now and then, somebody does it right.
In the bold action of a man confident of his politics and his policy,
In the stillness is the act …
In an ambitious maneuver to help restore the Everglades, the state of
The price is $9,300 an acre which, based on the very quickest perusal of a Florida land Web site, isn’t a premium, and a drop in the bucket compared to the value of coastal Florida land like Briny Breezes.
By buying the company, the state of
The same trick was pulled more recently, in Blackstone’s purchase of Equity Office, as I documented extensively at the time in Barbarians at the REIT? and Barbarians, the aftermath: Part 1, the overture.
Who was the mastermind?
Governor Crist:
From the Washington Post: Robert Buker, chief executive of U.S. Sugar Corp., left, walks to a news conference with Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and Shannon Estenoz, vice chair of the South Florida Water Management District Board, in
The plan, described by Gov. Charlie Crist as the largest conservation purchase in
Crist, who has been mentioned as a possible running mate for presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, made the announcement Tuesday after months of secret negotiations with the sugar company.
Like many another coup, it was hatched in private.
“It was a really well-kept secret. I think the Pentagon would be jealous of how well it was kept,” said Susan Kennedy, executive director of the Everglades Coalition.
[Governor Crist] called the purchase “as monumental” as the founding of Yellowstone National Park.
The patchwork of farmland totals 292 square miles, about equal to the land area of
That much land at $9,300 an acre?
The surprise effort is aimed at halting the degradation of the Everglades, which at 1.5 million acres is the third-largest national park in the lower 48 states, behind Death Valley and
Loss of the
Preserved against overgrazing
To defend the commons against private predation, a higher regulatory body – usually government – steps in and enforces managed use. Kudos to Governor Crist for seeing that such a move was necessary here, or the watershed area would continue being whittled down.
This used to be the glades
Restoration has been a state and federal priority for years and is the goal of a troubled $11 billion program that, until now, had envisioned the construction of hundreds of high-tech wells and huge aquifers in an elaborate re-engineering of
The Okeechobee dike
It’s so hard for government to think of buying out private actors that government adopts a mental workaround of developing a fantastic and uneconomic technological protection. (Would that, rather than compromising nature, we had simply bought out all the below-sea-level parts of New
The sugar company buyout puts a new and simpler option on the table: Water can flow from the lake into filtering marshes. The cleaner water could eventually be sent onward into the “sea of grass” at the southern end of the peninsula. A direct lake-glades connection, even one comprising levee-lined retention areas, has long been a dream of environmentalists.
Sometimes it’s so much easier just to buy back the private rights.
“You’ve got to do something to transition lake water to the
“It will be a structured, managed system, but it will definitely connect Lake Okeechobee with the
Restoring the land to public hands creates all sort of public-benefit options. And the buyout is a non-recoverable cost, funded out of taxpayers’ money – the sort of big infrastructure purchase that only government can do.
Some company assets could be sold to other sugar companies, leaving some cane fields and orange groves still under cultivation. Because the U.S. Sugar holdings are scattered, the state will try to swap land with other sugar cane companies to create a single corridor for water to flow into the reservoirs and on to the
Rationalizing checkerboard holdings benefits everyone – as we saw in the history of railroad land grants, a checkerboard approach to grants creates an immediate market and leads to a natural consolidation with money as the winding sheet.
“Acquiring this large swath south of
Environmentalists, who only days earlier had been infuriated by Crist’s reversal of his longtime opposition to offshore oil drilling, were thrilled and surprised by the pact, which was first reported on Monday by the Palm Beach Post.
And we locals are pretty happy too!
U.S. Sugar is based in Clewiston, “
Charles Stewart Mott, 1915
By the end of World War II, it was the biggest sugar company in the
But the industry has been blamed for many of
Human development is subject to Paracelsus’ principle: nothing is poisonous, the dose makes the poison, or its modern form, mice kept in a laboratory always get cancer.
Pour enough of that stuff through you and you too will get cancer
From beginning to end, the prime mover was Governor Crist:
U.S. Sugar Senior Vice President Robert Coker said the plan originated with Crist last fall in a meeting with company representatives in Tallahassee when the governor made a statement seemingly out of the blue: “I just think we ought to buy you out.”
Lightning strikes! American history is full of such moves using money to buy land:
Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana purchase, which we bought from Napoleon rather than tussle with
Critics said he had no authority to make the purchase …
… and at the time, the Treasury didn’t have the money
Said Coker: “I was very surprised. I’ve been dealing with
US Minister to
South of the Gila, west of the
He bought it via treaty …
Under the agreement, the company will continue operations for six years. Then it will hand the state 155,000 acres of sugar cane, 30,000 acres of orange trees, a commercial short-line railroad, a private railroad for hauling cane from field to factory, a sugar mill, a sugar refinery, and a just-completed orange juice plant.
William H. Seward’s 1867 purchase of
Bought for two cents an acre
We paid by check (the actual check for $7,200,000)
With six years to plan, and the state’s credit behind the purchase, all sorts of value-additive possibilities open up.
“We’re turning over lock, stock and barrel,” Coker said.
It’s a brilliant stroke – and it raises another possibility in my mind. Want to formalize slums? Just buy everybody out.
Good for you, Governor.
A man who thinks he made a good deal
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