More than half a century before a months-long fight to shut down an immigrant detention center in the heart of the Everglades, another battle over the same land was fought and won by environmentalists.
A single runway is located at what is now called the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. It’s 10,499 feet long and 150 feet wide. It’s all that was built during a plan to construct the world’s largest jetport, five times the size of JFK International Airport in New York City. The plan included six runways and a thousand-foot-wide corridor connecting Florida’s coasts. The corridor would have been I-75, but after public opposition over environmental concerns, the interstate was built further north.
In 1965, the Dade County Port Authority (DCPA) began talks for the airport. It was a solution to alleviate pressure from South Florida's rapid population growth and the high traffic at Miami International Airport. The U.S. Department of Transportation told Congress the new jetport would divert about 150,000 aircraft operations away from MIA each year. The chosen location, about 55 miles west of downtown Miami and nestled among dense trees and wildlife, was finalized two years later. The 24,960-acre site straddles the Miami-Dade-Collier County line.
In early 1968, DCPA applied to the Federal Aviation Administration to build a training airport. On Sept. 18, Dade County officials broke ground on the Everglades Jetport.
However, the location off the Tamiami Trail was chosen for another reason. In the late 1960s, many people believed supersonic jets would be the future. These jets can fly faster than the speed of sound and are shaped like narrow cones with pointed noses to reduce drag and minimize shock waves. But when a supersonic jet takes off, it soon breaks the sound barrier. It produces loud “sonic booms” that can damage property, like shattering windows. The remote spot in the Everglades was selected to avoid that.
Where the runway sits
Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park are neighboring regions in South Florida. The two are intertwined: Big Cypress lies northwest of the Everglades and supplies the wetlands with fresh water. It’s also a major source for South Florida’s drinking water. That’s where the runway is.
Everglades National Park was established in 1947. It’s home to prairies of sawgrass and mangroves and protected species like the Florida Panther, Snail Kite, and Wood Stork.
An environmental awakening
As word of the proposed jetport started making headlines, public dissent began to spread.
Former President Richard Nixon’s administration tasked wildlife conservationist and hydrologist Dr. Luna Leopold with researching the potential effects of building the giant airport. Leopold enlisted the help of Arthur “Art” Marshall, a well-known ecologist in South Florida. The report is considered the first-ever environmental impact study in Florida.
The report recommended moving any activities at the jetport elsewhere. It found that development in the Everglades would lead to drainage in what was then only known as the Big Cypress Swamp. The report warned that if the original plans of construction were to proceed, regardless of regulation efforts, the result would “be the destruction of the South Florida ecosystem. Estimates of lesser damage are not believed to be realistic.”
From 1969 to 1970, environmental organizations, like Friends of the Everglades, started in opposition to the development; new legislation to protect some of the country’s most vital ecosystems was passed; and green organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) were formed.
Congress gets involved
At a congressional hearing on June 3, 1969, several federal officials testified against the project.
Founder of World Wildlife Fund and Under Secretary of the Interior Russell E. Train said the future of Everglades National Park was in "grave danger."
"The steps we take, or fail to take, in the near future, will probably determine whether this unique park is preserved or ultimately despoiled,” he said.
Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson also opposed the project. He went on to create Earth Day the following year.
Nelson visited the Everglades three days before the hearing and told Congress the project should stop, especially if it would take water from Everglades National Park.
“I think even the rankest amateur ecologist could come to no other conclusion than that the jetport, if the project goes through, will mean the end of the Everglades as a unique wilderness and ecological complex,” Nelson said.
Nelson pushed back against testimony by the Dade County Board of County Commissioners' General Counsel William Gibbs. The Board also acted as the DCPA, the group leading the jetport development plans.
Gibbs told Congress that selecting a site for the jetport began in 1965 and took more than two years – seventeen sites were initially considered. He said the counties used eminent domain to take the land from private owners in both counties. Each proceeding had an “order of taking” allowing Dade to take 27 square miles that Collier had acquired in September of 1969 and an abutting 12 square miles in Dade the following month. Meanwhile, today, there are still hundreds of private parcels nearby owned by people across the U.S. and used mostly as hunting camps.
Gibbs said the DCPA had already done its own environmental studies and that the airport would proceed with “in-depth attention to planning.”
“It would be folly, however, to assert that a commercial airport could be imposed upon the Everglades area without dislocation of existing ecological factors,” he said. “The port authority does believe that the development of a two-runway training airport may be accomplished and may be operated with a minimum of such dislocation.”
While no members of the DCPA attended the meeting, Gibbs said the port authority believed both conservation and private enterprise have major roles in the country’s development.
“Conservation must be practiced vigorously but practiced positively,” he said. “By the same token, public bodies, regardless of their power, must not, in their efforts to provide desired economic growth, be permitted to adopt a negative attitude toward conservation.”
Florida fights back
Meanwhile, Florida’s 36th governor at the time, Claude Kirk, had been supportive of the project. But by September of 1969, he’d received protest mail running 50-to-1 against the airport.
Kirk hired Nathaniel “Nat” Reed as an environmental consultant for $1 per year. He convinced the governor, an anti-establishment Republican elected in 1966, to take pro-environmental stances like opposing the jetport, according to the National Audubon Society.
“And (Kirk) said, I want you to go down immediately. I want you to look at all the plans, and I want a full evaluation from an ecological environmental standpoint of the proposed jetport and the impact that it could have on the Big Cypress country of the Everglades,” Reed said in an oral history interview with the National Park Service.
Reed went to the Everglades immediately. He enlisted the help of Marshall, and the two men “plunged in.” Reed said they went to the site, pored over hydrological maps, and researched the potential impacts that major development could have on Big Cypress and the water.
“It was alarming to say the least,” Reed said.
He said airport authority officials were unable to address key concerns, like how someone would get from the jetport to Miami and how community developments, likely to be built around the airport in the marshland, could impact the entire ecosystem.
“Well, anyway, Kirk said, ‘I'm in a helluva jam. I'm committed to the airport. I've gone down there. I've had a spade in my hand. What am I going to do?’ Well, there had begun the drumbeat from Washington with Secretary Wally Hickel in the Park Service that they were getting deeply concerned about the impact that the development of the airport would have,” Reed said. “So Claude and I decided that the best thing to do was to go to Washington and give a briefing to Interior and share the concerns.”
Gov. Kirk went on to establish the Florida Department of Air and Water Pollution Control, a precursor to the modern Florida Department of Environmental Protection. He named Reed chairman of the agency.
Reed later joined the federal government, serving as the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford. During his time in Washington D.C., he remained committed to protecting Florida’s environment. He helped draft legislation, including the 1972 Clean Water Act and the 1973 Endangered Species Act, and also secured federal funding and protection for the Big Cypress swamp as one of the nation’s first national preserves.
Lawmakers listen
Leopold’s report is what led Nixon to sign the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, on Jan. 1, 1970. The law requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of proposed actions before making a decision. It’s “look before you leap” legislation, according to the Center for Biological Diversity’s Florida and Caribbean Director and Senior Attorney Elise Bennett.
The law also created the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which still exists today. The CEQ was established within the Executive Office of the President and works with federal agencies to develop policies and initiatives. Russell Train was its first chairman in 1970.
Weeks after Nixon agreed to NEPA, his administration finalized a deal between the U.S., Florida, and Dade County, often referred to as the “Everglades pact.” It stopped construction at the jetport.
The pact was a three-year agreement that allowed the DCPA to continue training operations, provided a new site was selected, and the current property was abandoned. Another site was selected in the 1970s, but the project failed, according to Miami-Dade County documents.
“Airport facilities already constructed on the site near the Everglades National Park will be used as temporary training facilities only,” Nixon wrote in a statement about the agreement. He called it an “outstanding victory for conservation.”
Training continues
The developed part of the airport takes up 900 acres in the southern part of the property. It includes a maintenance trailer, communications structures, and a 10,500-foot paved runway.
The single runway in the Everglades stayed fairly active for pilots to practice take-offs and landings — called touch and goes — on both giant and small jets from nearly a dozen nations.
In 1972, two years after construction ended, reports say around 100,000 flights flew through, calling it “unfinished, but not abandoned.”
Later reporting says the jetport peaked at about 200,000 operations in some years.
In 1973, the federal government monitored pollution at the site from the flights. The Associated Press said ozone occasionally exceeded limits. The tests were part of the Everglades pact, allowing airlines to train there as long as it posed no threat to wildlife.
By 1983, when the pact expired, the two-mile-long strip only saw about 24,000 flights that year. The chief of airside operations at Miami International told the Associated Press that air carriers “paid $8 for every approach or landing,” flight school operators paid a one-time fee of $1,000, and private pilots could use it for free.
And by 2016, the runway averaged fewer than 10,000 flights a year, mostly by small flight schools using it for training.
Over the years, Miami-Dade County, which now wholly owns the property, performed minor updates like repaving to keep the airstrip operational and in good condition. The airport can handle up to 175,500 flights a year, according to its website.
The director of airside operations for the Miami-Dade Aviation Department, Lonny Craven, told CNN in 2022 that there were multiple reasons for fewer flights.
“With the advent of flight simulators and the high cost of jet fuel, the usage decreased, but we still get practice military flights, mostly from the US Coast Guard, and small private aircraft,” he said.
Today, the airstrip is used for deportation flights, and tents erected along the runway hold thousands of immigrants from across the country in a detention center.
The Federal Aviation Administration filed a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) for the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport for June 26 through Dec. 26, meaning no pilots could perform touch-and-go operations on the airstrip while the detention facility is in use.
Two days before the expiration, a new TFR was filed for the location. It expires on July 2.
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This story was produced by WUSF as part of a statewide journalism initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
