For nearly $30 million, the state of Florida bought more than 11,000 acres near Everglades City from the wealthy Collier family last year to protect them. Now, someone who used to work for Parker J. Collier, the mother of the family that gave the county its name, says that most of that land is dangerous.
Sonja Eddings Brown, a former employee of Collier’s, filed a federal case late last week that was made public. In it, she says that independent tests show that at least 8,000 acres of the land that was sold are probably contaminated with creosote, a chemical used to treat wood, from a fire in 1956 that she says the family never cleaned up.
The government Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says that being exposed to creosote for a long time may lead to birth defects and cancer. Brown says Collier never told the state about the pollution.
Brown’s unsealed complaint says, “This case is about Parker Collier, a businesswoman and the matriarch of a powerful Florida family, and the illegal things she did to get rich by promoting and selling 8,000 acres of land in the Everglades that was contaminated with deadly creosote.”
A spokesperson for Collier told the Herald/Times that he completely rejected the claims.
“This claim has no truth to it at all,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “We categorically deny all the claims made against us and will vigorously defend our position and reputation by using all the legal options open to us.”
The case is part of a bigger dispute with Parker Collier over work. The lawsuit says Parker Collier lied to Brown about how polluted the Everglades land was when she was pitching the idea to the DeSantis and Trump administrations in 2020. Brown says Parker Collier fired her after she began to ask questions about the contamination and raised worries about possible corruption in a different Collier County development deal.
It’s not clear if Brown’s claims that the Collier land, which was sold to the state as part of a project called the “Green Heart of the Everglades,” is polluted will hurt conservation efforts. The buy is the last big piece of private land that separates the ecosystem of the Everglades. It is in the middle of the Big Cypress National Preserve and the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park. Some of the species that live there are the American Crocodile, the Black Bear, and the Florida Panther, according to a project description.
In an email to the Herald/Times, a representative for the South Florida Water Management District, which bought the land on behalf of the state, said that the land had a “comprehensive environmental assessment” done before the deal was made, which is normal. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the governor’s office both refused to answer further questions. The governor’s staff told the newspaper to get information from the District.
Ernie Cox, a lobbyist for the environmental nonprofit WildLandscapes International who helped the state buy the land, said it wasn’t toxic and that the District’s environmental assessment had already looked at creosote contamination on land that wasn’t part of the parcel that was sold to the state.
“The people who do these assessments know what they’re doing, and they would have looked at all the backups. It looks like they concluded that this was cleaned up a long time ago and isn’t a problem,” Cox said.
“If there was a problem, WildLandscapes would have brought it up,” he said.
Cox said Brown and he never worked together on the land deal. It says that Brown was fired in 2020, when the sale was still being advertised. Her name was taken off the deal when the land was sold to the South Florida Water Management District.
The environmental report was looked over by the Herald/Times. According to government records, there was creosote contamination in the unincorporated area of Jerome about 150 feet east of the land that was sold to the state. However, the document says that the contamination has been fixed since then. There were no real-life samples used for the study.
Brown says she did her tests on the environment that were looked over by a toxicologist on land next to the piece of land that was sold in Jerome in May and June. She says that since those tests show the land is toxic, a lot of the land in the Green Heart of the Everglades may be also toxic.
According to Brown’s lawsuit, creosote-related contaminants are still on the land and in the drinking water after recent tests of land right next to the Everglades Parcel.
