Many Floridians Want Offshore Drilling Sunk

In the driveway outside his fish market, Dewey Destin hefted a 20-pound plastic tub of brown hopper shrimp pulled live that morning from the Gulf of Mexico and uttered a plain truth of this state’s politics.

“Floridians throw a tantrum if you dirty the beaches or muck up the water, and that’s the end of that,” said the 48-year-old fishmonger. “Touch those, and you’re dead.”

On the slender strand of Gulf coast jocularly known as the Redneck Riviera, and elsewhere in Florida’s Panhandle, lives and prosperity have literally been built on the sand and water.

And that, many residents feel, doesn’t mix with oil and gas exploration offshore, which has been given the go-ahead by the Bush administration this month. And even more battles lie ahead.

When Destin’s ancestors arrived by boat five generations ago from New London, Conn., this was a virtually deserted stretch of barrier island in a fledgling U.S. territory.

The town named after those original settlers is now a booming resort, catering to swimmers, golfers and other visitors primarily from the Deep South, and does nearly $1 billion in tourist trade along with neighboring communities. The area’s claim to fame are “the world’s whitest beaches” of sugar-fine sand, and the sparkling emerald waters offshore.

The beaches and dunes, which look like rolling snowbanks surrealistically plunked down on the Gulf coastline, are so beautiful that between Florida and Mississippi, 74,000 acres have been declared a national seashore.

Little wonder, then, that any talk of drilling in nearby waters for petroleum and natural gas is analyzed as carefully here as the weather bulletins issued during hurricane season.

“Our beaches, to Floridians, are a national treasure, like the Grand Canyon, Pikes Peak, the Rocky Mountains,” said Jerry Maygarden, a Republican state legislator from Pensacola, the Panhandle’s largest city. “The preponderant voice among people here is that drilling off our beaches would be bad, since tourism is a big, big thing in the Panhandle.”

Despite talk from the White House about the need to increase America’s energy resources and despite the Panhandle’s dominantly Republican and business-friendly politics, chambers of commerce, county commissions, town councils and newspaper editorialists oppose prospecting for hydrocarbons in the waters off Florida.

Those lonely voices here who do think this state should do more to help meet its own enormous energy needs say foes of offshore drilling don’t realize, or choose to ignore, how relatively clean and mishap-free the process is.

“On one side, it’s basically fear and passions, and on the other, science,” said Klaus H. Gorhbandt, 67, a retired petroleum geologist who lives in Gulf Breeze. “And they’re unbridgeable.”

Frank Patti, 70, a Pensacola man who owns a pair of fishing trawlers, expends a gallon and a half of diesel fuel for each pound of shrimp his men catch. He has an obvious business interest in keeping costs down, but he is also concerned about the country’s ability to meet its energy needs.

“If you don’t want offshore drilling, then buy a bicycle and do your part,” is Patti’s advice to opponents.

Consensus on the other side of the issue is so broad, however, that a grass-roots group founded a decade ago to oppose drilling includes among its members Republicans and Democrats, retired military personnel and surfers.

“Why does this question unite people? Are you crazy? Have you looked at our beaches?” said Enid Sisskin, a Gulf Breeze resident who is legislative chair for the group, Gulf Coast Environmental Defense.

Only a slight flexing of the imagination is needed to conclude that this hot-button local issue could determine who sits in the White House in 2004. It’s conventional wisdom that President Bush, who won this state, and the presidency, by a scant 537 votes Nov. 7, needs Florida again to be reelected. Anything he or his brother Gov. Jeb Bush do that could be construed as fouling the beaches--and this state’s $50-billion-a-year tourism industry--could be electoral poison.

Jeb Bush, who faces his own reelection battle next year, also can ill afford to be seen as the Florida politician who allowed large-scale drilling in the eastern Gulf to go forward on his watch.

“We’re not against change. We’re against ruining the things we have,” said Anita Gregory, executive director of the Apalachicola Bay Chamber of Commerce.

Already, more than 4,000 platforms in federally controlled waters off the other Gulf states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are sucking up energy for sale to U.S. consumers. An estimated 25% of all of America’s natural gas and 12% of its crude oil lie under the Gulf’s seabed. In the Panhandle, the prevalent view is that Florida’s neighbors are welcome to keep their drilling rigs and production platforms.

Bowing to political realities, the Interior Department this month reduced by 75% the size of a new offshore tract to be opened for exploratory drilling, which meant no rigs or platforms would be within 100 miles of Florida’s coast.

“You’ll be able to stand on any beach in the state of Florida, and from it you will see no development offshore,’ promised Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton.

Mark Ferrulo, director of the Florida Public Interest Research Group, a pro-environment group based in Tallahassee, hailed that step as a “pretty significant victory.” But past government commitments, and the Interior Department’s timetable for offering new leases, promise yet more controversies, he said.

In the 1980s, Chevron Corp. paid $38 million for the right to conduct exploratory drilling in another offshore area named for this beach resort town, and Dewey Destin’s ancestors. Beneath the waters of the Destin Dome, Chevron’s geologists struck what is believed to be the single richest natural gas field in the Gulf of Mexico, an estimated 2.6 trillion cubic feet worth $12 billion.

Led by Gov. Bush, Florida has moved to block Chevron’s plans to start tapping this vast resource, claiming drilling would foul Gulf water, air and beaches.

In a legal brief filed with the federal government, the petroleum giant has countered that the state’s fears are wildly overblown and that Florida is conniving to “categorically stop all oil and gas activity, regardless of the needs of the nation.”

Under the Coastal Zone Management Act, a member of Bush’s Cabinet, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, will have to referee the dispute. If Chevron gets the go-ahead, the company will have the right to drill as close as 25 miles from Pensacola Beach, another popular seaside resort.

“The Destin Dome is clearly the most imminent threat to Florida’s coasts,” Ferrulo said. “The only way oil and gas companies can now expand in the Gulf is to the east. If the Destin Dome goes through, the other companies will be in there like gangbusters.”

No new leases for drilling in waters off Florida have been auctioned off by the federal government since 1988, but earlier leases that are still active cover parcels of the Gulf seabed from waters off Pensacola to Panama City. Florida’s congressional delegation has introduced legislation to buy back all of those leases.

In December, drilling rights in the reduced 1.5-million-acre tract will be put up for bid, a sale that the state’s Democratic U.S. senators, Bob Graham and Bill Nelson, want to block. Meanwhile, the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service is preparing a new five-year strategic plan for more offshore oil and gas leases, which could include additional parcels off Florida.

For the moment, the newly established 100-mile limit is a compromise many in the Panhandle say they can live with, but this sentiment could be shattered if drilling closer to land is allowed.

“This is about the last pristine stretch of coast in Florida,” said Patricia Tolbert, owner of the 335-room Ramada Inn in Fort Walton Beach. “I just wish they’d drill way out there.”

Dallas Blanchard, a professor emeritus of sociology and anthropology at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, says making the process invisible from shore should placate most people. He has conducted a study of Panhandle residents’ reactions to drilling, and concluded “they’re not so much concerned with pollution but with the perception of tourists.”

Jim Apple, vice president for economic development at the Chamber of Commerce in Mobile, Ala., believes many Floridians suffer from “a degree of hysteria” when it comes to worrying about drilling’s impact on the environment. Alabama, the next state to the west, earns about $2 billion a year in license fees and other revenue from large-scale natural gas extraction off its shores.

“If you’re on coastal Alabama in Baldwin County, Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, unless you realize you’ve crossed from one state to another, you don’t know the difference from Florida, in terms of the color of sand, the color of the water, the density of the condominiums,” Apple said.

People who are paid to worry about the conditions of Panhandle beaches are not as sanguine. Each year, the tourism authority in Destin and Fort Walton spends nearly $300,000 to keep the shoreline clean. Residents still remember an oil spill, perhaps from a tanker flushing its tanks, that sullied some of Destin’s dazzlingly white sand several years back.

“I’m sure they are doing all technology allows them to do, but when you dig a big hole and dump stuff back into the water, things happen,” said Nancy Hussong, research and development manager for the Destin-Fort Walton Beach Tourist Development Council.

In a vote that was closely watched here, the U.S. Senate rejected an amendment that would have blocked oil and gas development off Florida’s Gulf Coast. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives voted for the ban, with a Republican, John L. Mica of Winter Park, casting the sole dissenting vote from the Florida delegation. Californians and other non-Floridians might argue that in times of energy uncertainty, Florida must do more to meet its own needs.

Drilling opponents in the Panhandle reject such thinking.

“When Iowa shoulders its burden for orange juice production and Kansas its burden for sugar-white beaches and emerald waters,” said Sisskin of Gulf Coast Environmental Defense, “we’ll shoulder our share of the energy burden.”