Protest at FL’s Honeymoon Island State Park against DeSantis-proposed redevelopment

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On the 27th of August, protesters showed up at Florida’s Honeymoon Island State Park in another show of opposition to DeSantis’s so-called “Great Outdoors Initiative.”

The “Great Outdoors Initiative”  is a plan leaked to the media to “redevelop” nine Florida state parks to replace wild lands with golf courses, luxury hotels and lodges, and even pickleball courts. The pickleball courts seem to be a “thin end of the wedge” to get a developer foot in the door for later plans in those same parks. ALL of the targetted parks would get four pickleball courts and a disc golf course.

Honeymoon Island is one of the parks that would initially get the pickleball courts and disc golf, no doubt to be later followed by the full programs of 18 holes of golf and a luxury resort. This plan is sufficiently destructive in and of itself to place at risk the survival of endangered species in the park.

Since the plan leaked, there have been protests at four or five of the targetted parks plus in Tallahassee. Even GOP members of the state legislature have come out against it. The meetings originally scheduled on just a few days notice for this week have been postponed as a firestorm of opposition has blown up.

There was talk of a shadowy “nonprofit” called the Tuskegee Dunes Foundation, that tried to poach the name of the famous Tuskegee Airmen. Golf has nothing to do with flying P-51 Mustangs against Nazi Germany, and people allegedly connected to this organization have been furiously backpedaling. Capping matters, the CEO of the Tuskegee Airmen National Museum reported his organization has never heard of the Tuskegee Dunes Foundation.

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