You quickly get into tinfoil territory when you start looking into the question, but this much seems pretty solid:
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/the-panhandle-paradox-3528/None of this was surprising, given the enormous influence that St. Joe has exerted in the region, as St. Petersburg Times reporters Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite write in their new book, Paving Paradise: Florida’s Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss. “St. Joe’s development machine is oiled by its political influence,” they note in a chapter on the new airport. “Between 1997 and 2002, St. Joe donated the maximum legal amount to more than 100 candidates for state cabinet and legislative posts from both parties, with subsidiaries like Arvida often making an identical donation to the same candidates.” Further connections to the political structure of the region are well known now to anyone who has followed the story: Jeb Bush was once a part of the Codina Group, the 12th-largest real estate development firm in the state, which was founded by Armando Codina, a supporter and friend of former President George H.W. Bush. St. Joe purchased 50 percent of the Codina Group in the late ’90s, cementing ties to the man who would be Florida’s governor. A Panama City attorney, William Harrison, represented St. Joe and was the co-chair of George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in the Panhandle.
http://www.culturechange.org/JebBushLand.htmlSuburban sprawl is the spam of the built environment, it keeps coming, people complain about it, and nobody seems capable of stopping it. Gluttonous land development is ubiquitous. For decades the sprawl industry has used its money and political muscle to keep government subservient to sprawl interests, especially in Florida, whose environmental uniqueness belongs to everyone. Land development is the engine of economic growth in Florida, which has become a developer's dream. That's what happens when a governor has made his fortune in real estate development.
Governor Jeb Bush has not used the state's legal framework to limit sprawl. Say one thing and do the opposite could be the motto for Governor Bush's approach to addressing the ravenous sprawl consuming Florida. As The Washington Post observed in 2002, Florida's governors' "growth management efforts have failed for decades, and Jeb Bush's administration has been especially close to real estate interests." A former attorney for the state, Ross Burnaman, summed it up: "Jeb and his lieutenants are by and large selling the state out." . . .
The largest private land owner in Florida is the highly profitable St. Joe Company, with some 850,000 acres, and it has benefited greatly from the Bush brothers. It owns about 3 percent of the sunshine state. At the beginning of the last century it bought land for as little as $2 an acre, and now sells some land for $2 million an acre. Most of its land is in Florida's panhandle which it has renamed Florida's Great Northwest, because a panhandler is someone looking for a handout. And St. Joe is getting handouts from government. Moving roads and building new roads with government money make certain St. Joe parcels of land feasible for development. Hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars will help build infrastructure that St. Joe needs for maximum returns. In November 1999 Governor Bush issued and Executive Order designating eight panhandle counties as "rural Areas of Critical Economic Concern," which opened the floodgates for millions of state dollars for public infrastructure.
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