Eric Draper Quotations

What they're trying to do is to create the opportunity for them to be able to develop their land without them having to worry about someone challenging the development based upon the sprawl or the population projection rules, and those are two key concepts that the state Department of Community Affairs and counties use to determine whether a development is appropriate.

We've taken a bill that was intended to preserve a ranch with important environmental features and turned it into a state-owned farm.

She did a lot of good stuff for us then.

Money changes everything. Especially when you have a lot of it. For Governor Bush, I think you're seeing him looking to burnish his legacy.

If approved by the legislature, this budget will set in stone Governor Bush's environmental legacy.

Well, you know, usually we're complaining about the governor and his budget, but in this case, he really has delivered something that made us happy.

We recognized Florida ranchlands contained some of the best environmental lands in the state. It's better to have agriculture than a mall or housing.

We're not exactly in a great position to go and say we want more.

We should let the ranch be economically sustainable but also ecologically sustainable.

We spend more time opposing bad bills now than we did in the past. The Legislature is awful compared to what it used to be.

There's an ongoing kind of resistance movement to Babcock. But I don't think they have the juice to deliver.

It seems to give kind of a very open-ended permission ... to basically manage the ranch for an economic purpose. It's lost the balance between economic and ecological.

It's a great budget for the environment, it really is. It's more money than they've ever put into the environment.

It's a local project that got a big chunk of money and then had problems. Members don't forget that.

It used to be that we really were opponents on a lot of policy issues. We weren't listening to each other.

The increase they're looking for appears to be more than they would probably get.

You want to help these cowboys that have been out there managing the ranch very well to keep doing that. These people working on the ranch would keep their jobs. Where are you going to find another ranch job? These people - that's their life.

The Legislature should stop second-guessing the will of the voters.