Jadell Kerr has all the menace of a smiling third-grade teacher on the first day of school.
But if her demeanor is mild, the campaign to discredit her has been ferocious: opponents have hired lobbyists to whisper in the ears of Hillsborough County politicians and sent private investigators to comb through her personnel file.
Kerr was director of Hillsborough County's wetlands protection division within the Environmental Protection Commission. The office has been around for more than two decades, making sure that developers don't pave over quite all of the area's vital wetlands. It is one of 19 such local environmental agencies in the state.
It was a job she cherished. She started her career 15 years ago at the EPC on the bottom rung, as a Scientist I, doing fieldwork. She eventually was promoted through the ranks and ended up running the 29-employee wetlands division.
Her five-year tenure came to an abrupt end last month.
Kerr resigned her $116,000-a-year job in July after serving a two-week suspension for posting a blog comment that criticized her bosses, the Hillsborough County Commission, and a local developer who has pushed for the abolition of her wetlands division.
At issue was the county's 26-year-old tradition of enforcing tough rules about when and if developers can destroy wetlands. Kerr ended up on the wrong end of a movement to relax those rules, a push dominated by one Tampa Bay developer but abetted behind the scenes by big-money interests from all over Florida.
She walked away with a $38,000 severance package and the freedom to take the gloves off in her fight to protect wetlands.
So on a recent Wednesday evening, she stood before 40 members of the Sierra Club armed only with a laptop computer and a PowerPoint presentation that explained why wetlands are so important.
"They are the kidneys of the environment," she told the crowd. Wetlands filter out pollutants from stormwater before they can contaminate rivers, lakes, Tampa Bay and the aquifer, our source of drinking water. They provide important habitat for birds and amphibians. They absorb hurricane storm surge and prevent damage. They control flooding in heavy rains by storing excess water.
Wetlands preservation, however, is hardly a given. Hillsborough County has lost almost half of its wetlands since 1990. Statewide, a St. Petersburg Times story found, more than 84,000 acres of wetlands were destroyed during that same period.
"Today, we are at a crossroads in Hillsborough County," Kerr told the crowd. "We have to make a decision — are we willing to let the state take over our local control of wetlands?"
Wetlands regulation is a bitter battleground that has seen neighborhood and environmental activists beating back repeated attempts by developers and homebuilders to weaken the state's environmental laws. The activists won another round this year in the legislature when the Senate refused to take up a controversial bill that would have stripped local governments of the power to write their own wetlands development rules.
But there was no time to celebrate. The bull's-eye had already been planted smack in the middle of Jadell Kerr's unsuspecting back.
Stephen Dibbs isn't the biggest or most prominent developer in Tampa Bay. Not even close.
But he has been the most aggressive and effective opponent of the local wetlands rules. Dibbs, who builds homes and commercial centers in suburban Hillsborough and Pasco counties, has argued publicly that the EPC's wetlands division is a duplication of services, since three other state and federal agencies also review and issue similar permits. He has called the EPC rules arbitrary and overly strict. He wants, in his view, more balance. "How can property owners and developers have the right to use their assets while we ensure the environment is protected?" Dibbs asks on his corporate website (he could not be reached for comment for this article). "For government to do well in this new, collaborative environment, they will have to think outside the traditional, regulatory mindset."
Dibbs' environmental record is a mixed bag. A decade ago, the EPC prevented him from paving over wetlands along Dale Mabry Highway so he could build one of his shopping centers. He sued, starting a years-long struggle with the EPC. He won that battle out of court when the county settled the case and allowed him to build the center. On his website, Dibbs describes how he was able to mitigate the destruction of the swamp by creating another one at the back of the shopping center property.
The Times reported that the project won national awards and that "even EPC officials acknowledged Dibbs did a terrific job."
He and the wetlands division battled twice again in the past three years: first, over the removal of cypress trees and associated wetlands, and second, over his plans to build two dozen homes in the Carrollwood neighborhood north of Tampa.
After the attempt to abolish local wetlands control failed in the Legislature, Dibbs picked up the ball and pressed his case before the county commissioners. This time, he had powerful allies. Among them was his lobbyist Todd Pressman, a Republican consultant with close ties to the commission and — perhaps more importantly — a seat on the Southwest Florida Water Management District board. Swiftmud, as the nonelected agency is known, is one of the other agencies that review wetlands permits, and Dibbs clearly benefited from having its imprimatur on his side. Critics have called Pressman's involvement a conflict of interest.
Even better than having a connected lobbyist, opponents of the wetlands division had a tailor-made excuse for wielding the ax: the state's property tax reform movement. Faced with having to slash tens of millions of dollars in spending, county commissioners could blame the required budget cuts for killing EPC's wetlands division and avoid (or so they thought) getting into an argument over growth.
In May, Dibbs, two members of his family, and a handful of his consultants and lawyers spoke at an EPC meeting to criticize the wetlands division.
By June, the behind-the-scenes work to get rid of the wetlands rules was in place. On June 21, in a contentious meeting run by Commissioner Brian Blair, the EPC board voted 4-3 preliminarily to repeal the wetlands rules and eliminate the enforcement division's $2 million budget. Blair promised the public a chance to speak but reneged and instead hurriedly gaveled the meeting closed. Even the EPC's director, Dr. Richard Garrity, was barely given three minutes to address the matter, almost as an afterthought.
Blair joined Jim Norman, Kevin White and Ken Hagan in voting to put Hillsborough County out of the wetlands business. All but Blair had received campaign contributions from Dibbs and/or his various corporations.
Three days later, Jadell Kerr went to her computer at 2:47 p.m. and wrote her assessment of the vote on the popular Tampa blog Sticks of Fire:
"It was obvious to me, and by all the e-mails, obvious to you, that the whole thing was rigged. Stephen Dibbs has had it out for EPC for quite a while. He has hired private investigators to follow me and other EPC staffers. He has some huge controversial development plans in the pipelines, and without the EPC, those plans are likely to be a slam dunk."
She blasted Pressman and accused Swiftmud of collusion. She said Blair turned the meeting into a "circus." Then she concluded, "These arrogant commissioners have to go. They are not listening to us. The Planning Commission is next, be on the watch."
She was suspended the next day.
The firestorm that erupted after the June vote was impressive. More than 100 civic leaders and activists signed a letter to Gov. Charlie Crist asking him to investigate what they insist is wrongdoing by the county commissioners (who comprise the governing board of the EPC). Former county commissioners weighed in with their support of the wetlands division, including the normally diametrically opposed Jan Platt and Ronda Storms, and some not known as raging environmentalists — Chris Hart and James D. "Big Jim" Selvey.
Kerr became a rock star/martyr for the environmental crowd and to those who have tried to dislodge the Republican majority on the County Commission. One liberal blogger purchased the domain name jadellkerr.com and posted a fake "Kerr for County Commission 2008" homepage. (Kerr said she's not running; she wouldn't rule it out, however.) The EPC vote has become a major issue in Democrat Kevin Beckner's campaign to unseat Blair.
The death of the EPC wetlands department is likely a foregone conclusion according to one county source who would discuss the upcoming Thursday vote only on background. The EPC wasn't always reasonable in its assessments, the four commissioners believe, and the majority of the board view its workers as technocrats.
There is certainly duplication in the system; even responsible developers have a daunting number of hoops to leap through. Many in the building industry make a reasonable request to have one wetlands standard and one agency to review it instead of the three often vastly different assessments they receive with current government reviews.
Attempts by the EPC to compromise with developers came late in the game; after the preliminary vote in June, Garrity hastily put together what has been dubbed "the hybrid plan" that cut positions, loosened regulations and allowed for more wetlands mitigation by developers as a means of permitting their developments. There is only the slightest chance that Blair, Hagan, Norman or White will relent and accept the hybrid plan, the source said.
Environmentalists don't like the hybrid because of its embrace of wetlands mitigation, which was always the major difference between Hillsborough's wetlands rules and the other state and federal agencies'. The EPC currently won't even consider mitigation (in which wetlands are destroyed and rebuilt elsewhere on the property as compensation) until it exhausts all other options with a developer. In Hillsborough, mitigation is the last resort; elsewhere in Florida where counties don't exercise local control, it can be considered as the first option.
Mitigation has dubious benefits. The new wetlands can take years to function properly as soils change and plants grow to duplicate those that were lost. Some scientists argue that you can't completely recreate destroyed wetlands, that the new wetlands will never do for the environment exactly what the old ones did.
Keeping control over wetlands protection at the local level makes sense, Kerr argues.
"I don't believe in a one-size-fits-all," she said at the Sierra Club meeting. "I believe Hillsborough County is unique. I have said a million times that mitigation is risky business."
If Hillsborough's EPC wetlands division falls, that would help fuel the drive to take away local control statewide. "If you can knock it down at the county level, then you can bring that back to Tallahassee to help your bill here," one legislator opposed to such a change said on background.
The Tallahassee lobbying corps smells the blood in the water; already, prominent anti-wetlands lobbyist Frank Matthews has sent letters to the Hillsborough board criticizing the EPC and insisting that it doesn't provide stricter protections for wetlands. Matthews refuses to identify his benefactor in the matter. Three paying clients in Hillsborough — Dibbs, the local homebuilders association and Mosaic fertilizer — have denied ordering him into the battle. He also represents mega-landowners/developers such as St. Joe's, with its gigantic tracts of undeveloped land in the Panhandle.
So Hillsborough's "budget battle" could end up hastening the demise of wetlands all over Florida. But Kerr won't go down without a fight; she has been speaking on television and radio to rally troops to Thursday's EPC meeting. Her blog comment may have lost her a job, but it gained her a following.
"I still feel like it had to be done. The people had to know," she said as she hustled to her car to drive to a cable TV show taping after the Sierra Club speech. "No regrets."
The Hillsborough Environmental Protection Commission will meet at 9 a.m. Thursday for a scheduled final vote on the wetlands issue. It will be held in the County Center, 2nd Floor meeting room, 601 E. Kennedy Blvd.
This article appears in Aug 15-21, 2007.