Construction crews working on the Port St. Joe park first attracted Christie McElroy’s attention. (Photo by Christie McElroy)
How far would you go to protect your home from flooding? Would you be willing to go to jail?
That’s what happened to a woman I talked to last week. Her name is Christy McElroy and she has a home in Port St. Joe, up in the Panhandle’s Gulf County. She grew up in adjacent Bay County and now, at 62, she’s one of those retirees who has time to volunteer for lots of civic projects.
She and some friends noticed a construction crew at work in a park in her neighborhood. The work was disrupting the tidally driven canal system that flows into St. Joseph Bay and messing up their neighborhood’s remaining wetlands.
She and her neighbors had one simple reason for being alarmed about that.
“When Hurricane Michael hit, if the wetlands and the canal system hadn’t been there, our houses would have been full of water,” she said.
They were dismayed to learn that this work was being done by their own city government, with little notice to the public. They were even more dismayed to discover that the city hadn’t bothered to obtain any permits for messing around with a wetland.
McElroy sued the city and started collecting 300 signatures on a petition called “Save Our Wetlands.”
Meanwhile, she and her friends began snapping pictures to document everything for state officials. Then, on Oct. 29, she told me, when she’d been out shooting photos but was about to head home, a police car came screaming up. An officer jumped out and slapped handcuffs on her.
“He cuffed me tight and pushed me into his car,” she recalled. “He wouldn’t tell me what I was being charged with.”
Eventually, she found out: She was being tossed in the clink for felony trespassing — on public property.
“It all gets weird from there,” she told me.
While she was talking, it occurred to me that it was already pretty weird.
Interminable swamps
Wetlands aren’t on the endangered list, but they probably should be — especially in Florida.
Wetlands filter out pollution, hold back floods, and recharge the aquifer, the source of our drinking water. Not to mention providing essential habitat for imperiled species. And of course, soaking up the carbon emissions that cause our climate to do that thing the governor and Legislature don’t want us to talk about.
Not everyone’s a fan, of course. When John James Audubon visited Florida in the 1830s, he loved our flocks of roseate spoonbills and other wading birds. But he couldn’t cope with the soggy landscape where they lived.
“The general wildness, the eternal labyrinth of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently never ending, the whole surrounded by interminable swamps — all these things had a tendency to depress my spirits,” he wrote to his editor.
When I first read that, I wanted to yell at him: “You dope, that’s why the birds are there!”
Like the clueless Mr. Audubon, Florida’s builders and developers have failed to appreciate how important our wetlands are to what makes this state livable. They’ve been agitating for years to make it easier to acquire federal permits to fill in wetlands under the Clean Water Act.
Finally, in the waning days of the first Trump administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s coal lobbyist-turned-administrator gave his blessing to Florida taking over the issuance of federal wetland destruction permits.
Suddenly, because the Florida Department of Enabling Pretty Much Everything — er, excuse me, “Environmental Protection” — was so eager to accommodate the politically powerful builders, wetland permits became as difficult to obtain as a cherry Icee from the self-serve dispenser at Circle K.
A year later, the EPA under the Biden administration was waving a big old red flag about a lot of the wetland permits that Florida had issued. The EPA complained that the state was letting way too many marshes, swamps, and bogs get paved over.
A coalition of concerned environmental groups sued. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that Florida was doing its wetlands permits wrong and had to stop most of them immediately. Florida appealed, but so far has not been able to overturn the decision.
Of course, you could just proceed with destroying a wetland without bothering to obtain a permit first and hope no one notices. According to McElroy, that’s what Port St. Joe opted to do.
“I guess the powerful don’t need to ask for permission, just forgiveness,” she wrote to state officials.
Not for everybody
Port St. Joe officials said that they were just replacing a failing stormwater pipe under the ballfields, although there are suspicions around town that they were working on something much bigger.
The only notice city officials gave the public about the work was a brief note on the city’s Facebook page.
“Out of an abundance of caution and for the safety of our citizens and visitors,” it said, “Benny Roberts Park will be closed for construction until completion of the pipe replacement project.”
Because it would be an active construction site, the city notice said, it would be posted as a “no trespassing” area. However, McElroy and her friends noticed that no-trespass signs never stayed in the same place. They moved around for no reason they could discern.
McElroy told me she and her friends snapped pictures that showed the no-trespass rules apparently didn’t apply to everyone. For instance, she said, she spotted the city manager using the park with the county school superintendent and their kids.
That observation reminded me of the Outback Steakhouse slogan: “No rules, just right.” In this case, though, it would be “No rules for those with might.”
When she went over to take pictures, McElroy told me, “I didn’t go anywhere where we hadn’t recorded these other people being out there.”
When she first began raising objections to the city’s work, Port St. Joe officials said they didn’t need a wetlands permit because the property didn’t include wetlands.
But McElroy and her allies dug up some correspondence from 2010, when a walkway was built around the park. There was a DEP letter that refers to the walkway crossing wetlands — which means the park held wetlands too.
Finally, last month, the city admitted McElroy was right and applied for a permit to fill wetlands.
“The city applied for this permit … well into the project,” McElroy wrote to DEP, “and the only reason they did that was to cover their behind for work they were doing for weeks.”
By then, though, the cops had arrested her. To local activists, the reason seems obvious.
“We believe that this action is an attempt to intimidate and silence her and others from speaking out,” Dannie Bolden of the Gulf County Citizens Coalition For A Healthy Future told me.
No Rod Steiger
I talked to McElroy for more than an hour. The story she told me about what happened when a cop snapped handcuffs on her from behind, and what happened next, was a wild one.
She said she was taken to the Gulf County Jail to be booked, but she didn’t stay there for long. Soon, much to her surprise, she was put back on the road — this time with the cuffs in front, fortunately — and driven an hour to Liberty County’s jail.
Only when she finally arrived in Liberty County did she get to make her one phone call.
This story sounded so outlandish, I thought I was listening to a small town version of one of those paranoid thrillers from the ’70s, like “Three Days of the Condor.” Surely, I told myself, she must be exaggerating what happened or even making up some of it.
To check her story, I put in a call to Port St. Joe’s police chief, Jake Richards. I have to say he did not act at all like the stereotypical small town police chief you see in the movies (for instance, Rod Steiger in “In the Heat of the Night”).
In fact, Richards was much more forthcoming than some gubernatorial press secretaries I could name. He not only confirmed that McElroy had been arrested for felony trespassing but even sent me a copy of the arrest report.
Turns out McElroy didn’t make up a word of what she told me.
“I detained McElroy and placed her under arrest in double locked handcuffs behind her back,” the officer’s report said. “I then placed her into my marked patrol vehicle.”
I was intrigued to note that in the report, the officer who arrested McElroy says he made not one but two calls to the chief during the incident. He also mentioned that he’d muted the sound on his body camera during those calls so no one could hear what they’d talked about.
Maybe they were discussing who’d bring what to the department Christmas potluck, and not something like efforts by the city to squelch dissent.
The chief told me he didn’t have any comment on the arrest itself, which was carried out at the request of a city employee whose name was redacted from the report. But the chief did clear up the mystery of why McElroy was taken to the jail in Liberty County.
“The Gulf County Jail does not house female inmates,” he explained.
McElroy told me she disputes much of what is in the police report. She’s contesting her charge in court while still pursuing her lawsuit against the city.
If this was indeed an effort to intimidate her, it backfired badly. She seems more determined than anyone I ever met to continue fighting for her neighborhood wetland.
In the forbidden playground
I tried repeatedly this week to contact Port St, Joe Mayor Rex Buzzett and City Manager Jim Anderson to discuss McElroy’s arrest, as well as what the city’s doing at the park.
Neither one called me back. Perhaps they were too busy playing ball with other city officials at the forbidden playground while singing “Centerfield” by John Fogerty.
McElroy, needless to say, is no fan of them or other council members.
“I don’t trust any of these people,” she told me. She said she agreed with one of her friends, who said, “They would eat their young if it paid to do so.”
I have to admit that Port St. Joe has turned into something of a hive of official skullduggery. Just last year, a Miami company called Nopetro tried to sneak in and win federal permission to build a liquefied natural gas plant on the site of the old St. Joe Paper plant.
The one person who seemed to know about it was Rep. Jason Shoaf, R-Dark of Night, whose family stood to benefit.
Once people found out what was happening in their community, they turned out in force to protest and Nopetro backed down.
Something similar happened with McElroy’s crusade, with city officials belatedly putting in for the permit they kept saying they didn’t need.
The whole time I was chasing this tale, something was bothering me.
Last month, DEP boss Shawn Hamilton stepped down after the recent uproar over building golf courses, hotels, and pickleball courts in state parks. Public protests clearly had an impact there.
To replace him, Gov. Ron “Guess I’m Not Going to Washington for a New Job” DeSantis picked Alexis Lambert, chief of staff of the state’s division of bond finance.
Lambert may be a perfectly nice person, but her resume seems pretty thin when it comes to displaying any expertise or passion for Florida’s environment.
She’s previously worked for the state Department of Health, the Department of Children and Families, the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, and the Chief Financial Officer. She seems more familiar with the money kind of green than the ecosystem kind.
I wish DeSantis had picked as his next DEP boss someone like McElroy — someone who’s willing to take a trip to the hoosegow to protect a wetland. Honestly, we’d all be better off with that kind of person in charge of protecting what’s left of our environment.