New Crayfish "Plan" Published - Property Rights Skewered

The new Panama City Crayfish Draft Management Plan has been published here by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Here are some of the ways in which this monstrosity skewers your property rights and makes a mockery of Panama City, Florida:

- They decided that certain soil types 'might' be favorable for this crayfish. 70% of the land in the greater Panama City area has this soil.

- If you have the soil on your property, to build or add anything, you may be required to allow government biologists to come on your property and look for the crayfish. Their protocol requires them to make a least 3 visits to search for the creature, and each visit should be timed based on the weather conditions before and during the search.

- A "take permit" could be required. The State has the unmitigated gall to call this permit 'free'. What they neglect to tell you is that the City of Panama City had to pay an environmental consultant over $8,000 to get one of these permits for a project they did.

- You may be offered "mitigation", which is basically a payoff demand that will allow you to use your land the way you want to. The 2 for 1 mitigation plan means you'd be asked to buy 2 acres of property elsewhere for every one acre of your own property you want to use.

- Through the mitigation plan you may be transferring your money to St. Joe Company, the richest landholder and developer in the Florida panhandle, to buy their 'crayfish land' from them. You won't be able to use it for yourself. Government workers and their environmentalist leeches will use it, at taxpayer expense, to further study the crayfish and publish pointless studies about it.

- If the crayfish is found on your property, they plan to keep coming back around looking for it. If some day they can't find it any more, they can throw the book at you. Criminal charges could include heavy fines or even jail time.

- You can't tell if you have the crayfish or not! Because there is only one man in the State of Florida who is 'qualified' to identify it. He'll get the lucrative government contracts to find the thing on your property, and you have to sit back and take whatever he tells you. Is it any shock that he's also the person who petitioned the State to upgrade the endangered status of the crayfish? This whole plan should be invalidated just based on the incredible conflict of interest inherent in it.

- The plan recommends that your tax dollars get diverted to public schools in Florida to indoctrinate children. So one night you'll be sitting at your dinner table and receive a lecture from your daughter about why you need to give up your property rights for the common good of the ecosystem.

-The plan calls for 'influencing and motivating' operators of off-road vehicles to stay off this land. Assuming that means public or private land, envision a wildlife officer stopping hunters wherever they travel and telling them to get off the land. Whether they own it or not.

Again, remember, the crayfish LOVES PEOPLE. It has only been found in man-made ditches and swales between man-made tree farm rows. So it's ridiculous to have a plan to make humans grow more of them. In fact, this may be the first time the Endangered Species Act has been used to have our government introduce a species into a developed metropolitan area.

You can still do something to prevent the travesty that will befall Bay County if this law hits the books. Earlier in this blog we posted the contact information for the seven commissioners who will vote this summer to enact the law. You may want to go straight to the Governor. This will become law unless citizens stand up against it. Governor Charlie Crist can be reached at charlie.crist@myflorida.com.