Thank you very much for the article in your paper about the Perry Oldenburg WEA. We have lived 3 miles from there for 36 years and didn’t even know it was there, until we saw the legal notice for the management plan meeting. We distributed about 2 dozen copies of the notice to addresses near POWEA, but none of them responded. Shirley and I and a friend were the only people to attend from the general public. 4 others had vested interests in the area, such as hydrology, native plants, and hiking trails. There were at least 7 FWC representatives there. Only Shirley and I filled out speaker cards.
The meeting was a disappointment for us, mainly because of their commitment to never-ending prescribed burns. They plan to burn approx. one-third of the property per year, so that there is a complete burn every 3 years. The primary stated purpose of the management plan is to protect the gopher tortoise. They admitted to an estimate of hundreds of tortoises on the property before acquisition, but didn’t know the current number. They didn’t even have an estimate for the number of gopher tortoises in Florida. Our research indicates there are over a million, about the same as the number of alligators. I pointed out that the tortoises thrived there without fire, and that we know of burrows over 30 years old on our own unburned property. I said for those reasons, the burns cannot be justified. Shirley pointed out the loss of acorns as a food source from the destroyed oaks. Matt Koenig actually said that gopher tortoises don’t eat acorns, so I question whether he ever does independent research, or just repeats what he is told.
Another surprise was that their “Maximum One Year Expenditure” figure is $534,890, according to the summary on p. 24 of their 2016 Management Prospectus. To me, that’s a huge waste of taxpayer funds. My guess is that they spend over $1,000,000 per year for every 1,000 acres they manage in the State.
In their Draft Management Plan for 2016 – 2026, on p. 18, they claim an estimated economic impact of $3,137,963 for the State and north central region of Florida, assuming 44 visitors per day. Really? Who even knows it is there? There are no directional signs, and several roads to choose from to find it. Since we knew about the logging, we found it by following a heavily rutted logging road. (They admitted that pines had already been “thinned’, in addition to the oak harvesting.) We drove in by straddling one of the ruts, and saw no evidence that anything other than heavy equipment had been there. In summary, their rhetoric does not match reality.
-Pat Miketinac