A bill aimed at making Port St. Joe’s port more accommodating to big cargo ships faces a big backlash from Gulf County residents, but legislators ignored their complaints. (Photo via Florida Ports Council)
Facing foul weather, the old sailors would always say, “Any port in a storm.” But what if the port is the cause of the storm?
Right now, big controversies are blowing up over two of Florida’s 16 ports. One has gotten statewide coverage, but I think the other one is more intriguing.
The one that’s gotten the most ink concerns a 328-acre island at the mouth of Tampa Bay. The owners of this parcel, adjacent to the Terra Ciea Bay Aquatic Preserve, want to turn it into a new port for cruise ships that are too big to fit under the soaring Sunshine Skyway bridge.
The proposal has drawn a deluge of complaints from the public and even an in-person, sign-waving protest. A state senator, trying to quiet the storm, amended a bill to make it much harder to build something like this next to an aquatic preserve.
In the other port controversy, there’s also a state legislator involved. He took a different approach. He’s the guy who created the storm.
“State Rep. Jason Shoaf wants to bring more business into the port at the old paper mill property in Port St. Joe,” WMBB-TV reported this month. “He’s filed a bill in Tallahassee that would expand the boundaries of the Port Authority and include board members from Franklin, Gadsden, and Liberty counties.”
Shoaf’s stated goal for the expanded port authority: clear the path for converting the port into one that can accommodate major cargo shipments. Doing that would require dredging a channel through St. Joseph Bay and rebuilding the local railroad line.
And he promises there won’t be any environmental consequences whatsoever.
“They used to dredge that channel regularly when the mill was up and operational, and so we never had any environmental catastrophes,” Shoaf told the TV station. “The sea grasses and the health of the bay was much better back then when the port was active.”
Republican Rep. Shoaf has a history of making — oh, let’s be kind and call them “zany” — comments. I think this dredging-is-beautiful one ranks just behind his 2024 claim that there were bears on crack running around the Panhandle wrecking people’s houses.
On the other hand, a local teacher named Wendy Woodrick wrote a letter printed in the Port St. Joe Star to say she had “scalloped, fished, swum, and spent time on these waters. St. Joe Bay is not just scenery; it is an economic engine, an environmental treasure, and a defining part of Gulf County’s identity.”
Shoaf’s bill, she wrote, “undermines the principle that local communities should retain authority over decisions that directly affect their environment, economy, and quality of life.”
Of course, it’s not like Shoaf asked for his constituents’ opinion before launching his bill.
Shhh, it’s a secret
On his X account, Shoaf says he’s “fighting to conserve everything that makes our state such a special place to live.”
But that hasn’t stopped him from backing development efforts that would be bad for those things that make the state special. You can tell when he’s doing it, too, because he’s acting sneakier than Secret Squirrel, hiding what he’s up to.
In 2023, for instance, he tried sneaking through the federal regulatory process a new liquid natural gas plant for Port St. Joe, despite the risks of pollution or even an explosion. Nobody in Port St. Joe had any idea what was happening.
One entity that would have made big bucks from this LNG plant was a company called the St. Joe Gas Co., whose corporate officers were all named Shoaf. Fortunately, once his constituents found out, they raised such a big stink that the LNG plant’s owners pulled the plug.
“Sneaking it through” turned out to be his mode for this project as well.
He filed House Bill 4105 on Valentines’ Day — a Saturday — which was not much of a message of love toward his constituents.
When I talked to Mrs. Woodrick, the letter-writer, she said that was what made most of her friends so mad.
“This happened really quickly, with very little transparency,” she told me.
The first inkling many people had about it was when a notice about Shoaf’s bill appeared in the local paper.
“There are a lot of Gulf County residents who are against the change,” Port St. Joe port authority chair Guerry Magidson told me. “They don’t want people from other counties making decisions about the port.”
It’s on their waterfront so they see it as THEIR port — nobody else’s. And they really don’t want to stir up what’s been long buried in the bay bottom.
The company town
Port St. Joe used to be a company town. The company that controlled the town shared its name: the St. Joe Paper Co.
The company was run by the state’s undisputed king, Ed Ball, who also controlled banks, railroads, and most of the Legislature. When he died at 93, The New York Times called him “a tart-tongued, hard-nose financier who would rather be cursed than bested in a deal.”
At Ball’s behest, St. Joe built a paper mill on the Port St. Joe waterfront. From 1938 to 1998, it gobbled up massive piles of pine logs and spewed massive billows of stinky fumes.
It also produced a pollutant called dioxin. A byproduct of using chlorine to bleach paper, dioxin is a known carcinogen.
“Dioxins are highly toxic and can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones and cause cancer,” the World Health Organization says.
Lots of paper and pulp mills in Florida left behind dioxin pollution. The now-closed Georgia-Pacific mill in Perry, for instance, polluted the Fenholloway River so badly that, in 1990, health officials had to ban fishing in the river.
In Port St. Joe, the paper mill toxins are now buried under layers of silt in the bay bottom.
“Dredging for a cargo port would disturb and spread this long-lived, toxic chemical, introducing it into the food chain from fish to people,” the Gulf County Citizens Coalition for A Healthy Future wrote in one of their email alerts about Shoaf’s bill.
I talked to Deborah Mays, a board member of the Gulf County Citizens Coalition who’s a former Vanderbilt University researcher. “We don’t know how much is out there,” she told me. “That’s the problem.”
There have been no proper sediment tests for the depth of a dredged channel, she said. The last time anyone did a full-blown environmental impact study of dredging the bay, she said, it was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1973.
“They didn’t even know what dioxins were then,” Mays said.
I asked whether her group had shared this information with Shoaf. She said they tried.
“I don’t think he understood it,” she told me. “He kept asking, ‘How much is too much?’”
The only committee stop
Shoaf’s port bill was scheduled for one and only one committee hearing in the Legislature.
The State Affairs Committee met in Tallahassee for three hours Tuesday morning. A bunch of people from Gulf County drove 2½ hours to speak.
Afterward, they felt like they’d wasted their time.
Shoaf, in comments introducing the bill, told the committee that he had first run for the House on the promise to revitalize the port. Because he won, that justified him filing this bill. Of course, that was back in 2019, but nobody on the committee asked why he waited seven years to propose legislation.
When one committee member asked him about the tidal wave of emails she had received from Gulf County residents opposing the bill, Shoaf sneered that those opponents were merely “folks who just moved in,” not longtime residents.
As for the people who insisted that he needed to hold local hearings on the bill, Shoaf scoffed.
“We’ve been talking about this a long time,” he insisted, even though his bill was just 10 days old.
Then the committee chairman, Bradenton real estate attorney Will Robinson, invited the local opponents to speak. Although Shoaf faced no limit on his speaking time, Robinson gave each opponent no more than a single minute to explain what was wrong with the bill.
One Gulf County resident talked about the high cost to local taxpayers of adding all the infrastructure a commercial port needs. Another Port St. Joe resident talked about how Gulf County taxpayers would get stuck with the bills, not the other counties that would be on the board making decisions.
Then came Mays. She told the committee about the danger of disturbing the dioxins contaminating the bay. A thorough cleanup would be required, she predicted, which would make expanding the port cost way too much.
Another Port St. Joe resident, retired health care worker Annette Ryan, told the committee that only residents of Port St. Joe should have a say in what happens to their port, since it’s in their backyard.
Then a woman named Kim Ross from a group called ReThink Energy Action Fund told the committee that her organization opposed the bill, too. She said the group had worked with Mays’ group on defeating the LNG plant, but her group wasn’t involved in this fight for environmental reasons.
“Citizens should have a say in what happens to their bay and their port, where they work and play and live,” Ross said. Because of Shoaf’s secrecy, she said, “they’ve had virtually no time to review it.”
Ross was the one person who didn’t identify herself as a Gulf County resident, but she’s the one Shoaf targeted with his rebuttal. It was, I think, his revenge for the defeat of his pet LNG project.
Shoaf contended that all the complaints about the bill were just a lot of “smokescreen by activists, like this ReThink Energy group and others. They’re environmental activists who don’t really want a port at all. That’s the kind of conversation they’re trying to fool everybody with by throwing out all the other stuff.”
Shoaf called that anti-port position “kind of crazy.”
“This legislation is about opportunity, opportunity for my kids and my grandkids,” he told his fellow legislators. It was not, he said, “about people with a second home or a third home, or wanna come down and hang out at the beach.”
Mays told me nobody in her group fits that upscale category, but that didn’t matter. Despite Shoaf’s awkward evasion of the complaints from local residents, the committee approved his bill by a vote of 23-3.
The Shoaf legacy
Shoaf’s bill has to pass both the House and Senate, plus get signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis. It could still be stopped along the way.
But Mays told me her disheartened allies won’t bother badgering legislators to vote it down anymore.
If they couldn’t derail it at its lone committee stop, they figure it’s a lost cause. They expect Shoaf’s bill will become law, handing over control over their port to people who don’t live near the water.
Their next move, she told me, is working to convince the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to handle the dredging project in the safest way possible. That includes regulations to protect the public from all the hazardous material sure to be dredged up from the bay and dumped somewhere onshore.
The port authority has been working toward converting Port St. Joe’s port to something much smaller than what Shoaf envisioned. Members wanted to “procure a floating dry dock and start a marine academy to train people to work at a repair and maintenance facility,” authority chairman Magidson told me.
Now that modest plan will be chucked out a window.
Instead, the renovated port board will renovate the port to be something much larger, a big commercial cargo port. Incidentally, just 36 miles down the road, that’s exactly what the port in Panama City already has up and running.
Maybe, to salute his strong but unpopular support, the new Port St. Joe commercial cargo port (if it ever gets built) will wind up bearing Shoaf’s name. Personally, I think it would be more appropriate to put his name on something else.
I look forward to seeing the port’s fancy plaque advertising the Jason Shoaf Dioxin Dredging Mound and Secret Squirrel Sanctuary.