WITHLACOOCHEE STATE FOREST — Over the thrumming of insects and the squawking of blue jays perched high in sand pines, heavy machinery roared nearby.

Bordering this wedge-shaped stretch of state forest in Hernando County is Cabot Citrus Farms, a luxury golf resort that’s making upgrades. The company hopes to draw people from around the world to tee off on its courses and fill multi-million dollar homes.

And it wants to expand. Following a request from the company, the Florida Cabinet — which includes Gov. Ron DeSantis — quietly approved giving Cabot Citrus 324 adjacent acres of state forest, some of it harboring threatened species. The Cabinet’s June 12 discussion, which lasted less than 30 seconds, did not mention golf courses nor the state forest where more could be built. There was no debate, no public comment. No mention of endangered wildlife.

In return, Cabot would buy 861 acres of timber land about 50 miles northwest in Cedar Key to give to the state — land that largely consists of rows of planted pines with limited biodiversity.

When asked about the deal, DeSantis has said that the state was getting “better conservation land” in exchange for “less-desirable land.”

Since the Tampa Bay Times first reported the land swap Aug. 26, experts have raised legal questions about its validity. Floridians have demanded answers at local government meetings.

The pushback has come from inside state government, too.

At least one high-ranking state forestry official disagreed with the land swap, email records show. The governor’s office pushed through the last-minute vote, while Cabinet officials received the updated agenda less than 24 hours before the meeting. The other members of the Florida Cabinet are Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, Attorney General Ashley Moody and Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis.

These records, obtained by the Times through public records requests, reveal how the governor’s office coordinated this effort to turn public land into a golf course as DeSantis works to publicly distance himself from a parallel controversy surrounding proposals to add golf courses and hotels to state parks. Those proposals, made by the Department of Environmental Protection within his administration, sparked widespread outrage, prompting DeSantis to walk them back.

But the land swap deal in Hernando is moving forward. Now that the Cabinet has granted initial approval, a council within the environmental agency needs to concur, giving opponents hope that it can still be stopped.

Eugene Kelly, the president of the Florida Native Plant Society, hiked through the sandy soil of the Withlacoochee State Forest parcel on a sweltering day earlier this week. Along the way, he took notes of the coordinates of gopher tortoise burrows. They could come in handy if the land deal proceeds and he needs to plead for the threatened species. He’d counted 13 by Tuesday.

“It makes perfect sense for Cabot Citrus Farms to want this,” Kelly said as he brushed past golden partridge pea flowers and nickel-sized toads hopped across the dirt. “It makes no sense for the state to say yes.”

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Forestry official: ‘It still sucks’

Kelly, who has been closely watching Florida land conservation policy for decades, said he’s never seen anything like the Cabot Citrus deal.

For the state to trade the protected forest land, officials must find that it’s “no longer needed for conservation purposes.”

Usually, that process for offloading conservation land is initiated by experts within state government, Kelly said. But this time, the golf company, which is an offshoot of a Canadian golf developer, hatched the idea. According to the June 12 Cabinet meeting agenda, Cabot Citrus approached the Department of Environmental Protection to ask if the company could swap for the state forest land “to expand their current operation.”

This deal was added to the Cabinet’s agenda the day before the meeting through an unusual, last-minute process typically reserved for natural disasters and other extenuating circumstances. Emails show DeSantis’ deputy chief of staff, Cody Farrill, drafted agenda language with environmental agency officials a day before the rest of the Cabinet was officially notified of the new item.

Farrill sent one draft that stated the Florida Forest Service, “as manager of the Withlacoochee State Forest, supports the proposed exchange.”

Not everyone was on board, however, emails show.

Brian Camposano, assistant bureau chief of the forest management bureau, didn’t hold back.

“It still sucks,” Camposano wrote. The line showing support from the forest managers was deleted before the final agenda was made public, but the rounds of editing in late drafts further underscores how fast the project was moving prior to the vote.

On the morning of the vote, Camposano asked Alan Davis, a forestry department land coordinator, when they would speak to “Rick about this,” likely referring to the director of the Florida Forest Service, Rick Dolan.

“I guess next week when he’ll be in the office,” Davis replied.

Kelly, the environmentalist, has sent a letter to Dolan urging him to stop the deal.

Although the state is receiving more acres than it’s giving away, environmental experts say the parcels are far apart in conservation value. The state forest land is becoming fully restored sand-hill habitat, which shares similar levels of biodiversity to tropical rainforests. It is connected to other land where wildlife like black bears can roam. The land sits where a corridor for wildlife is already narrow.

The land in Cedar Key, on the other hand, is rows of planted pine trees. It’s interspersed with patches that have no trees at all. More importantly, environmentalists say, it is largely disconnected from other conservation land, limiting its value to create longer swaths of preserves for animal habitat. It’s also located in a remote part of the state with less development pressure.

Environmental experts said they can’t see how the Withlacoochee State Forest parcel could no longer serve conservation purposes.

“Our big concern is the precedent it would establish,” said Tom St. Clair, president and conservation chairperson of the Hernando Audubon Society. “My immediate reaction was, ‘Oh my god’ — that this could be done at the Cabinet level just at the request of the developer.”

When asked about the differences in land quality and why the governor’s staff facilitated adding the land swap to the Cabinet agenda at the last minute, DeSantis spokesperson Julia Friedland touted the number of acres by which DeSantis has increased the state’s conservation land.

Since DeSantis took office in 2019, “his administration has grown Florida’s state park system by more than 31,000 acres and has protected more than 245,000 acres within the Florida Wildlife Corridor,” she wrote in an email. “Land acquisitions and exchanges are how this is achieved.”

A spokesperson for the Attorney General’s office, Kylie Mason, said the land swap “is beneficial for state land preservation, as it secured nearly triple the amount of state land acreage.”

Spokespeople for Patronis and Simpson did not respond to emails requesting comment.

The timber company that owns the Cedar Key acreage, JTMR Timber LLC, likely stands to make millions of dollars in the sale of their land to Cabot Citrus Farms before it’s transferred to the state. But it’s not clear its level of involvement. John Appel, listed as a company leader in business filings, did not respond to a voicemail or text messages from a Times reporter. Cabot’s chief executive, Ben Cowan-Dewar, also did not respond to requests for comment.

Land swap a break from precedent

There are a number of moves surrounding the land swap that break from precedent, according to Eric Draper, who worked under the DeSantis administration as the parks director.

For one, there was no presentation to the Cabinet on an assessment of the value of the conservation land before the vote. Cabinet members, and the public, had no way of knowing that the Withlacoochee State Forest land harbors protected wildlife. According to Draper, that’s information that should have been presented at a public hearing.

Cabinet members were misled, Draper said, but it was still their responsibility to ask questions.

“There’s no way the Cabinet did their job, which is allowing for public input and giving this enough consideration to make the decision,” Draper said.

Second, the Cabinet’s job of determining whether the land is needed for conservation was passed to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection secretary, Shawn Hamilton. But that decision belongs with the Cabinet, Draper said.

Julie Wraithmell, executive director of Audubon Florida, said the Florida Constitution is clear that only the Cabinet can make the decision and it can’t be delegated. That move sets “a huge precedent,” she said. “It’s disposing of conservation land and suggesting it’s no longer needed for conservation purposes, when the case for that has not been made.”

Draper worked under Hamilton for two years and considered him “a public servant, and a good boss.” But Draper also said that, ultimately, “he’s going to do what he’s told to do.” The Florida Department of Environmental Protection did not respond to questions about how the swap was approved.

It’s unclear when the land swap will next come up for a vote. The Acquisition and Restoration Council, a committee within the Department of Environmental Protection that has the final say, did not discuss it during its latest meeting Thursday in Tallahassee. It’s next scheduled to convene in mid-October.

Looking for answers and a place to air their frustrations, roughly a dozen Floridians showed up virtually and in-person to Wednesday’s regular meeting of an obscure government body in charge of managing the Cabot Citrus Farms golf resort community. One woman said she drove three and a half hours from Palm Beach County to Brooksville to confront the Cabot Citrus Farms Community Development District board because she wanted to protest how public land was “being taken away behind our back.”

After listening to the many complaints, Michael Eckert, a lawyer who works for the development district, told residents that the group has “nothing to do with the land swap” because it only oversees the community and doesn’t own the land.

“It’s not on our agenda. It’s not going to be on our agenda,” he said.

The concerned residents left unsatisfied. One woman who attended virtually expressed her disapproval before exiting the meeting.

“That was a bunch of crap,” she said.