Glynn Wilson

A view of the Gulf of Mexico from Gulf State Park beach in Gulf Shores, Ala.

by Glynn Wilson

POSSUM ROAD, GULF SHORES, Ala. — There was a time not too long ago when you could pull into the Gulf State Park campground and park under a canopy of shade trees and foliage and be comfortable in a tent — even in the summertime.

Glynn Wilson

On this trip, we were assigned a spot on Possum Road, where we managed to find a little shade on camp site 325.

Since the park suffered a direct hit from Hurricane Ivan in 2004, however, which knocked down most of the tall cypress, palm and pine trees, and suffered a flood of salt water from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which destroyed the root system for just about everything else, the park looks shockingly like an almost barren landscape now.

Then, if the annoying views of the high rise condos on the beach on the south side are not bad enough, the nightly noise and light pollution from The Wharf development on Canal Road on the north makes camping here, well, let’s just say a less than “wilderness” experience.

The stressed out environment may also be one of the reasons for the worst yellow fly outbreak anyone can remember here, although the park is still home to a host of interesting and important wildlife, including a number of bird species such as ospreys and even nesting bald eagles in the wintertime, along with coyotes, bob cats, and a couple of rare long-tailed cats, the jaguarundis — and there’s even a few alleged sightings of a panther or two.

Experts agree it will take many years for the park to fully recover, that is if climate change due to global warming doesn’t continue to wreak havoc on the coast with rising sea levels and even stronger storms due to warmer water in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The future of the island depends on storms,” Gulf State Park director Hugh Branyon said in an interview.

Glynn Wilson

Ospreys nesting in Gulf State Park.

He has overseen the park since former Governor George Wallace appointed him to the position in 1976, and fought off a number of private development attempts over the years, including a plan to build a 36-hole golf course in 1992 as part of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail.

Experts also agree the last thing the park needs is another high rise development on the park’s beach, especially a high-priced spa, hotel resort and convention center farmed out to private developers to charge $300 a night and prevent average Alabama citizens from accessing the public’s property.

So when the Alabama Supreme Court struck down Alabama Governor Bob Riley’s plan for a public-private partnership with the West Paces Hotel group and Auburn University to build just such a project, it was up to the Alabama Legislature to kill a revised plan — or pass it with changes.

So last week, both houses of the legislature passed the first bill to allow a new type of development on the beach, changing the Alabama Concessions Act to allow for a 70 year lease instead of the 12 years called for in the original law.

But when the rest of the media in Alabama reported on the action in Montgomery on the day of the big flood in the state house, they missed the point of the story. It was covered as if Riley got what he wanted. That is far from the case.

The new plan is NOT the Riley plan.

It was significantly modified and calls for a smaller footprint of a development further from the coast line, perhaps only six stories tall with 300 rooms at a much lower rate than $300 a night.

Glynn Wilson

The Gulf State Park beach has been closed since Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

Rather than being built under a no-bid contract by Riley’s cronies, any new development will now have to be competitively bid. Rather than being staffed by employees of the private company and some students from Auburn, state employees will have jobs in the new convention center, which is expected to be about 15,000 to 20,000 square feet.

Also, the new hotel and convention center will share revenue with the state park system, Branyon said.

“It’s too early to tell how it will all work out,” he said, but one thing is clear.

Since Riley didn’t get his way, the state park system, the people of Alabama and the local environment will be much better served. The bill passed by the legislature last week also calls for oversight by a legislative committee and public hearings in both houses before any development is approved.

Sources also say the new plan will also help protect the park from further development in the form of a larger golf course and a new road through the wildlife refuge portion of the park, since the bill, which Riley is expected to sign, will not compromise the public status of the park.

Sources say David Bronner of the Retirement System of Alabama has finally given up on his plan to develop a 36-hole golf course on the property anyway, and a plan for another road connecting Orange Beach to the Gulf Shores beach through the park is now dead as well.

Every governor of Alabama had pledged not to build another road through the park until Bob Riley came along, but the legal delays and the state of the economy now guarantee the park’s security for years to come.

“It’s not the Constitutional Amendment that would protect it forever,” said Charlie Grimsley, the former conservation commissioner under former Governor Jim Folsom Jr., who sued to halt the development. “But it’s a much better plan we can live with for now.”

Glynn Wilson

Sunset looking west over the Gulf State Park beach now cleared for development.

Related Story

Supreme Court Loss Fails to Stop Riley’s Corrupt Plan

Supreme Court Loss Fails to Stop Riley’s Corrupt Plan

Glynn Wilson

by Glynn Wilson and Roger Shuler

Glynn Wilson

A sunrise view in Gulf State Park over Lake Shelby toward the beach, a view that would be directly obscured by Bob Riley’s planned 13 story high rise spa resort…

Like the neo-cons who concocted a think tank plan for the development of Iraq well before 9/11, which gave the Bush administration the pretext it needed to start a war, Alabama Governor Bob Riley had plans to raid Gulf State Park for private development well before Hurricane Ivan the Terrible came ashore in September 2004, according to court documents.

The Alabama Supreme Court recently upheld a circuit court ruling striking down the plan for an upscale private hotel and spa on the stretch of public beach where the Gulf State Park lodge and convention center was located before Ivan blew ashore and obliterated it. It sits on the widest and most ecologically important piece of land on the short and thin spit of a peninsula that makes up the Alabama Gulf Coast. Ceded to Alabama as worthless swampland when the Spanish controlled Florida, it only stretches 32 miles from the tip of Ft. Morgan on the West to the Flora-Bama Lounge on the Alabama-Florida line.

Gulf State Park is no doubt the “most treasured piece of public land in Alabama,” said Charley Grimsley, who sued to stop the development.

“Sadly,” he said, “when Bob Riley first became governor of Alabama, he immediately embarked upon an elaborate plan to take a prime portion of the beach away from the people to build a four-star Ritz-Carlton-style hotel, complete with a luxurious spa fit for a king.”

In the Associated Press story about the court decision, the wire service includes this inaccurate background paragraph:

After the old lodge was wrecked beyond repair, Gov. Bob Riley’s administration came up with a plan to build an upscale park hotel in a partnership between Auburn University and Atlanta-based West Paces Hotel Group.

Court documents show Riley had grand plans for the property well before Ivan.

Glynn Wilson

A view of the old Gulf State Park resort, after Ivan blew right through the old construction. That ain’t no parking space underneath…

In fact, on the very day he was sworn in as commissioner, Riley dispatched his choice to head the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Barnet Lawley, to meet with the West Paces Hotels Group, a company with ties to an Arabian princess in the oil business who has strong ties to the Bush family herself through the bin Laden family.

According to sworn depositions in the case you can view and read for yourself here and here, furthermore, the meeting was set up by none other than Susan Hubbard, the wife of Rep. Mike Hubbard (R-Auburn), at the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta. She was an employee of Auburn University and made the introductions through Horst Schulze, the CEO. The deal was introduced to the new president, Ed Richardson, within weeks of him taking over the university.

In any other state with a fully functioning watchdog press, this deal would have raised serious eyebrows about conflicts of interest. But not in Alabama, where the corporate Newhouse news chain has a virtual monopoly on the news by virtue of it’s ownership of the three largest newspapers in the state in Mobile, Birmingham and Huntsville, as well as several TV news stations.

Charley Grimsley, the primary plaintiff in the case who sued to stop the development, was commissioner of conservation under Jim Folsom Jr. when he served as governor in the early 1990s. When asked how the case got as far as it did with so little opposition, he blamed the media in Alabama.

“Because there is a void of accountability in the Alabama media, Bob Riley is absolutely a media creation of absolute power,” he said. “There’s not been any scrutiny on him or his son or daughter. Even if he was honest as the day is long the day he took the oath of office, he’s not today, in large measure because the Alabama media have given him a free ride. They have not been the watchdogs and the eyes and the ears of the public as they should have been.”

He further blamed the environmental community in Alabama for not recognizing the importance of the state park land.

“The environmentalists have got to wake up and realize that if you get this mega-four-star hotel, the next step’s going to be to put an interstate right down through the park to get those high-end clientele down there,” he said.

No doubt somebody with close ties to Riley would have been ready to make a bunch of money off of that deal, he said, like Fob James’s sons did on the toll bridge to Orange Beach. That was another sweetheart deal virtually ignored by the Alabama press.

David Bronner, the overseer of the State Retirement System, who filed a friend of the court brief on Riley’s side in the case, has had his eye on the state park and wildlife refuge for private development for years. In 1992, he tried to get access to the land to build a 36-hole Robert Trent Jones golf course and take out a lot of the wildlife refuge, home to a host of interesting and valuable species, and acres of wetlands, land that was home to the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker and the endangered beach mouse, critical to dune habitat.

Backed up by opposition from the local press in Baldwin County and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Corps of Engineers killed that project by denying the permit to build bridges in the wetlands for the new golf course.

While the Alabama Supreme Court may have stopped this smelly mega-development deal for now, Riley is already meeting with some of the parties in the case and planning to try and get the state legislature to re-write the law to allow the development. Will you read anything critical about this deal in a single Alabama newspaper? We doubt it.

The main legal argument that convinced a majority of the Alabama Supreme Court to vote against the plan was the State Parks Concession Act, which includes a very explicit limit of 12 years for leases. Riley wanted to lease the land to Auburn University for 70 years, which would have then turned around and farmed out the management of the hotel and resort to the private company owned largely by a Bush-connected Arabian princess.

Opponents say that would have opened up the entire park for private development, since the land would effectively no longer be a state park under that arrangement. The State Employees Association and the Alabama Education Association also opposed the plan, on the grounds that no state employees would get jobs there. Auburn employees would have been trained working at the new resort, but most of the jobs would have gone to employees of the private company.

At first glance, the Supreme Court ruling appeared to be a victory for those who want to protect Gulf State Park from private enterprise. But a closer look shows that the Republican-dominated court brought the Riley administration to the edge of victory.

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