ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – Susie Wiles, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, blasted a controversial and fast-tracked proposal backed by Florida regulators that would trade 600 acres of sensitive and prized public land in St. Johns County to a private developer, calling the proposed swap “outrageous” and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” in a statement to The Tributary on Sunday.
RELATED: St. Johns County residents oppose Guana River Wildlife Management Area land swap
Wiles, who has decades-long ties to Northeast Florida, called for members of the Acquisition and Restoration Council — an obscure body of bureaucrats and political appointees thrust into the headlines over the contested land deal — to vote down the “land grab.”
Wiles’ intervention, given her proximity to national power, is remarkable, but it’s in line with many prominent figures in the region who have either publicly or quietly mobilized to defeat the potential land transaction.
The prospect of ceding hundreds of acres of land within the Guana River Wildlife Management Area to a neighboring private developer — identified only as a generic LLC with undisclosed development plans for the site — ignited protests over the weekend and harkened back to other ill-fated proposals DeSantis administration officials greenlit last year to drill in a sensitive river basin and build hotels and pickleball courts on state parks.
“Guana Preserve and its beauty, familiarity and serenity is woven into the fabric of our communities and is, indeed, a treasure in northeast Florida. To allow — even enable — this land grab to occur is outrageous and completely contrary to what our community desires,” Wiles said in a statement to The Tributary.
The statement continued, “Elected and appointed leaders should vote against this development wolf in sheep’s clothing, and preserve this extraordinary natural bounty.”
The developer, identified in documents only as The Upland LLC (and widely rumored to be affiliated with Dream Finders Homes, which the company denied in a statement to The Tampa Bay Times), has offered up in exchange a patchwork of about 3,000 acres of land in St. Johns, Lafayette, Osceola and Volusia counties.
DEP staffers concluded the trade would offer a “net positive conservation benefit” because it would add more than 2,000 acres to the state’s Wildlife Corridor, a network of millions of acres of parks, wildlife management areas, and forests.
The Acquisition and Restoration Council is set to take up the Guana land swap Wednesday, a notably quick turnaround for a major land deal first disclosed in a meeting agenda last week. The speed and lack of details have helped fuel distrust and fury over the proposal.
“Florida’s conservation lands are not held in trust for the public simply until a developer wants them,” Audubon Florida said of the proposal, noting also that while the swap, on paper, provided five acres for every one the state would trade, it was all “light on details.”
Wiles’ national reputation centers on her indispensability to Trump, but long before that relationship, she was known throughout Northeast Florida as a moderate Republican with a particular interest in the environment.
In the late ’90s, working as the chief of staff to former Jacksonville Mayor John Delaney, Wiles helped spearhead the Preservation Project, a major city land-acquisition program designed to protect environmentally sensitive areas. She and her family have lived in both Jacksonville and St. Johns County.
Over the years, Wiles became a confidant to multiple Jacksonville mayors, political donors, and two Florida governors. One of those governors — Ron DeSantis — ultimately ousted Wiles from his inner circle, opening a widely known rift between the two that, given her closeness to Trump, continues to color the relationship between the president and the governor of one of the nation’s most populous states.
Wiles’s opposition to the land swap puts her in a chorus of bipartisan leaders concerned about the proposal.
The governor and cabinet would have to sign off on the land swap. That it has stirred such outrage in St. Johns is no small irony: DeSantis once represented the region in Congress.
Nate Monroe is the executive editor of The Tributary. He can be reached at [email protected] .
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