Sleepy Creek is the project formerly known as Adena
Springs Ranch which you’ll recall first proposed to pump some 27 million
gallons per day directly from the springshed of Silver Springs. It appears this not-so-community oriented Canadian auto parts billionaire
is beginning to show his true stripes.
-Sandspur
___________________________
Sleepy Creek - just another bait and
switch for Frank Stronach?
Page all
of 3Canadian billionaire Frank Stronach
is the master of the bait and switch. Let us learn from his swindle of a $15
million sports stadium from the children of Marion County, so he doesn't use
his dishonest tricks to make off with our drinking water too.
When Stronach came to Marion County
to raise cattle, and to request 14.6 million gallons of water a day to nourish
his cattle, he offered to build a multi-million dollar stadium and athletic
complex for North Marion High School. Due to a “misunderstanding,” explained
the Stronach Group, the offer is now off the table. The many disappointed
persons left in the wake of this development are likely unaware that Stronach’s
biography reveals a history of such business shenanigans.
Indeed, this bait-and-switch tactic should
be a wake-up call to the Marion County residents whose precious water supply
has now been permitted 1.46 million gallons a day, for Stronach’s Sleepy Creek
cattle operation. They may also be unaware that his “exclusive” golf club has
been permitted 278,000 gallons a day, 3,300 times more than his neighbors.
Stronach’s Florida cattle operation
is not his first “hobby” investment, nor is it the first one that promises to
make him wealthier, while leaving those in his path holding the bag. A 2009
Washington Post story recounts how hobbyist entrepreneur Stronach managed to
scuttle his investor’s money while living the life of Riley. Wanting to add
horse-racing to his personal entertainment dossier, Stronach “bought Gulfstream
Park in Florida for $90 million, demolished it and spent $240 million to build
a new facility that most fans regard as inferior to the old one.”
Not to be out “Trumped” by other
members of the billionaires club, the Post adds that in order to add more
stabling, “Stronach decided to build the Taj Mahal of stable areas, Palm
Meadows, at a cost in the vicinity of $100 million — an investment that returns
no revenue.”
Shareholders were infuriated. One of
those investors, Farallon Capital Management of San Francisco, protested that
MI Development was “pursuing an investment [to please] Frank Stronach.” As
reported in the Post story, using a metaphor that should sound a note of
caution to Floridians whose water Stronach wants to suck up at historic rates,
Magna Entertainment was a “giant sinkhole.”
And down into what sinkhole were
Stronach’s personal profits disappearing? According to investigators looking
into the matter who were quoted in a Swiss newspaper, they resurfaced, like a
bubbling Florida spring, into the tax sheltered vaults of Zug, Switzerland,
where other folks with deep pockets and clever accountants, say like tennis
star Boris Becker, manage to avoid paying taxes back home. The story referred
to Stronach as a “pseudo resident.”
Magna, the auto parts giant he
founded, decided its CEO was costing them more than he was worth. As reported
by the Canadian weekly news magazine Maclean's in May 2014, Magna outfitted its
boss in a $52 million dollar parachute of consultant fees and bonuses, “772
times the median household income.”
Florida Defenders’ record of
protecting the Ocklawaha from ecological disaster is well known. The infamous
Cross Florida Barge Canal, a boondoggle of colossal proportions, was aided and
abetted by a pantheon of pork-chop politicians and President Lyndon B. Johnson,
who broke ground for the canal in Palatka with a blast of dynamite. Two ugly
stubs remain of the canal, as well as the Rodman “pool” of water coveted by
bass fishermen.
FDE finds it unacceptable that one
of the nation’s most exotic and pristine rivers has not run free for over 40
years. If Richard Nixon, a Republican president, had the good sense to
decommission the canal and conserve both the river and taxpayer dollars, there
is some hope the Scott administration will remove the Rodman dam before it requires
expensive repair and free the river in the process.
 |
Silver Springs, Florida
Photo by Emilio Vergara, Skyshadow Photography
2014-04-26 |
Even if we accept there was a time
when barge canals and dams resulted from a lack of solid science and ecological
awareness, there is little excuse for the recent decision by administrative law
judge, Gary Early, to permit Stronach’s Sleepy Creek cattle operation 1.46
million gallons of water a day, when aquifer recharge of Silver Springs and the
Ocklawaha watershed is 30 percent below normal. How can it be in the “public
interest,” to use Judge Early’s convoluted interpretation of this term, to
provide water to 9,500 cattle who will defecate 158 million pounds of manure,
produce 11 million gallons of urine, thus adding 700,000 pounds of nitrogen to
a watershed already reeling from nitrates that have increased 20-fold over
healthy levels?
So we now know what the Stronach
Group is not going to leave behind. There will be no athletic complex for North
Marion High School, and a whole lot less water in the ground and fewer fish in
the Ocklawaha. We also know what Stronach and his Sleepy Creek operation will
leave behind.
Thanks to Gov. Rick Scott’s
business-friendly administration and the mass firing of veteran water district
personnel, we will have cow patties galore. Like the poor investors in Scott
and Stronach’s business enterprises, we’ll all be forced, in a manner of
speaking, to “step in it.”
We can only hope that Stronach’s
pending water permit is denied and that Gov. Scott joins Richard Nixon by
supporting a free Ocklawaha as a lasting legacy to the people of North Florida.
— Steve Robitaille is board
president of Florida Defenders of the Environment. He lives in Gainesville.
