Developments atop a Florida cavern could lead to pollution and sinkholes

GAINESVILLE — There are a few films I consider essential viewing for all Floridians because they aid in understanding this wild and crazy state of ours. One of those is a documentary called  “Water’s Journey” by acclaimed underwater explorer Wes Skiles. 

In it, a couple of divers plunge into a sinkhole and travel hundreds of feet below the ground to explore the Floridan Aquifer. As they traverse our watery underworld, a pair of colleagues track their progress above ground. 

Everyone who’s seen this movie remembers one scene in particular in which the divers squeeze through a deep passage while, up above, their colleagues wander around in a Sonny’s Barbecue. “They’re heading towards the salad bar!” one of the trackers announces to the baffled diners.

I heard a sort of a sequel to that scene last week while I was visiting Alachua County. Trust me when I tell you it’s a classic Florida story, complete with mass resignations, allegations of undue political influence, and a developer who’s apparently obsessed with “Gone with the Wind.”

The Sonny’s part of “Waters’ Journey” occurred when the divers were swimming through an area known as Mill Creek Sink in Alachua County. Mill Creek Sink is a crucial part of the drinking water supply for that Central Florida county. 

“The Sink funnels water from the 70 square miles that surround it into vast caverns of the Floridan Aquifer, making it a jaw-dropping diving site and a highway for contaminants,” WUFT-FM reported last year.

Yet right now one of Alachua County’s more turbulent small towns is considering letting a developer build a project named Tara Forest West: a 523-home neighborhood, virtually on top of it. It’s sure to bring with it lots of polluting lawn fertilizer, gasoline, pesticides, and herbicides like Roundup, which will then seep into the caverns and wind up contaminating the aquifer.

By the way, building things on top of underground caverns increases the likelihood of sinkholes suddenly opening up and swallowing everything.

Leading the fight to prevent this project from happening is an unusual group of clean water advocates: cave divers just like the ones who starred in “Water’s Journey.”

In fact, one of the daring divers is now running for a city commission seat. You might say when it comes to small-town politics, he decided to take the plunge.

The hidden river

The town of Alachua, pronounced by some residents as Alachu-WAY, shares its name with the county of Alachua, pronounced Alachu-wah, where it’s the second-largest city after better known Gainesville.

The town stretches along U.S. 441, the highway Tom Petty mentions in “American Girl.” It’s also somehow become the home of the largest Hare Krishna community in North America.

Both the county and city’s names come from a mangled Spanish-Native American reference to a sinkhole in Gainesville’s Paynes Prairie area.

Sinkholes, springs, and swallets give us a glimpse into the natural resource that provides most of our drinking water, the Floridan Aquifer. The water flows through the Swiss-cheese limestone formation known as karst, occasionally bursting forth on the surface.

Only a few people have seen the hidden river flowing below ground. These hardy souls are known as cave divers. 

Although cave diving dates to the brass-helmet days of the late 1800s, it didn’t really become popular until after Jacques Cousteau — the French naval hero who had a popular TV show — co-invented the SCUBA system for breathing underwater. 

After that, says a history of the sport, “Cave diving first got its start around 1953 … when the Florida Speleological Society founded the first cave diving organization.”

The sitting president of the Florida Speleological Society is Jacob Fletcher, a cave diver who lives in Alachua and works as a data analyst at the University of Florida. 

One day he stepped out of his front door to go for a jog and spotted a sign across the street. The sign was a public notice about the Tara Forest West development. Because Fletcher had been inside Mill Creek Sink, he immediately grasped what a danger the development and its contaminants would pose for the water beneath his feet.

“It’s been kind of a roller coaster since then,” the first-time city commission candidate told me. 

He admitted that his entry into politics required undergoing a makeover. His friends said he looked too much like Shaggy from “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?” He doesn’t anymore.

Because he’s a data guy, after he saw the sign Fletcher dug into the data on the project. He soon figured out something else was being hidden. Tara Forest West was only one of the projects named for Scarlett O’Hara’s mansion that’s being planned for Alachua by the same developer.

“There’s five of them,” he said. “Five separate plats. It should have been done as one master plan, all at once.”

By splitting them up, he told me, “It hides the scope. Instead of seeing that it’s thousands of houses, you think it’s just 300 or 500. It hides how big of an issue it is.”

Hiding things about this project is what led to the controversy.

The developer swooped in

A couple who are avid cave divers, Bryan Buescher and Vicki Bashore, first told me about all this Tara-rorism running rampant in the town of Alachua. 

Their first trip to dive in the region nicknamed “Cave Country” happened in 2003. They finally moved to North Florida in 2018 so they could go diving more frequently. Yes, they have seen the inside of Mill Creek Sink — hence their concern.

Originally, they said, a developer tried to build a Walmart above Mill Creek Sink. Alachua the city approved a change in the zoning to make it happen, but Alachua the county sued to stop it. 

As a result, the Walmart was never built. People who were worried about the fate of the sink knew that someone needed to make sure that site was never developed.

“The Alachua Conservation Trust was about to buy it,” Buescher told me. “Then this developer swooped in.”

The swooper is Sayed Moukhtara of Gainesville. He’s the man behind not only Tara Forest West but also Tara Forest East, Tara April, Tara Baywood, and Tara Phoenicia. 

I think it’s fair to say he’s obsessed with the single literary work by author Margaret Mitchell. It’s also fair to say he’s not a popular guy. His Tara Forest West was the subject of a citizen petition drive to halt the project. They collected more than 2,000 signatures, which city officials ignored.

Driving the petition signatures is the fact that in 2005, hydrologists dropped some dye into Mill Creek Sink to see how far its waters would flow. The dye showed up 12 days later in Hornsby Spring, six miles away. It was still showing up there after 154 days.

“It’s all hydrologically connected,” a University of South Florida geology professor named Patricia Spellman told me. “The cave system acts like a river and sucks things into it.”

But in a July commission meeting, Moukhtara assured the commissioners that his multi-Taras wouldn’t ruin the caves or the water they contain. He told everyone the four stormwater basins he will build on the site will collect and filter runoff before it enters the aquifer. 

“We are really not trying to do anything that is harmful,” the developer insisted.

But he’s not interested in slowing things down to make sure of that, either. And that’s what led to the mass resignation.

‘I quit’ times three

Complicating the quintuple Tara situation is the involvement of Alachua’s former city manager, Adam Boukari. He’s playing a dual role here, and no I don’t mean like millionaire Bruce Wayne was also Batman.

When Boukari left the city’s employ three years ago, he became a paid consultant, often for developers like Moukhtara. But he was also hired by the town commission to provide guidance to his successor as the city manager, the less experienced Mike DaRoza. 

That’s what led to three of the four members of the city planning department abruptly turning in their resignations in February. One of them wanted to explain what happened, so he sent an open letter to the city commission.

“It appears former City Manager Adam Boukari never relinquished control of the city manager’s position and has essentially been co-managing the city with Mr. DaRoza while representing developers’ interests in a private capacity,” planner Justin Tabor wrote to the commission last month.

Tabor went into detail about how DaRoza pushed the planners to deliver the results most favorable to the developers and quicker than common sense would dictate. He told them not to talk to the city attorney at all, Tabor said. And he pushed them to cater to developers despite them raising lots of questions about the various Taras. 

One of the Taras’ plans calls for bringing in 9,000 dump trucks full of fill dirt to elevate the buildings. That led to concerns about how so much dirt would affect the geology underneath. Maybe it would crumble and be Gone with the Weight.

Everything regarding the Taras, the planner wrote, “was orchestrated by former city manager Adam Boukari to fulfill the needs or desires of Mr. Boukari’s private clients.”

Keep your foot on the gas

A 2003 Gainesville Sun story describes Alachu-way politics as being “rough and tumble,” with city meetings so rowdy that they sometimes resembled “a crowd at a World Wrestling Entertainment event.” One of the town commission’s most vocal attendees said he was thrown out of city meetings 24 times.

Twenty years later, the uproar has hardly died down. I watched a video of a March Alachua town commission meeting that was pretty wild.  

The commissioners voted against hiring an outside firm to help the remaining planner get his work done. The city attorney had a meltdown about being left out the loop by the city manager. A commissioner called her “despicable” for talking about it in an open meeting. The city manager defended himself against Tabor’s accusations, calling them “completely false and unfounded.”

During a public comment section of the meeting, a visibly angry former commissioner named Tamara Robbins told the sitting commissioners, “You are hellbent on keeping your foot on the gas for the destruction of this city.” 

You know who’s not hellbent on destroying everything? Alachua County, which may be the cave divers’ best hope for saving Mill Creek Sink. The county commission has voted to intervene in the discussions as a legal party. They also unanimously approved a 12-part plan to discourage further development around Mill Creek Sink.

I hope they’re able to protect the sink. But I get the sinking feeling that the city commissioners in Alachua may not like the county folks interfering with their final decision on Tara Forest West. Electing just one cave diver to the board may not be enough.

That’s why I think all the cave divers concerned about Mill Creek Sink should show up in force at the next city commission meeting. They should bring with them a bunch of clear canteens. Each canteen would contain water that’s full of Roundup and Tru-Green products. 

As each cave diver steps up to the lectern, they should offer the canteen of contaminated water to the commissioners and say, “This is what you’re voting for.” 

I would hope the commissioners would pay attention to these folks. After all, they’re the ones who have made a deep dive into this issue.

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