Developers want to build over everything

Florida Wildlife Commission chair denies trying to build destructive project he tried to build

The problem with appointing developers to run the state’s wildlife conservation agency is they want to do things contrary to its mission.

In the hot seat: the sitting chairman of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Rodney Barreto.

Over the past 20 years, Barreto has been appointed to the commission by three different governors — Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist, and Ron DeSantis — which suggests governors are as unoriginal as network execs. This was Barreto’s fourth confirmation hearing, and by far the roughest, because mobs of people contacted the senators to urge them to reject him.

After Barreto swore to tell the truth, senators asked him about the objections people had raised. Some were angry that he voted to allow a toll road to be built through a Central Florida preserve. Some were upset about the wildlife commission’s push for another bear hunt. Others were mad about his advocacy of the purposely misleading Amendment 2.

Years ago, our Save Our Neighborhood PAC was represented by Leslie Blackner. Here is what she said: “He’s just used to getting his way,” said Lesley Blackner, a Stuart attorney and longtime foe of Florida sprawl who testified against Barreto. “And not being questioned.”

Our former Lake Worth Commissioner said, "The place where it would be built, by the way, is adjacent to John D. MacArthur Beach State Park, which Reinaldo Diaz, of Lake Worth Waterkeeper, calls “one of the best state parks in the state. As for the property Barreto wanted to develop, it has “the highest density of juvenile sea turtles in at least the east coast of Florida,” Diaz told me. “Nearby is the only significant horseshoe crab nesting site I’ve found in the Lake Worth Lagoon.

That spot is so full of wildlife, he said, because Barreto’s property consists of “nothing but seagrass and a strip of mangroves.”

Read more about it... and see Reinaldo Diaz holding up a Horseshoe crab.