A sudden rain at Oleta River State Park Tuesday interrupted the start of a rally to protest controversial plans to bring pickleball, frisbee golf or hotels to state parks around Florida, but it couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm of the dozens of park lovers fighting to stop the work.
“I don’t want nobody to kill our nature because nature makes everything good,” said Nathan Haber, a slight second-grader who loves to go to the park’s beaches.
The rally, along with others around the state, were staged to coincide with public meetings scheduled by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and then postponed after widespread criticism of the plans ignited petitions and letter-writing campaigns.
With many questions and few answers from state officials, organizers decided to hold the rallies anyway.
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“We're going to try to keep the pressure on as much as we can until we know more,” said Catalina Lemaitre, who organized the Oleta rally. “If they delayed the meetings to give us more time, but then they announce them and give us less than a week to prepare, I don't think that's fair.”
Nine parks were originally on the drawing board, with two slated to get lodges while others would have expanded cabins or glamping, pickleball and frisbee golf. The most controversial plan — to bring golf courses to Jonathan Dickinson State Park — was dropped after a veterans group pushing for the fairways backed off.
Opponents say paving over parks for pickleball courts or turning open spaces into frisbee courses runs counter to most park missions. The State officials have also proposed adding pickleball courts to Dr. Von D. Mizell-Eula Johnson State Park in Dania Beach, where wade-in protests were held in the 1950s and 1960s to desegregate beaches.
At Oleta, a frisbee golf course is being planned in an area where Urban Paradise Guild worked to remove exotic plants and restore the native upland hammock between 2010 and 2017, said founder Sam Van Leer.
“Our organization has probably invested something upwards of 20,000 hours of volunteer time in this park,” he said.
A few days before the rally, Van Leer said he visited the two and a half-acre site for the first time in several years.
“I'm looking up at trees that I remember when they were seedlings,” he said. “To see it today is just, wow. And there's just no way you can play frisbee golf in there.”
The area around it, he said, is wetlands.
“And that area should be protected,” he said. “So you would have to destroy either wetlands or restored habitat to have a frisbee golf course there. It is egregious that they would even suggest it.”
The park is also part of the Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve, a protected area marking its 50th anniversary this year.
“We are shocked as a citizens support organization of [the Florida Department of Environmental Protection] that on the 50th anniversary, this is what they would propose,” said Laura Reynolds, an environmental consultant for Friends of Biscayne Bay.
“This floods,” she said. “That's the thing. When we're talking about flood attenuation, we're talking about green spaces like this that can double as a place for kids to play, like is happening today, and also absorb the water to protect us from flooding.”
Kids who attended the rally were sad, angry or both about the plans.
“I'm actually very mad with the government on what they want to do to the parks,” said Benji LIeberman, a sixth-grader at the school. “When my mom told me they want to build stuff on the parks, I actually got very mad and I cried.”
Antonia Pratz, 7, drew a picture of gopher tortoises as part of the art lessons Lemaitre planned for the kids.
“If they destroy their home, the turtles are going to be sad,” she said.
The kids and their parents say they treasure the quiet wilderness offered by the parks in busy Miami.
They also worry the parks have bigger needs than adding pickleball to draw more visitors that already gets overcrowded on weekends. On Tuesday, a warning on the park’s website said it frequently reaches capacity on the weekends and must close.
Clean Miami Beach hosts regular clean-ups at the park where trash piles up along its shores, said founder Sophie Ringel.
“We see all sorts of trash,” she said. “We see a lot of trash that gets washed ashore, but also so much it gets left behind.”
To demonstrate the impact of the plans, Lemaitre planned a larger demonstration of protester art. After she corralled the kids and handed out big skeins of colorful yarn, she and other moms marched them across about an acre of empty field where four pickleball courts would be built. Ringel had checked online plans beforehand to approximate the location.
“We know that it goes all the way back up to the treeline,” she said, as she watched the kids map out the boundaries, then crisscross the imaginary courts with more yarn. “They’re wrapping the yarn in any direction all around. People that are here in the middle, they’re all getting entangled in this pickleball mess.”
FDEP, which oversees parks, has yet to reschedule meetings. In the meantime, the public can post comments on the state's online survey.
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