Rick Scott's Budget Team: No Plan to Close State Parks

While there have been rumors and reports that the proposed budget unveiled on Monday by Gov. Rick Scott would lead to closing 53 state parks -- including Civil War battlefields like Olustee and Natural Bridge -- the Scott team shot those reports down on Wednesday.

In remarks to the Florida House Agriculture and Natural Resources Appropriations Subcommittee chaired by Rep. Trudi Williams, R-Fort Myers, Andrew Grayson -- the acting policy coordinator of the Environmental Policy Unit of the Office of Policy and Budget --said those reports were not true and that the Scott team had no intention of closing the parks.

We are not closing any parks in the governors budget, insisted Grayson.

Please tell the governor, thank you, thank you, thank you, said Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda, D-Tallahassee.

With the Conservative Political Action Conference kicking off on Thursday, national pundits will once again start the navel gazing about what it means to be a conservative.

They may want to keep in mind the immortal lines of Macaulay.

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?"

Part of conservatism is a respect for heritage and tradition and reverence of what happened before.

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors, noted the great G.K. Chesterton. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around."

Just so.

Some of the state historic parks -- and I have been to most of them in the more than 25 years that have passed since I began my love affair with Florida -- reflect the best of our tradition. Fort Mose, just north of downtown St. Augustine, which was organized by former slaves who yearned and fought for their own freedom, comes to mind. So do the Letchworth-Love Mounds, just west of Monticello, where Native Americans built places to worship more than 1,000 years ago. So does the John Gorrie Museum in Apalachicola which commemorates the man who set the stage for creating air conditioning which helped pave the way for the Florida we know and love.

While they do not bring in the visitors that Disney or other tourist locations bring in, the historic parks stretched across Florida remind us that we are but a thread of the rich tapestry of the Sunshine States story. They remind us that important things happened here. While the history books do not pay much attention to it, St. Augustine had been established more than 40 years before John Smith showed up in Jamestown and more than 50 years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.

Conservative intellectuals -- Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver come to mind off the top of my head -- often pout that modern man has no idea of where he came from, of what happened before him that shaped his world and established his place within it. The historic sites preserved across Florida offer us a little glimpse into how we got here -- and should be celebrated.

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