Florida wildlife commission chair denies trying to build destructive project he tried to build

Yahoo

17-04-2025

A manatee greets kayakers paddling near the property Rodney Barreto owns on Lake Worth. (Photo by Reinaldo Diaz of Lake Worth Waterkeeper)
There used to be a TV game show called 'To Tell the Truth.' It ran from 1956 to 1968, then was revived in syndication in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Then, because network TV executives seldom have new ideas, ABC brought it back in 2016 for a six-year revival. We'll probably see it again in the next decade.
The game worked like this: Three contestants would all claim to be the same person. Two were impostors willing to lie up a storm, while the real one was required to tell the truth. The celebrity panel had to guess which was which.
I thought of that old game show the other day while watching the Florida Senate Committee on Environment and Natural Resources run a confirmation hearing. In the hot seat: the sitting chairman of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Rodney Barreto.
Over the past 20 years, Barreto has been appointed to the commission by three different governors — Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist, and Ron DeSantis — which suggests governors are as unoriginal as network execs. This was Barreto's fourth confirmation hearing, and by far the roughest, because mobs of people contacted the senators to urge them to reject him.
After Barreto swore to tell the truth, senators asked him about the objections people had raised. Some were angry that he voted to allow a toll road to be built through a Central Florida preserve. Some were upset about the wildlife commission's push for another bear hunt. Others were mad about his advocacy of the purposely misleading Amendment 2.
But there was one exchange that I found particularly fascinating.
Barreto makes his living as a developer and lobbyist. Sen. Gayle Harrell asked him if he was trying to build condominiums on submerged land on Singer Island in Palm Beach County.
Barreto acknowledged that he owns property there but swore he wasn't trying to build anything.
'I don't know who's telling you that I'm building condos there,' he testified. 'There's not one application in front of any governing body.'
When Harrell asked him if he'd ever tried to build on his submerged land, he told her, 'Never.' Then he stood there defiantly, as if about to break into the Eurythmics song 'Would I Lie To You?'
The committee moved on. I regret to report that nobody brought up the fact that, in 2021, the Palm Beach Post ran a story about Barreto headlined, 'Top Florida wildlife official wants to fill, build on lagoon where turtles, manatees roam.'
'Florida's top appointed protector of wildlife wants to make millions by dredging up and filling in acres of the wildlife-filled Lake Worth Lagoon,' the story begins. 'Rodney Barreto … is pressing legal action to let his company fill, dredge and build hundreds of condos and houses on mostly submerged land off Singer Island.'
Maybe he didn't intend to say something so blatantly untrue while he was under oath. Maybe he's just so busy developing land that he forgot about this one controversial project.
Others offered a different theory.
'He's just used to getting his way,' said Lesley Blackner, a Stuart attorney and longtime foe of Florida sprawl who testified against Barreto. 'And not being questioned.'
Barreto isn't some clueless outsider who's swooped in to destroy Florida's environment. He's from here.
'When I grew up in Miami,' he told the Senate committee, 'I hunted in the Everglades and went fishing in Biscayne Bay. … It was the best time of my life.'
Now he's a millionaire who owns property in four states, chaired the Miami Super Bowl Host Committee three times, and routinely hobnobs with well-known politicians, raising beaucoup bucks for them and their causes.
'I'm in the business of making money,' he told the senators.
This is not how the wildlife commission started in 1998. Back then, the commissioners included a wildlife biologist, a dentist, a cattle rancher, an insurance executive, a charter boat captain, a retired sheriff, and a defense attorney.
The difference, I think, is that the governor who appointed that first board, Lawton Chiles, limited his campaign contributions to $100 maximum. Now the appointees are all big-money boys reaping the benefits of being major contributors to the governor.
'It's all quid pro quo now,' Blackner said.
The problem with filling the board with campaign contributors in the real estate and development business, though, is that they're likely to have projects that conflict with the mission of the commission.
Take the project Sen. Harrell asked Barreto about. He bought his property in 2016 for $425,000. Two years later, under the name of a company run by Barreto and his wife called Government Lot 1 LLC, he filed an application to build 330 condos, 15 single family homes, 30 boat slips, and a 50-slip marina with a restaurant and community center.
To build this would require dumping fill in 12 acres of submerged land and dredging 4 acres of the submerged property. This is a style of destructive development we seldom see in Florida anymore.
The place where it would be built, by the way, is adjacent to John D. MacArthur Beach State Park, which Reinaldo Diaz, of Lake Worth Waterkeeper, calls 'one of the best state parks in the state.'
As for the property Barreto wanted to develop, it has 'the highest density of juvenile sea turtles in at least the east coast of Florida,' Diaz told me. 'Nearby is the only significant horseshoe crab nesting site I've found in the Lake Worth Lagoon'
That spot is so full of wildlife, he said, because Barreto's property consists of 'nothing but seagrass and a strip of mangroves.'
Until about 50 years ago, Florida developers believed the best way to build a new waterfront subdivision was to do what Barreto was proposing: Create new land out of water.
They would dump fill on the submerged property, turning water into dry land, meanwhile burying mangroves and seagrass aucods galore.
In St. Petersburg, for instance, so many developers had built dredge-and-fill subdivisions on Boca Ciega Bay by 1957 that Gov. LeRoy Collins quipped, 'Pretty soon, we're going to have to drill to find water here.'
When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, the new Environmental Protection Agency used it to stop a harmful dredge-and-fill project in Florida.
Harbor Isles was to be built on the edge of Tampa Bay by using 1.3 million cubic yards of fill dirt to create 281 acres of dry land. It would destroy what biologists called 'a rich estuarine area.'
The EPA won that case. Then it won seven more in the Florida Keys, laying the groundwork for ending such destructive development, not just in Florida but nationwide.
Because Barreto's development project was a throwback to the bad old days, it did not get a warm reception from the state.
One of the agencies to which he applied for a permit, the South Florida Water Management District, sent back a 17-page letter that basically said, 'Dude, you have GOT to be kidding.'
Noting the serious impact on 'an unknown amount of open water, submerged bottom, mangrove and seagrass habitats,' the staff wrote that they had 'considerable concerns' and would likely say no.
Barreto withdrew the application — but he was far from done with the project.
For the next step, he basically tried to resurrect the dead.
Despite the Clean Water Act, some would-be developers had already secured permits for using the old-fashioned building method. Government officials had to negotiate a way to stop them. The settlements they worked out made sure that kind of rampant destruction faded.
In 2020, Barreto filed a legal motion to reopen one of those old cases. He asked the court to revive this long-settled matter so his Singer Island project could be declared exempt from modern environmental regulations and he could proceed to build.
He joined with two other owners of submerged property to legally object to the Riviera Beach commissioners rezoning their land for preservation. That would prevent their development plans, they argued.
These efforts backfired when the Palm Beach Post reported that the lead defender of Florida's wildlife was also the guy trying to destroy a bunch of it. A public uproar ensued. People demanded he either drop his development plans or resign.
'It's not just any part of the lagoon, it is absolutely the best part, in terms of its environment,' Lisa Interlandi of the Everglades Law Center said during an FWC board meeting at the time.
To quiet everyone down, Barreto dismissed his legal challenges and told the Miami Herald he would immediately sell the property.
However, it appears that his promise to sell the land was another — oh, what's that word that's the opposite of 'true?' It's right on the tip of my tongue.
Rather than sell the land, Barreto's corporation hung onto it. He still owns it. He testified to the Senate committee that his only plan was to use it as 'mitigation' to make up for someone else's mangrove-destroying development plans.
But a more recent Barreto lawsuit tells a different story.
Last year, Barreto's corporation sued Riviera Beach over the property. Barreto contended that by rezoning the land so it could not be developed, the commissioners had in effect taken it from him and he demanded to be paid. That lawsuit is still pending.
I contacted Interlandi about all this. She told me: 'The last thing Florida's submerged lands need is people trying to get rich off them. I think this is a great opportunity to pivot and focus on land conservation, not land development.'
I tried to contact Barreto to ask him about that.
I should warn you that this is where the story gets weird.
I have interviewed Barreto several times in the past. For some reason, he didn't return my calls this week. Probably too busy raising money for DeSantis' new foundation, 'Hope Florida Doesn't Find Out.'
Instead, to my surprise, I heard from someone who claimed to be Barreto's partner in owning the submerged land. And it wasn't his wife.
His name is Glenn Larson. He's president of a Miami company called Dock & Marine Construction that's been around since 1959.
Larson told me he'd known Barreto ever since the future mover-and-shaker was a police officer. He said he also built the Barretos' backyard docks.
This is the one and only time they've been partners in anything, Larson told me. He just happened to bump into Barreto while he was considering buying the submerged land and Barreto agreed to join forces with him, Larson said.
Barreto didn't mention him to the Senate committee and Larson's name doesn't appear anywhere in the property records. I asked him if he had any paperwork to show he's a partner.
'I'm the half-owner, but when they recorded the deed, they left my name off of it,' he told me. In other words, no.
The attorney who filed the deed was going to correct that oversight, he said. But that's when Larson — not Barreto! — filed the application to build all those houses and condos on the property, he said.
'I kind of messed him up,' Larson told me.
When the water district sent back that letter with all the conditions, he told me, 'Rodney called me and said, 'What the hell are you doing, man?' So, I withdrew it.'
Larson insisted that Barreto had no knowledge of the development plans, and that's why his answers to Sen. Harrell were not perjury.
Hang on a second, I said. The signature on the permit application looks like Barreto's, not yours. You're just listed as a contractor.
He acknowledged that Barreto did sign the permit application.
'I probably went and left the paperwork at his house to get his signature,' Larson said. 'But he didn't know what I was doing.'
I find it hard to believe Barreto, a hard-headed businessman if ever there was one, would sign any document without reading it.
Anyway, despite all the people who urged them to kick Barreto to the curb, the Senate committee voted 8-1 to confirm him for another term as a wildlife commissioner. Even Sen. Harrell voted for him.
Barreto has yet to appear before his second and final Senate hearing, this time with the Ethics and Elections Committee. The hearing hasn't been scheduled yet, so he's got some time to consider what answers he'll give. I promise we can handle the truth.
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