Haunted By The Future

By GRETCHEN PARKER The Tampa Tribune

Published: Aug 27, 2006

APALACHICOLA - When morning light shines through the smashed windows of this old, forsaken oyster house, the ghosts of Apalachicola Bay rise up.

The shuckers have abandoned their work stalls. But the concrete shows the scars left by decades of stacking, sorting and prying open the gnarly fruits of the bay. The straining of workers' bodies against their stations left smooth hollows.

The dock outside, where bay laborers unloaded their catch, has disappeared. It was swallowed by Hurricane Dennis' storm surge more than a year ago. In its place, the bare beach launches the oystermen who still start each day with hope and a plan.

But they know, and the former shuckers know, what will happen to this haunted house.

Condos are coming.

But not just yet. What is happening on this waterfront is a unique twist on the Old Florida versus New Florida fight. A stalled real estate market - and a legal challenge to the area's growth plans - is giving enough pause for this community to take real stock of itself and decide what it wants to be.

Fishing village or luxury resort?

It's a small battle in a larger war over growth in Florida. But the stakes are high. Those who are developing thousands of homes say the community is relying too heavily on a dying seafood industry. They say that at best, a portion of the old way of life can be saved and an influx of new residents can help.

Those fighting the new homes say that if development goes unchecked, what could be lost is a working fishing industry and heritage that cannot be replaced. It's a culture treasured, they say, by Floridians beyond this little nook of the Panhandle.

A Quiet Job

The hunters and gatherers bring with them their ancient tools.

The hand-operated tongs are standard gear, but they could be classified as archaeological finds. Nothing about the work of oystering has changed in 200 years, except the motors that power the small, scrubbed-out work boats.

It takes pure human will to tear the oysters from the bay's bottom. Mechanical dredging, a practice long used in other parts of the country and blamed for overharvesting, is not allowed on public beds in Apalachicola Bay.

The shells must be at least 3 inches before they can be legally harvested. Many are bigger. And they are plentiful. Even in these summer months, when the crop is expected to be more puny, oystermen are harvesting giant piles of meaty loot.

Many of the shells they scrape from the beds are dotted with pale, shiny circles of spat - seeds that attach themselves and spawn new outcroppings of fresh oysters. It's a good sign. These beds are healthy.

"Acre for acre, nobody does it better," said David Heil, a state aquaculture official who regulates oyster harvesting on the 6,000 acres of beds in the 210 square miles of the bay. In Florida, it's by far the most productive estuarine system, a network that includes three rivers - Chattahoochee, Flint and Chipola - that feed the gigantic Apalachicola River and pour into the bay. Florida aquaculture officials think it's one of the cleanest and most productive estuaries in North America.

It has been a hundred years since Apalachicola Bay oysters became famous by securing their own cargo hold on the Apalachicola Northern Railroad. Today, the bay offers up 90 percent of the oysters eaten in Florida and 10 percent of those eaten nationwide. They earn oystermen $3 million to $4 million a year.

Besides the oysters, shrimp processed here still bring a dockside value of $7 million a year, even though they're competing with cheaper cousins from Thailand, China and Vietnam.

It's not just about the oysters and shrimp. The nutrient-rich river water creates marshy nurseries that make ideal incubators for the fish that later migrate to the Gulf. Ninety-five percent of the fish species commercially harvested from the Gulf, including grouper and stone crabs, spend part of their life cycles feeding off the bay marshes.

What lies underneath Franklin County tells the story of how vulnerable the bay is to groundwater contaminated by too much development. Nine feet of sand gives way to limestone, with water flowing through it that runs straight to the bay.

Oystermen and shrimpers know how delicate the balance is.

"Once it's gone, it's gone. It ain't coming back," said Billy Dalton, 58, a lifelong oysterman whose father started out on the bay with no tongs and a boat with no motor.

Dalton's boat is one of about two dozen working the bars, the reeflike masses of oysters, open for summer harvesting. They anchor close enough to talk, although there is little conversation between boats. It's a solitary job.

Nearly 900 fishermen hold licenses to harvest oysters commercially, a number that has been constant over the past two decades, but of those, about 250 are regularly on the water, Heil said.

"It's such a unique culture," said Dan Tonsmeire, head of Apalachicola Riverkeeper, an advocacy group for the river and the bay. "They know when the tide and wind and moon and everything are right. They know which bar you need to be at. To lose that … is just like throwing the Mona Lisa out the window."

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

David McLain, a leader of the Franklin County Oyster/Seafood Task Force, calls it the "great plagues of Egypt."

He ticks off the enemies of the seafood industry. Rising fuel prices. Hurricanes. Red tide, which closed the estuary for four months last year. Unchecked amounts of cheap imported shrimp from Asia. Water wars - the Florida-Alabama-Georgia fight over the flow of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin, which stems the flow of fresh water and could tip the delicate balance of the estuary.

And development, which he fears will pollute the bay and eventually hog the area's entire coastline, icing seafood harvesters out of the public space they need to launch and dock their boats.

He has already seen three oyster houses in nearby Eastpoint close after their owners banded together, along with other business owners, and sold 31 acres to an Arkansas partnership for $19 million. The development group hopes to build more than 300 condominiums, plus shops, a fish market, a marina and a museum to commemorate the seafood industry.

The irony of building a museum to celebrate an industry that is struggling to survive just a few feet away seems clear. But project leaders say it could help seafood businesses by promoting their product.

The site plan includes razing several oyster houses abandoned after Hurricane Dennis. When those are gone, several hundred feet of precious boat launch access will be gone.

McLain's task force is conducting a study, with $75,000 in state money, to find out whether moving seafood processors inland - off the valuable waterfront - will work. The proposal concerns some, such as Heil, who fear that a seafood industry out of sight is politically "out of mind."

Being on the waterfront, where residents and tourists can see the work of harvesting seafood, keeps it integral to the community, he said.

Putting On The Brakes

Plans for the Eastpoint condos are moving ahead, but because of the flat real estate market, nothing will be completed for about two years, said Dirk Van Veen, project director for the Arkansas-based Growth Group.

Other projects across the county are slowing way down, including one near Eastpoint that has built only a dozen homes instead of the 112 forecast.

Also held up, by a legal challenge from environmentalists, is a massive set of plans to build 3,500 homes east of Apalachicola and Eastpoint along southeast Franklin County's waterfront. It would be a substantial addition to a county of 11,800 people.

The legal fight against those plans spawned a political campaign. Wildlife consultant Don Ashley, who is leading the challenge, is convinced the only way to stop the area's "explosive growth" is to help run government. He's running against the county commission's chairwoman in the Nov. 7 election.

"It's not trite to say this is almost like the American Indian and the bison," he said. So much of the seafood industry here, the cultural heart of Franklin County, already has been lost. Putting thousands of homes in such a sensitive area is a sure way to funnel pollution into the bay from runoff and contaminated groundwater, he said.

The neighborhoods would abut a state forest, a state park, a national wildlife refuge, a national forest and an aquatic preserve.

At the helm of the plans stands the St. Joe Co., Florida's goliath timber company and paper maker-turned-developer. St. Joe officials say they're exceeding state water-quality standards in their plans for stormwater drainage and sewer lines. For three years, they'll submit to Florida State University tests of their drainage.

The company argues that it has a clear commitment to the area. St. Joe isn't going anywhere.

The company owns more of Franklin County than any other private entity. It's an incredible split: 80 percent of the county is national forestland or state parkland, much of it bought from St. Joe; 15 percent is owned by St. Joe; and 5 percent is what's left over.

Thanks to acquisitions made in the 1930s, St. Joe still owns about 850,000 acres in Florida, mostly in the Panhandle.

But even St. Joe is not immune to powerful market forces. At SummerCamp, the company's lush, new neighborhood going into the tall pines along four miles of Franklin County beach, St. Joe sold 65 lots in the first half of 2005. Over the past year, only 10 were sold.

The county's homebuilding rate has crashed. There are fewer homes being built this year than in 1990. Last month, only a half-dozen building permits were issued, said Alan Pierce, the county's planner and a former mayor of Apalachicola.

Real estate agents who just a year ago were flush with competitive bids and closings report that more of the county is on the market now than they've ever seen. Of the county's $4.2 billion tax base, $1 billion is for sale.

The brakes are slamming on development faster than most expected. The lull puts Franklin County at a crossroads.

Limited-growth advocates see it as a chance for the county to backtrack and redefine what it wants to be before the market ramps back up.

They look to Carrabelle, eight miles up the coast, for inspiration.

Starting Anew

The turning point in little Carrabelle was a proposal to develop 90 condos in the center of town, along beachfront U.S. 98. It would have blacked out a 4.5-block stretch of Carrabelle's view of the Gulf of Mexico.

People got mad.

They elected three new city commissioners and a new mayor. In a referendum, they nixed future high-density developments. Over the past year, the new government has started a planning board and a building department, hired the city's first code-enforcement officers, and started rebuilding a public boat ramp that had been removed.

The former sponging and shrimping town has only a thousand homes; plans were in the works to build 2,200 more. The halted market for condos is buying Carrabelle some time, said new Mayor Mel Kelly.

"I think it truly has given Carrabelle and other communities a chance to stand back and look and say, 'Let's catch our breath and say: Where do we go next?'" she said.

In both Apalachicola and Carrabelle, there is something called "the Destin theory." When the subject of development comes up, people say: "We don't want to be like Destin," the beach town four counties west that is home to luxury condos, a dinner theater and a Saks Fifth Avenue.

It's successful development, but some in Franklin County see it as something else altogether - a failed fishing village.

Apalachicola, beyond its tony antiques shops, is still a fishing town. Box trucks roll through carrying crabs and flounder from processors. Pickup trucks round the corners piled high with burlap sacks of oysters. And the shrimp boats, with their gear hanging from high masts, still dock downtown.

Next to $800,000 town homes, they are quite a sight. Suddenly, digital cameras appear out of leather handbags. All the working boats along the waterfront draw tourists like rusty magnets. Families, too, ride over on bicycles at twilight.

But the attraction is not a model behind glass. It's an organic part of the area that is living and breathing.

"That's what Apalachicola is all about," said Jerry Hall, who owns a restaurant and an ice cream shop in town. "That's why people come here. If the seafood industry is gone, what's the point?"

'One-Legged Stool'

In Eastpoint, David Barber watches the smashed-up oyster house next to his own with concern. The Arkansas developers, sooner or later, will demolish the old building and put their condos right next to his docks.

He predicts a battle that will look something like Beauty versus the Beast.

Out-of-towners who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a vacation home will discover what it overlooks. Barber's dock is where the romance of oystering meets reality of its own detritus - a sun-baked mountain of shells, bits of gray meat stuck to them, raising a hellish odor.

Meanwhile, he has other worries. He is foregoing flood insurance this year after finding out it would cost him $15,000. He'll take his chances, even though hurricanes are one of his biggest fears. Plus, with gas about $3 a gallon, it's costing him $15,000 a month to keep fuel in the trucks. His fleet carries seafood to restaurants all the way to Key West.

On the other side of the future condos is Lynn Martina, who is barely hanging on to the oyster-processing business that has been in her family for three generations. A shortage of labor, Hurricane Dennis and rising fuel costs nearly closed her doors until she knocked out a dozen shucking stalls and built a retail fish market.

The iced flounder from the bay and catfish from Vietnam are keeping her solvent, she said.

She dreads condos but knows she can't stop them. As long as they're coming, she figures she can at least sell the newcomers some fish.

The troubles throw a harsh light on what Pierce, the county planner, calls the "one-legged stool." At least fostering an industry of second homes for baby boomers would give the county a backup economy, he said. It's short-sighted, he said, for the community to say it prefers seafood over development.

He fears the worst-case scenario: Franklin County rejects development, loses the seafood industry anyhow and is left with nothing.

Not even the ghosts.

Reporter Gretchen Parker can be reached at gparker@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7562.