 CANDIDATE FOR TOP DISTRICT SEAT LAUDED Palm Beach Post -- Thursday, June 14, 2001 By: Jim Ash, Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau TALLAHASSEE -- If Florida ever expects its $7.8 billion Everglades restoration program to work, Henry Dean has to run the show. That was the consensus Wednesday of a handful of leading environmentalists, colleagues and industry experts who gushed about the man widely expected to be the next executive director of the South Florida Water Management District. "Henry is one person I would essentially characterize as a class act," said Charles Lee, a veteran lobbyist for Audubon of Florida. "I have known Henry for better than 20 years. He has been an excellent public servant." Dean, 52, spent the past 17 years as executive director of the St. Johns River Water Management District, deftly navigating meteorological and political storms with a mix of technical and communication skills rare for a regulator, colleagues say. Of the five taxing districts that protect water resources in Florida, St. Johns is considered the smoothest running and best managed, observers say. Spanning 19 counties in central and north Florida, the district has 650 employees and a budget of $239 million to serve nearly 4 million residents. Jim Swann, a former governing board chairman, hired Dean temporarily in 1984 - and quickly stopped looking for a replacement. "He was doing such a good job, we said why bother?" said Swann, a Cocoa developer. Dean was traveling Wednesday to Palm Beach County, where he will be interviewed today for the new job. He was not available for comment. Dean took the St. Johns job when the former executive director quit after a falling out with some board members. Previously, he was general counsel for the Department of Natural Resources, now a part of the Department of Environmental Protection. Dean, a Republican, has served the nine-member governing board under Republican and Democratic governors alike, beginning with former Gov. Bob Graham, a Democrat. Dean is considered the architect of one of the largest and most successful environmental restoration programs in the state, at the headwaters of the district's namesake, the St. Johns River. The project involved acquiring 150,000 acres in Brevard and Indian River counties, a roughly $200 million effort considered a model for Everglades restoration. When Dean took over 17 years ago, the project looked doomed, said Doug Bornique, executive director of the Indian River Citrus League. District managers were threatening to seize property that had belonged to growers for generations. Growers were girding for war, Bornique said. "He sat down at the table and said what can we do to make this work?" Bornique said. "He did a real job on everybody. We had attorneys, the district had attorneys, the environmentalists had attorneys. Henry said we don't need this war and everybody got rid of their attorneys and got the job done." Not all of the district's major projects have been trouble-free. Three years ago, the death of some 1,000 migratory birds -- mostly white pelicans -- near the north shore of Lake Apopka sparked a federal investigation that recently blamed pesticides. The deaths followed a $100 million district restoration project that called for the flooding of 14,000 acres of farmland. District managers have disputed the findings released earlier this week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Swann said Wednesday that the district did everything it could to test for contamination before the land was flooded, but couldn't be expected to find everything. Any other government agency probably would have sat around and done nothing," Swann said. "The St. Johns bought the land, did the testing and then flooded it. It wasn't a bad decision. It may have just been a wrong one." Copyright (c) 2001, The Palm Beach Post |