For its mid-winter meeting the Forum met at the
Waldorf-Astoria, five miles up the beach from Naples. Below and east of there is no-mans land: the
Everglades, Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge, Big Cypress National
Park, and Florida Panther Wildlife Refuge.
Alligators prowl the highway known as Alligator Alley leading across
to Miami. They share apex predator
status with Burmese pythons. The snakes
unlock their jaws and swallow baby alligators whole; the alligators snatch the
snakes and devour them under water.
The Darwinian spirit infects local litigators too. Arriving in Naples there was buzz at the
Forum about the ongoing Tampa defamation trial against a local shock jock,
Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. The Plaintiff’s attorney visited a local steak house after court last week for dinner. There, he was bemused by an attractive young
woman. Much drinking and flirting ensued. At the end of the evening the woman asked if
the attorney would please drive her car to her apartment, a short distance away,
because she had consumed too much alcohol.
The gentleman obliged and was promptly arrested by the local police for
drunk driving and was made to spend the night in jail. The story is that the police had been alerted
by the vixen and had been lying in wait for some time at her request. Oh, and she was a paralegal for the defense
firm. This was all over the news with a
non-sequestered jury. At the trial
court’s hearing on motion for mistrial—on the grounds that the publicity of the
arrest must surely have contaminated the jury—it was confirmed that the woman
had lied about the identity of her employer.
The paralegal and defense attorneys refused to answer questions,
asserting their right against self-incrimination. The judge refused to grant a mistrial. As Kerry Kester might say, we are not in
Nebraska anymore, folks. And mind those
snakes.
A band of mangroves and a lagoon separate the hotel from the
beach. My room
afforded an expansive view across a long row of condominium and hotel towers that line the
Gulf of Mexico up and down the beach in this area. One can imagine them watching out across the
gulf, moment frame steel relics abandoned to hurricanes and a rising sea in the
not too distant future. Florida is
flat. The average elevation of Naples is
less than 10 feet above sea level. This
week the waves lapped peacefully on a sliver of beach. But far inland, on the way to the airport, I
noted that construction excavations also exposed sand. The landscape is covered with lakes and ponds. Surface water is said to be just below the
surface everywhere, and it won’t take much for this to be just above the
surface. So the
state worries about
global warming. Predictions for sea
level rise over the balance of this century vary from .5 feet to more than six
feet. Anyway it plays out, Florida will
be affected more than most.
Most of the construction in and around Naples took place
after hurricane Donna made a direct hit on Naples and devastated the area in
1960. My taxi driver on the way back to
the airport says he arrived from Haiti fifteen years ago. In 2002 to 2006 he drove cement trucks for
Cemex. “They paid me $1,050 per
week,” he said. “Things were really good.” He speculated with the purchase of a plot of land for $12,000, but
he couldn’t really afford it. “Just pay me
$2,000 and $100/month,” said the seller.
That worked out well. In 2006 he sold the land for $60,000. He promptly turned around and invested in two
other lots for $25,000 each. When the crash
came, he was laid off by the cement company along with most other drivers, he
lost one of his lots in foreclosure, and the other one is now worth
$5,000. “It’s not coming back the same,”
he says.
“It appears that the worst is behind us and the future is
paved in (developing) dirt. All across
Southwest Florida the business of building is once again booming. It’s not just a single-family home here and
there in The Moorings or small multi family developments in Old Naples but the
larger developers like D.R. Horton and GL Homes are making land purchases on a
large scale. In Lee and Collier county
2700 single and multi-family permits have been pulled. In the City of Naples single-family permits
are up more than 50% over last year according to the Naples Daily News. If you drive through the streets of the
downtown neighborhoods whether it be Port Royal, Aqualane Shores, or The
Moorings, there is new construction everywhere you look.”
There will be construction.
There will be actions for damages.
The humidity was low this week. I
saw no alligators, but I’m sure they were there just out of sight.
