This story was updated at 12:30
In a surprise move, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has asked county commissioners to turn over the county’s old jetport, and now home to the Alligator Alcatraz detention center, to Everglades National Park.
In a memo Thursday obtained by WLRN, Levine Cava said the county-owned site in the Big Cypress National Preserve is “no longer operationally or economically optimal for continued County ownership and operation.”
According to the memo, the county’s environmental chief and head of pollution regulation attempted to inspect the site Wednesday, but were turned away over security concerns.
Levine Cava noted that the administration has consistently voiced concerns over use of parts of the site for the detention center and risks to ongoing efforts to restore the Everglades, a massive years-long project expected to cost more than $23 billion.
The detention center is “fundamentally inconsistent with Miami-Dade County's longstanding commitments to environmental stewardship and sustainable land management,” she wrote.
During a press conference at the detention center Thursday morning, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would not support the selling the land to the park service.
"Over the last six or seven years, there were discussions about if this strip, if you just took everything out, would that meaningfully aid Everglades restoration," he said. "The view was that it really wouldn't make a huge impact. It would be costly. So I'm not sure that that's something certainly our administration is gonna push. It was fine the way it was."
All detainees, which DeSantis said have totalled 21,000, have been moved from the facility. He said he expect the center to fully close in two weeks.
"This has been here. This does training flights. It's not the most busy airport in the state of Florida by any stretch, but it has been used for that," he said. "It's continued to be used for that, and it will continue to be used for that in the future if that's the desire that people have."
The old airport was originally planned as a regional airport in the 1960s but blocked by environmentalists in part because it sits in the middle of a historic flow-way connecting Lake Okeechobee to the Shark River Slough. All that remains is a single airstrip, where the detention facility now sits. Restoration projects now underway sit upstream that aim to restore hydrology on Miccosukee tribal land. Downstream efforts are underway to reconnect the flow of water to Shark River as well as another slough that empties into Florida Bay.
In her memo, Levine Cava noted that the jetport's “remote location, limited aviation utility, significant maintenance obligations, and increasingly constrained compatibility with surrounding conservation lands warrant consideration of a transition to a permanent conservation and restoration use."
In the coming months, she said county staff would review environmental impacts and conduct a financial assessment to make a recommendation to county commissioners
