Earlier this year, the sunbaked scrublands of Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Martin County had an unusual visitor: Jack Nicklaus, the hall-of-fame golfer who’s played with four presidents.

Though Nicklaus only lives 30 minutes away in North Palm Beach, near a street that bears his name, he hadn’t made the trip for leisure.

He had come to scope out the park land, his lawyer, Gene Stearns, confirmed — to see how he might design golf courses there. Nicklaus left satisfied, thinking it could be done.

It would be months before the public learned of these plans, through a leak made by concerned employees of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection — first reported by the Tampa Bay Times.

As the plans for Jonathan Dickinson took shape, they ballooned to encompass eight more state parks. Altogether, the state developed, in secret, a sweeping proposal to build hotels, pickleball courts and more on protected land — a venture that would imperil already-dwindling habitat in areas the public had assumed were safe.

The plans’ rushed unveiling ignited a rare, roiling bipartisan backlash.

What had started as hushed discussions in Tallahassee hallways boiled over into public view beyond the state’s control. Politicians condemned the plans, and irate residents hoisted protest signs, prompting an evasive Gov. Ron DeSantis to shelve the designs.

The scandal united Floridians against what they saw as a sudden threat to the natural treasures they hold most dear. The saga also raised uneasy questions about the future of Florida conservation.

This is how it happened.

The plans take shape

The first known mention of the golf course plan for Jonathan Dickinson came more than a year before the scandal broke, when a veterans’ charity approached politicians to gauge support.

The nonprofit, called Folds of Honor, pitched courses that would memorialize the Tuskegee Airmen, Black World War II military pilots. Proceeds would flow to the nonprofit, which distributes scholarships to family members of killed or disabled service members and first responders.

Multiple Republican officials, including state Sen. Gayle Harrell and Martin County Commissioner Harold Jenkins, advised against the idea.

Jenkins told the charity: “You are going to start a war with the people,” he recalled to the Times.

Folds of Honor remained undeterred. Its leader, Lt. Col. Dan Rooney, discussed the idea with DeSantis, an avid golfer. The two met one-on-one April 10, the governor’s schedule showed.

Folds of Honor modeled the pitch around its Michigan golf course, which Nicklaus designed. But there, the group remodeled a shuttered course. In Florida, it proposed disturbing conserved land owned by state taxpayers. Jonathan Dickinson, the largest state park in Southeast Florida, consists of a patchwork of rare habitats, from sandhills to shrubby forests, and is home to the Florida scrub jay, a threatened species with iconic cerulean and grey feathers.

Weeks after the DeSantis meeting, the proposal moved forward. A lobbyist for the charity initiated a plan to survey the park for possible golf courses. That lobbyist was Ryan Matthews, who once led the Florida Department of Environmental Protection but now counts a subsidiary of Folds of Honor as one of his clients.

Matthews tapped an environmental consultant, Edward Weinberg, who offered to survey the land for free since the project benefited a charity. His employees were soon walking the park, marking down plants and soil types on a sweltering day.

“This wasn’t our first data-collection permit, but this one processed a lot faster than the last ones,” Weinberg told the Times. “I can speculate that there was a different level of influence involved.”

Newly obtained records show the survey work ended May 31, a couple of weeks before Nicklaus would visit. According to Stearns, Nicklaus’ lawyer, Folds of Honor asked the golfer to donate his skills designing courses, and he happily obliged. His tour has not been previously reported.

As the Department of Environmental Protection hammered out the details, their plans apparently metastasized.

In an undated document, state officials listed 24 state parks under consideration for development.

They mulled another lodge at North Peninsula State Park in Volusia County, as well as the revival of an old golf course in the Panhandle’s Florida Caverns State Park.

Ultimately, officials settled on nine parks to be developed. In the tradition of Yellowstone National Park, two would get 350-room hotels, one with beach views. Jonathan Dickinson’s courses would total 1,300 acres, more than a tenth of the park.

DeSantis’ deputy chief of staff, Cody Farrill, shared internally a 42-page report with examples of amenities on public land, including a golf course in Death Valley National Park.

Two former environmental agency employees, both of whom worked for the state during this period, told the Times that the overarching plan was shoved through the agency by the governor’s office, often through Farrill. Farrill has not responded to repeated emails and texts from the Times.

Those ex-employees, Doug Alderson and James Gaddis — the second of whom would become known as a whistleblower — said the agency’s approach deviated from the norm.

Typically, agency leaders sought input from field biologists or the public when weighing big plans. But the two men, who worked in the department’s parks headquarters in Tallahassee, believed the agency pursued these designs in secret.

Alderson, 67, oversaw the state’s kayak and canoe trails. His friend Gaddis, 42, worked in an adjacent office as a cartographer.

When the state finally sought public feedback this summer, it was in the form of one-hour hearings set to occur nearly simultaneously across the state. That made it feel like a coordinated strike, leaving almost no room for park enthusiasts and environmental advocates to muster opposition.

Officials slated to vote on the plans wouldn’t attend. And staff making the presentations weren’t authorized to answer Floridians’ questions.

Gaddis and Alderson weren’t the only ones who felt the department was working to limit the exposure. Other high-ranking former agency officials agreed that the department abandoned typical procedure, including Eric Draper, who served as the director of Florida’s state parks under DeSantis; Albert Gregory, the former state chief of park planning and Dana Bryan, former chief of the bureau of natural and cultural resources.

“What they did was secret and accelerated – both of which were unprecedented,” Bryan said.

Agency leaders didn’t loop in at least several state park managers at the targeted locations, so they had no idea a pickleball court or hotel could soon fall under their purview.

In late July, Gaddis said, he was summoned into a series of virtual meetings on Microsoft Teams in which a supervisor told him to “drop everything” and start drawing maps where the new developments might go. A park planning leader read the list of proposals for the nine parks from a Post-It note, Gaddis said, and “instructed us not to talk to any coworkers” outside the team.

Around this time, Alderson noticed the mood shift. Park planners, normally a lighthearted group, turned sour, he recalled, “like they had a big weight on their shoulders.”

A few days after the Teams meeting, the friends took one of their usual midday walks. They would often stroll around the brick building, taking a break from their screens. As the men rounded the edge of the tree-lined parking lot, Gaddis’ voice turned serious.

In the days since he was told to draft those maps, his hand would shake in anger over his computer mouse. He could no longer keep the plans to himself.

“You know, this is bigger than you and I,” Alderson remembers telling Gaddis.

Spreading the information would risk their jobs. At that moment, in an agency of thousands, Alderson thought that probably fewer than a dozen knew about the state’s plans. Alderson was nearing retirement, so he was comfortable making the leap. But he worried about his younger friend.

The next day, the two walked further from the building. Gaddis handed Alderson a flash drive containing maps and details of the proposals: Habitat that houses Florida’s only endemic bird species converted to 18 holes, a hotel near fragile coastal dunes, pickleball courts shoehorned into quiet spaces.

As he worked on the maps, Gaddis saved them to an internal shared computer drive, as was common, he said. Then he tipped off another employee to look there. After a supervisor started getting phone calls, Gaddis was told to move the documents to keep them concealed, he said.

The new folder name: “DirectTV Subscription Info.”

On his work computer, Gaddis crafted an anonymous memo. In the evenings, at home, Alderson made calls.

Within a week, the information reached a Times reporter, who emailed the department asking about the plans. Without answering, the agency released an evening announcement with scant details. In it, the state acknowledged that a new initiative would add lodges, golf, pickleball and other amenities to state parks. The news release wasn’t posted online for days. Public records from inside the department show it was sent to eight recipients.

The department hasn’t responded to multiple emails requesting clarity on who received the initial announcement other than the Times.

On Aug. 20, the Times broke the news of the plans, stunning many at the environmental agency. The next day, the Department of Environmental Protection quietly posted its plans online, prompting a second article.

Staff passed around the Times story, careful not to share their opinions in writing, Alderson said. Those who’d known about the plans felt relief that they could finally talk openly.

“I think a lot of people didn’t get a lot of work done,” Alderson said.

Blowback materialized almost instantly. Within 24 hours, members of Congress, the state Legislature and the Florida Cabinet condemned the plans, including several powerful Republicans typically allied with the governor.

“Not just foolhardy — it’s wrong,” said state Rep. Adam Anderson, R-Palm Harbor.

“A slippery slope,” said state Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis.

State officials quickly had to grapple with the fallout.

A Times reporter emailed questions to the environmental agency and the governor’s office. One referenced criticism from Draper, the former parks director, who had raised the possibility that state officials had skirted the law with their secrecy.

Communications staff forwarded the questions to Farrill, the governor’s deputy chief of staff. Farrill responded internally, emails show, by bashing his former administration colleague.

“Mr. Draper’s intentions are clear,” Farrill wrote before linking to a news story in which Draper described climate change as “a huge issue” for state parks.

The governor stood behind the plans. His spokesperson, Jeremy Redfern, issued a statement.

“Teddy Roosevelt believed that public parks were for the benefit and enjoyment of the people, and we agree with him,” Redfern said, invoking the 26th U.S. president to whom DeSantis has often compared himself. “It’s high time we made public lands more accessible to the public.”

On social media, another DeSantis spokesperson, Bryan Griffin, said the proposal made for an “exciting new initiative” and that “everyone should be able to enjoy Florida’s natural treasures without long waits or cramped campsites.”

This messaging strategy would not last.

Course reversal

On hot, late-summer afternoons, Floridians started gathering at their local state parks – from Miami to Tallahassee — converting pickleball paddles into protest signs and singing in unison to “This Land is Your Land.” The opposition raged online, too, with “Keep Florida State Parks Wild” art ricocheting around social media.

“DON’T PAVE PARADISE,” read a handwritten sign by Michelle Birnbaum, of Dunedin, who stood in front of the Honeymoon Island State Park entrance. Walking the park is like therapy for her veteran husband, she said, and she felt the need to fight for it.

On the same August weekend that protests erupted, DeSantis and his staff were 4,000 miles away in Dublin, Ireland, for a Florida State football season opener against Georgia Tech.

A social media video showed top DeSantis staffers standing outside in the gray Irish afternoon, bobbing to the blare of the Florida State band’s trumpeted war chant.

Back on Florida shores, the onslaught of opposition mounted. The proposal quickly began to crumble.

Folds of Honor, the veterans charity, withdrew its plan for Jonathan Dickinson State Park from consideration Aug. 25.

At the time, the charity operated under the name Tuskegee Dunes Foundation, registered in Delaware.

Stearns, Nicklaus’ lawyer, confirmed this month that Tuskegee Dunes and Folds of Honor were virtually one and the same. He said the name reflected the intent of the proposed golf courses, to honor its namesake airmen.

“This was just a subsidiary to create a name for a golf facility that would basically respect a group of Americans that served this country under extraordinary circumstances,” Stearns said. “The idea that there’s some conspiracy behind it is puzzling.”

Folds of Honor did not publicly take ownership for the project. As the plans fell apart, the Times identified the charity’s connection through Tuskegee Dunes’ Florida lobbying paperwork, where it listed the same address as the national group.

Days after Folds of Honor’s retreat, DeSantis, too, backed down. He held a nearly hour-long news conference in Winter Haven to highlight ongoing anti-crime efforts, though nothing new was announced.

Reporters asked him afterward about the park proposals, from which he immediately distanced himself.

“It was not approved by me, I never saw that,” DeSantis said. The state would go “back to the drawing board,” he said, with nothing more on the plans to come in 2024.

In Tallahassee, so many Department of Environmental Protection staffers were streaming the news conference that DeSantis’ voice echoed through the office, Alderson said. DeSantis’ comments shocked staffers, sparking angry watercooler conversations. Parks employees involved with the proposals knew well that DeSantis’ top staff had been coordinating the project behind the scenes.

“We just couldn’t believe he was throwing the (agency) under the bus,” he said. “We all felt like we got run over.”

The internal conversations that led to DeSantis’ reversal remain largely unknown. The Times requested emails within the governor’s office and the environmental agency months ago, but the state has not turned over the public records.

Meanwhile, the search was on inside the environmental agency for the leaker of the anonymous memo. Using the metadata of the Microsoft Word document, officials pinpointed Gaddis.

He came home one Saturday in early September to find an envelope waiting on his doorstep. He’d been fired.

He went public with his dismissal to the Times and other news outlets, emphasizing he’d leaked the plans out of concern for fragile habitat. That week, another department under DeSantis, the Agency for Health Care Administration, released portions of Gaddis’ personnel file to a Gainesville TV news station, despite the fact that it hadn’t formally requested such documents.

The documents revealed unflattering information about Gaddis related to a past workplace relationship. A woman, whose name was redacted, had filed a police report saying Gaddis would not stop trying to contact her, making her “scared every day when I go to work.” He was not criminally charged but resigned instead of being fired in early 2022. Two months later, the state hired him again, this time for the Department of Environmental Protection.

Gaddis has called the release a “hit piece.” He has since filed a whistleblower complaint against the state, which proceeds confidentially through the Florida Commission on Human Relations. His case is ongoing.

As the state’s attention turned elsewhere after back-to-back hurricanes and a presidential election, park advocates have urged vigilance.

Harrell, a longtime Republican lawmaker whose district includes Jonathan Dickinson State Park, filed a bill to prevent golf, pickleball, hotels and more from ever being pitched on state park land again.

The proposals prompted a biologist and team of environmental advocates to hurriedly seek federal protection for an ultra-rare flower found only in southeast Florida. There are fewer than 20 known populations of Jobé bluecurls remaining – including on the very land that was slated to become golf greens.

In their federal petition, those arguing for the flower’s protection point to a lesson many Floridians say they have learned from the scandal: “Although the species exists on public lands, this alone is not sufficient to protect it.”

Since he retired from the environmental agency, Alderson has been spending much of his newfound free time in state parks.

He watched his daughter perform a Christmas dance show among the lush symmetry of Alfred B. Maclay Gardens State Park, 1920s-era gardens that could have been reshaped to add pickleball and frisbee golf.

Lately, he’s been volunteering at Wakulla Springs State Park. The springs aren’t as clear as when he was a boy, but Alderson loves climbing into a pontoon on a Saturday to count the wading birds, alligators and manatees tucked into the labyrinth of cypress.

The tallies help ensure that if wildlife populations dip, the park’s caretakers notice quickly.

He wants to make sure that when future generations visit, the animals are still here.