Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
County officials are shifting their focus from continued improvements of the park at the head of the Wacissa River to other areas that can benefit from expenditures of British Petroleum (BP) monies.
After spending between $100,000 and $150,000 on improvements to the Wacissa River Park and approving a feasibility study of properties surrounding the park with an eye toward purchasing additional land to expand the park’s recreational offerings, commissioners have decided to back off from the park for the time being.
Commissioner Stephen Walker, whose district encompasses the park and who has been most involved with the park’s improvements, recently expressed the view that it was time to move on to other projects, suggesting that enough work had been put into the park at this point.
In response, Commissioner Betsy Barfield at the meeting of Thursday, Nov. 18, recommended several other projects that the county might want to improve with Restore Act money.
The projects that Barfield suggested included the repair and restoration of the Wacissa River dam, enhancement of the Goose Pasture Park campground, inclusion of a portion of the county’s rock mine in the Aucilla River Sinkhole Trail and upgrade of the recreational amenities at the Pinhook River site.
The named projects, Barfield said, were ones that the commission had approved about five years earlier. They were also projects, she said, that the Gulf Consortium had already also approved as part of the State Expenditure Plan (SEP).
Barfield asked that her colleagues think about her suggestions and be ready to discuss them and select one or two for pursuit in the coming weeks.
In response to a question from Commissioner Chris Tuten, who heads the Economic Development Council, Barfield called it an idea worth exploring that some of the money be used to help a shrimp-producing operation that wants to locate a facility here.
One of the requirements for projects to qualify for Restore Act funding, she noted, was that they had to benefit the Gulf, which requirement she said that the shrimp-producing operation might well meet.
Barfield is the county’s representative on the Gulf Consortium, the public entity created in 2012 in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill to disperse the millions of Restore Act dollars that resulted from the federal government’s settlement with the companies that caused the spill, a large part of which money was earmarked for the 23 Florida counties affected by the disaster.
As one of its functions, the consortium in 2018 enacted the State Expenditure Plan, a voluminous document that sets the framework for the economic and environmental recovery of Florida’s oil-spill-affected Gulf Coast.
The plan also established the guidelines for the projects that the consortium’s 23 member counties may pursue with the Restore Act money from the disaster. And part of the process called for each member county to submit a list of the projects it planned to pursue with the funding, which projects the consortium and a host of other state and federal agencies then had to approve, including the U.S. Treasury.
So far, Jefferson has received $3.4 million of the $4 million that it was slated to receive from pot 1 of the BP funding. It’s also to receive another $12.7 million from pot 3, pots being the method of dispersal for the BP monies.
British Petroleum, the main culprit in the petroleum disaster, in 2015 agreed to pay $5.5 billion for its part, which monies were dispersed to the five oil-spill affected states in three pots over a 15-year period. The five affected states were Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
The BP oil spill began on April 20, 2010, and lasted more than four months, releasing upwards of 200 million gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico. The oil spill, the largest in U.S. history at the time, wrecked havoc on estuaries, harmed commercial fishing, marred beaches and adversely impacted the region’s general economic viability and its tourism.