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Swamp sale so sweet

You know, when this thing was announced, during the Governor’s race, it seemed awful fishy, and now things are really starting to stink...

The investigative arm of the U.S. Department of the Interior has begun an inquiry into the Bush administration's $120 million buyout of oil rights in the western Everglades.

The deal was intended to thwart a massive oil-drilling plan by the Collier family of southwest Florida, which held the mineral rights at Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge and Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge. When the buyout was announced last year at a White House news conference, environmentalists gave the administration a rare round of applause in a crucial state for the 2004 election.

But now the Interior Department's Inspector General's Office has begun reviewing the transaction. The Inspector General's Office would not comment. But Hugh Vickery, spokesman for the Interior Department, said the inquiry focused on how the administration arrived at the $120 million price.

"We can confirm that the inspector general has told the department that it is initiating an inquiry into the valuation process used for the Collier deal," he said. "We're confident that the process used in reaching the valuation of those resources was good."

Bad timing

The buyout still has not closed, and the inquiry comes at the worst time for its prospects. The administration had requested a $40 million installment in next year's budget, but neither the House nor the Senate put the money in their spending bills. While the Florida delegation had planned to fight for the money, the inspector general's review could make it difficult for them to press their case.

"If there were some sort of inquiry going on, I would think that people would want to see how that comes out before they appropriate funds," said Jill Greenberg, spokeswoman for U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida.

And now that the federal investigatoin has held up the money, the Colliers are attempting to extort as much as they can:

A federal investigation that has stalled an Everglades buyout has a rich Florida pioneer family thinking about reviving plans for exploratory oil and gas drilling on some of the nation's most sensitive land.

The Bush administration's $120 million purchase of mineral rights on 390,396 acres of federally owned land in the historic Everglades was intended to halt drilling planned by the Collier family, for whom Collier County is named.

The Bush administration asked for a $40 million down payment, but House and Senate appropriations committees are not expected to put the money into the current spending bill while the Interior Department's inspector general conducts an investigation.

Bob Duncan, general manager of Collier Resources Co., said the family would ''look at its options'' if no money is forthcoming.

''We firmly believe there's additional oil to be found. We have our permits in with the National Park Service, so clearly that's one of the alternatives,'' he said.

Mary Munson, regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association, said the Colliers should be patient with the process.

''The Colliers know the fiscal climate,'' she said. ``The threat to drill if they do not get this huge payout borders on extortion.''

Summing things up:

A year ago, New Times probed the Bush administration's planned $120 million buyout of mineral rights in the Big Cypress National Preserve from the wealthy Collier family, whose operation is based on Florida's west coast ("Big Cypress Buyout," September 12, 2002). The deal, announced in May 2002 on the White House lawn by the president and little brother Jebbie, was also to include to-be-determined tax breaks that could have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Though New Times revealed that the feds ignored staff estimates that the mineral rights were worth only $5 million to $20 million, there was little response.

So why did the inspector general of the Department of Interior just recently decide to probe the deal, as the Sun-Sentinel disclosed last week? The IG won't say a word about the inquiry, but a DOI insider has a pretty good idea of what sparked it. "There's blood in the water," the source says of the growing criticism of the White House. "It's near election time, and the sharks are circling. A lot of people are worried about what this administration is doing."

If it chooses, the IG's office can easily verify that the inflated valuation is a waste of taxpayer money. The question the IG investigators should be asking, however, is this: Did DOI higher-ups use that federal agency to aid Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in his reelection bid against challengers Bill McBride and Janet Reno?

Coming as it did during the thick of the campaign, the proposal certainly raised eyebrows. "The timing with the Bush administration -- that energy-happy, let's-drill-everywhere administration -- was certainly very suspect," says Robin Rorapaugh, who at the time was McBride's campaign manager. "The Bush White House and Interior Department are not an environmentally friendly organization. The deal was counter to what that administration is usually doing. [The announcement] was there to help his brother."

Even the governor hinted as much at the time. "Whenever there is a convergence of good politics and good public policy, I don't think we should be ashamed about it," he declared at the White House.

The Collier family has been a major landowner in South Florida since 1921, when Barron Gift Collier bought 1.25 million acres of swampland. His heirs sold almost 700,000 acres of Everglades property to the federal government during the '70s and '80s, much of which now makes up the Big Cypress. The Colliers retained the mineral rights, however.

The family has tried to wring as much as it can from its holdings, including an attempt to trade them for surplus military bases in California and Florida in 1996. At that time, the DOI's Minerals Management Service in New Orleans determined that the rights were worth $230 million to $430 million. The deal died, though, says the DOI source, because the appraisal was so far-fetched that it couldn't pass the "red-face test." In 1999, the Colliers tried to swap the mineral rights for property at the Homestead Air Force Base, but by then, DOI staff had determined they were worth $5 million to $20 million.
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Early this year, Sen. Bob Graham reacted angrily when the Bush administration tried to slip a $40 million down payment for the Colliers into a 2003 appropriations bill without congressional scrutiny. It was subsequently withdrawn.