TAMPA, Fla. – Florida’s top leaders approved a fast-tracked deal Tuesday to pay a campaign donor more than $83 million for his companies’ four acres of waterfront Destin land, disregarding the mounting concerns from conservationists and some Republican officials over the land’s high price tag.

The purchase passed with a unanimous vote from Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General James Uthmeier, Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson and Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia. However, in an unusual move, Ingoglia paused the vote to note that while he supported the other land purchases bundled together in the vote, he wanted to single out his opposition to the Destin purchase, deemed item 4F on the agenda.

“I’d like to be shown as a no on Item 4F,” Ingoglia said. DeSantis, seemingly surprised, replied that it was an all-or-nothing vote for the slate of eight land deals.

“We’ll take that as a yes, and your objection will be noted on that one,” DeSantis said.

The landowners selling the property are Pointe Mezzanine LLC and Pointe Resort LLC, both of which are registered in state corporate filings to Robert Guidry, a Louisiana business owner. Since last summer, Guidry and businesses connected to him have written checks totaling more than $35,000 for local candidates, including county commissioners, who make decisions where his property is located.

Guidry, who was implicated in a bribery scandal involving former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards in the early 1990s, has also donated large amounts to state politicians, including to those who voted Tuesday to buy his land. Guidry and companies registered to him have donated more than $400,000 to state political committees, including DeSantis, Uthmeier and the Republican Party of Florida, records show.

The 4-acre parcel is not on the state’s Florida Forever priority list of properties, a roadmap of the land deemed important to purchase to bolster statewide conservation efforts. The Destin purchase also leapfrogged other crucial environmental projects when state lawmakers added in last-minute language to the budget in June.

At $20 million an acre, longtime conservation experts consider the Destin deal to be one of the most expensive land acquisitions in state history. The purchase also comes as Ingoglia leads a statewide effort to root out fiscal irresponsibility in local governments, targeting what state officials deem “waste, fraud and abuse.”

When the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald asked Ingoglia after the meeting why he objected to the deal, he said, “I have concerns.”

When asked what those concerns were, he wouldn’t say.

“Let’s just say I have concerns,” he said.

Ingoglia was also asked why he didn’t ask to have the purchase removed from two other land acquisitions and five conservation easements on the agenda.

“Procedurally, I thought that was the right way to do it,” Ingoglia said. “The governor chose to continue the way he did it, but I lodged my objection, and that was the intended purpose.”

Ingoglia said he researched the purchase before the vote.

“I did have concerns, and I vetted those concerns, and obviously it reflected in the vote,” he said.

The approval comes just days after details surrounding the land proposal became publicly known, and the Cabinet approved the purchase without any opportunity for Floridians to offer public comment.

Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson — who in June questioned the procedure behind another DeSantis-backed land deal to trade 300 acres of protected state forest to a luxury golf developer — voted in favor of the Destin land purchase Tuesday.

“I wonder what it would look like with 250 condos on it,” Simpson told the Times/Herald after the Cabinet meeting. “No we will never have to imagine that.”

Multiple environmental groups have said the conservation value doesn’t square with the price tag. On social media, the Sierra Club argued that “Florida’s conservation dollars belong to nature, not donors.”

Ingoglia wasn’t the only prominent Republican official to have concerns.

State Sen. Ed Hooper, a Republican from Palm Harbor who chairs the Legislature’s appropriations committee, said he remembered when the purchase of this land came up during budget discussions earlier this year.

While the language prioritizing the purchase of the land made it into the budget, a specific price tag did not. Hooper said that was because he opposed spending more than $20 million an acre on the property, and the idea didn’t get far in his conversations with budget staff.

“If it were to go through the budget process, I would not look favorably on it at that price. But it sounds like it’s not going through the budget process,” Hooper said, noting that the Cabinet has the authority to greenlight the purchase on its own.

“I just know it came to our attention in the budget process and it was like, ‘Uh, no.’”

Former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, who is running for governor, also said he had “big concerns” around the large price tag and how quickly it moved toward approval. He just heard about the deal Friday, he said.

“Why are we spending $83 million on a raw piece of land (when) that could buy thousands of acres of pristine land that needs conservation today?” he said in a phone interview.

DeSantis and the Cabinet also voted Tuesday to approve naming a new director of state lands, Bradley Perry, the third person to hold that position since May. A series of personnel changes have swept the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s state lands program since last summer, when the DeSantis administration proposed developing nine state parks with golf courses and hotels.

Last month, Andrew Fleener resigned as the interim head of the state’s land program. In May, his predecessor, Callie DeHaven, abruptly resigned in a handwritten note just before a proposal to trade 600 acres of St. Johns County wildlife preserve garnered national attention.

The Cabinet also approved two other controversial land deals during the Tuesday meeting: a plan to hand over downtown Miami land worth at least $67 million to Donald Trump’s nonprofit foundation to build a presidential library, and a proposal to amend an existing conservation easement on more than 5,000 acres in St. Johns County to allow for a wetlands mitigation bank.

---------

Times/Herald Tallahassee staff writer Lawrence Mower contributed to this report.

------------

©2025 Tampa Bay Times. Visit at tampabay.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.