Chris Cate: Welcome to the Fluent in Floridian Podcast, featuring the Sunshine State’s brightest leaders talking about the issues most important to the people of Florida and its millions of weekly visitors. In this episode created by SalterMitchell PR, our executive producer Heidi Otway, the President of Salter Mitchell PR talks to Jim Murley, the Chief Resilience Officer for Miami-Dade County, and one of Florida’s leading voices for climate change preparedness. In their conversation, they talk about climate change, sea level rise, and efforts to address the impacts of climate change and sea level rise in Florida. They also talk about Jim’s work for Governor Lawton Chiles and much more. You can hear it all right now.

Heidi Otway: Jim Murley has spent more than four decades working in public policy issues important to Florida, especially when it comes to the environment, emergency management, sustainability, and climate change. I’ve gotten to know Jim over the last few months on a project we’re working on to address sea level rise in Miami-Dade County. Jim, welcome to the Fluent in Floridian Podcast. Thank you so much for being our guest today.

Jim Murley: I’m very happy to be here. Thank you.

Heidi Otway: Well, we’ve been working a little bit on this project down in Miami-Dade, but you know you have the very long history and passion for Florida, and your work has been dedicated to protecting our residents and our natural resources. So you’ve held numerous positions in the state, local, and national level. But I want to start at the beginning. What brought you to Florida?

Jim Murley: Well, you know, like so many people I was introduced to Florida when the winters got so cold in Cleveland, Ohio, that my father and mother packed us up into a car and we drove down what I’m sure was not Interstate 75, but some road network that got us to Sarasota. We were mid westerners, so we went to the west coast, and I started experiencing winter vacations to Florida.

I grew up in Cleveland. I went to undergrad in Ohio, and then law school in Washington DC. In Washington DC I was right at an interesting time when the federal government was looking at all these issues, and I was able to learn about them right there in national capital. That allowed me to find out about some opportunities with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. One of the programs NOAA has is called the Coastal Zone Management Program, and that is really set up to help states develop plans for their coasts, not just to protect them, but for recreation and commerce and, you know, multi-use plans. Every state was able to sort of mold it.

My job in NOAA was to travel to the states and help them put these plans together. Of course, Florida was one of my states. So I met some prominent Floridians, probably the most important in terms of someone who had an impact on my life was then Governor Bob Graham, to-be Senator Bob Graham. I was working with him because he wanted to push the state into more comprehensive planning along the coast. He was very interested in seeing the state and local governments work together on the erosion issues at the beaches and preparing for storms.

There was a period of time when the moons aligned between his initiatives and the leadership in the Florida Senate and House. It was pretty much 1984, ’85, and ’86. In those three years some major legislation was passed, most of which is still on the books in Florida. It’s certainly modified, but it was referred to generally as the Growth Management Package. So I was very privileged to have been in the trenches, literally writing the bill, and taking amendments and legislative sessions and then starting to implement.

But then there was a change. Governor Graham was elected to the Senate, a new governor came in. So I stayed in Tallahassee, but I took on the position of the first Executive Director of 1000 Friends of Florida, which is a not for profit organization, whose mission is to see the implementation of the Growth Management Law is done according to the way it’s written and sort of be an honest … safeguarding it. We were both a not for profit law firm and had planners. So that was exciting ’cause, first of all, I was the first employee-

Heidi Otway: You were employee number one, wow!

Jim Murley: … and I had no experience in the not for profit business, so you learn. That went on until 1995, when Governor Chiles had been just elected to his second term, and the opportunity presented itself for a vacancy at the Secretary of the Department of Community Affairs, which is the department which was leading the Growth Management.

Heidi Otway: Right. And that’s now DEO.

Jim Murley: It is. Later on under … at least a couple governors later, three governors later, there was reorganization in the state government, and the DCA was really sort of dissolved and parts of it went different places.

Heidi Otway: Right, right.

Jim Murley: But in those days we had emergency management and … actually, my first job was my predecessor, Linda Shelley, handed me the blueprints for the new building that she had been overseeing get designed, said, “You get it built, and move in the department.”

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Jim Murley: So that’s out at the SouthWood Center.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Jim Murley: The DCA Building, which later became the Sadowski Building, and the special building for Emergency Management.

Heidi Otway: Right. So was the Department of Emergency Management, was that competed by the time 1998 rolled around and you were involved with the-

Jim Murley: Yes, we were in our new buildings by ’96.

Heidi Otway: So that must have been a wild year for you, 1998.

Jim Murley: ’98 was, I call it the year of the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, because we had four hurricanes, the most dramatic of which was Hurricane Opal, which went ashore just maybe 50 miles west of where Hurricane Michael went ashore last year. We had significant tornadoes going through central Florida, with a loss of life. We had flooding on the Panhandle rivers from rain up in Alabama and Georgia.

Then we had, I think, to this day the most significant outbreak of forest fires that the state had ever experienced.So Hurricane Opal came assure in the summer of ’98, as I mentioned, west of Panama City. At that time, the counties to the west of Panama City Bay, Walton, Okaloosa, were not as developed as they are now, but there were many plans for undeveloped forest areas to become developed. There was some disagreement going on, you know, some development companies wanted to do a lot more, and the state was saying, Well, we don’t think you should do that. Well, what happened was the storm came ashore, and there were areas that had built very close to the Gulf of Mexico.

So you can literally … we were flying over it the next maybe two more years later with the Governor … and there were three very visible changes. One was, the old homes were built along the coastal road that had been built decades ago, and they were pretty much wind and water had just destroyed them. Then there were some new communities, one of which is Seaside, which was built to entirely different standards and behind the dunes. They made no attempt to get right near the water, and survived beautifully.

Then we were flying west, and in an area which we now know today as Topsail Hill State Park. And for a lot of reasons, the coastal highway had bent north away from the coast, so the road wasn’t a barrier between the water and, at that point, still undeveloped properties. It moved north and then west again. So you had this kind of what some people will tell you is some of the most beautiful coastal dunes and dune lakes, which is a phenomenon of the Panhandle that is very rare, when these lakes fill up, they break through the dune and drain to the Gulf. And then when they drain, the movement of the beach fills that trench in, and they fill up again. That’s very rare, and it’s totally natural. There’s no manipulation. It was all intact, and you could see the surge line on the natural landscape, because it took all the debris and then it receded. So what we call the “debris line” was very clear, it was a black and white line.

We basically told the governor, “If we develop this, then that line will look like, you know, scenario one. We will be having to pay for all that property. If we buy it, we’ll never have to do anything.” About a year later, the Department of Environmental Protection secretary … jeez, I can see her but I can’t think of her name … sent me a facsimile copy of a check for $72,000,000. We bought that property and Deer Lake State Park addition to Washington State Forest, Point Washington State Forest, and additions to one other state park.

So I will tell you today that that coastal area of South Walton, it has development, but it’s surrounded by either state forest or state parks that are managed in a way that will never have fires because they do controlled burns. If we did have the occasion that we had another storm, we’re never gonna have that kind of right on the shoreline stuff. So what I learned from that, what we learned was: It’s your land acquisition program, it’s your building codes, it’s your … everything needs to be part of the package to thinking about making your communities more resilient. We didn’t use the word “resilient” then.

Heidi Otway: What was the word back then?

Jim Murley: Probably “sustainable.” That word was a very new … I mean these words are not new, but they’re sort of repositioned and repurposed. So “sustainability” was about developing but leaving it better for your future generations. I can remember that being used quite a bit in that context. ‘Cause we were really rewriting the book.

Heidi Otway: So right now we know that North Florida is really trying to recover from Hurricane Michael, which you referenced earlier. I’m sure you’re following it. What are your thoughts on how they can rebound from this?

Jim Murley: Well, they’ve got to do things regionally. Even the large urban counties in Southeast Florida … Long Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe … smaller in population but valuable because of its coral reefs and its unique Florida Keys, you know, that’s almost 7,000,000 people of our 21,000,000. We work best regionally. So I’m here visiting Tallahassee as a representative of Southeast Florida Climate Change Compact. We visit with the governor’s office, we visit DEP, we visit with the legislature. We can always make an ask on behalf of Miami-Dade County, but the things that brands us differently is that we are there as a region. You know, we have all this common things that we have … we’re not asking for different things in competition with each other.

Heidi Otway: So basically, for North Florida they need to work together.

Jim Murley: I would go by river basin. There may be a situation where … there’s so many rivers that flow beautifully in freshwater springs that, you know, maybe there’s one or two depending on the situation, but the other thing that makes the Panhandle very unique … and it’s a great asset in so many ways: Jobs, natural area protection … is the military bases. The military bases require careful management of what happens outside of the boundary. So that means not only do they manage very well the wildlife and natural systems within their boundary, the last thing they want is a subdivision, right underneath them screaming “jet flyover.”

So it’s very exciting to see that Tyndall is going to be the subject of major redevelopment. When we had Hurricane Andrew hit Southeast Florida, we lost Homestead Air Force Base completely.

Heidi Otway: Yeah, I was there.

Jim Murley: You were there?

Heidi Otway: Yeah, I was there.

Jim Murley: It wasn’t till three, four, or five years later that the politics got right and we came back as Homestead Air Force Reserve.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Jim Murley: Today it is thriving. It might as well be Homestead Air Force Base again. But it’s also a very vulnerable [inaudible 00:18:34]. But those bases from Tyndall over, they’re huge in land area. And the military is very attuned to climate change. They see climate change, the term they use, and we’ve kind of stolen it, is “force multiplier.”

Heidi Otway: Force?

Jim Murley: Multiplier.

Heidi Otway: Multiplier.

Jim Murley: And that’s a term they will use in tactics and other planning that they do for their missions. But what they see, the climate changes that the forces that they have been dealing with have been storm events and other … maybe fires or outbreak of something. It’s like an attack, right?

Heidi Otway: Yeah.

Jim Murley: But the multiplier behind that is the sea level rise and the climate change, because it’s making all those events worse.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Jim Murley: So they can’t say, Well, can … the storm in 1995, we’ll plan for that happening, you know, every 20 years, and we pretty much can know what it’s gonna do. They know now that they have to take that storm event and actually extrapolate the damage, the extent it goes in, the height of the waves-

Heidi Otway: Oh, my goodness.

Jim Murley: … the amount of rain. Remember Houston gained 30 to 40 inches?

Heidi Otway: Yeah.

Jim Murley: And the military is nothing but very specific about taking care of their mission-

Heidi Otway: And very tactical.

Jim Murley: And they have their own weather people. So I think of local governments, they do it now but they have to find a way to ask the military to join them in that kind of thinking.

Heidi Otway: Good. Well, let’s switch to your current position as a Chief Resiliency Officer for Miami-Dade County. I was looking back at some of the headlines for when you were first brought on. One of the headlines said, “Meet the Miami-Dade Official Charged with Saving the County from Rising Seas.” That’s a really big lift.

Jim Murley: Yeah, it is, yeah.

Heidi Otway: So tell us about your work to keep Miami-Dade above water.

Jim Murley: It’s an exciting job. When I left Tallahassee, I went to Florida Atlantic University and I had the privilege of running an environmental and urban policy research center. So it wasn’t science based, it was thinking about policies. It was there that a funder approached us and said, you know, “We know what you do, but we’d like for you to look at it through the lens of climate adaptation.” I didn’t know what the heck they were talking about.

Heidi Otway: We know no now. Or did you have to define that?

Jim Murley: We had textbook examples and there were things that were being talked about under the auspices of the International Panel for Climate Change, and there’s a thing that has been going on since the 1990s called the National Climate Assessment, happens every four years. There was rich literature out there. I’m not sure we could google it yet but [crosstalk 00:22:22] … So the grant I received was to sort of conceptualize a Florida climate adaptation plan from the literature and from what we already knew we did in terms of growth management and emergency management, how we handle the highways. We did that, and also got a second grant to look at how water treatment facilities could be further protected from storm surge and sea level rise. We drilled down very specifically.

So about that time, we were in a period of time when the federal government was willing to spend some more money. I went over to the South Florida Regional Planning Council, which was the four counties. We received a multi year fund from US Housing and Development to do a regional sustainability plan.

Heidi Otway: Okay. Was that like one of the first for Florida?

Jim Murley: There were about 50 of them being done at that time around the country.

Heidi Otway: Okay.

Jim Murley: We were the only one in Florida. There were some smaller ones that HUD provided just to cities but not regional.

Heidi Otway: Okay.

Jim Murley: So we were about finishing that when … and actually I was still at the Regional Planning Council working with our partners in the other counties and others to finish the regional … we called it 750s, because we actually worked … we asked the three counties on what we referred to on what we referred to as the “treasure coast,” which is Martin, St. Lucie, and River to join us. We really wanted to look … so it was 750, seven times looking out 50 years.

Heidi Otway: Wow, okay.

Jim Murley: Reasonably successful with, you know, some bumps along the road. But the Obama administration decided that as part of the Recovery Act and profusion of funds, a lot of which passed from Washington agencies down to the states, that they were gonna really try to incentivize local governments to get into this business, both on the climate mitigation side, which is reducing greenhouse gases through energy efficiency, managing that, but also starting that process of climate adaptation. As a part of that, we’re now under Governor Charlie Crist …

When Governor Crist came in and he’s standing on the steps of the Capitol at his inauguration, he announced that one of his priorities was climate change. You could have … everybody in that crowd just said, “What in the world? What did he drink” that morning. He had never talked about it in his campaign. You know, he was a former attorney general who wanted all the prisoners to wear black and white. He was Chain Gang Charlie. Here he was talking about climate change.

So he really enthused a lot of people, including his Department of Environmental Protection Secretary, Mike Sole, who created a task force. We started doing statewide strategy on climate. Importantly, he and the legislature agreed to create a standing commission called the Florida Energy and Climate Commission, which was staffed by the Energy office, which at that time was in the governor’s office. The appointments … this is in the weeds, but the same way that people get appointed to the Public Service Commissions. See there’s a nominating committee and then you go from the slate. So I ended up getting on the commission, and then Governor Crist asked me to chair the commission.

Heidi Otway: Right. And you were still with the Southwest Florida-

Jim Murley: South Florida Regional Planning Council. [crosstalk 00:26:19].

Heidi Otway: Okay.

Jim Murley: That was before I finally made my eventual change over to-

Heidi Otway: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jim Murley: So that was a wonderful job, because we had over $100,000,000 in federal funds, and we were focused. The legislature for the first couple years seemed to ride along, and then the bottom fell out.

Heidi Otway: What caused that?

Jim Murley: Well, Governor Crist’s attention went on to some other things, if you remember that election where he decided not to run for governor again, run for the senate. This was about 2010, 2011. Governor Scott came in, the recession was in the very bottom of its worst impacts, and huge cuts were made. That’s when the Department of Community Affairs was phased out and reorganized.

Heidi Otway: And we got DEO.

Jim Murley: The commission was disbanded, the energy office moved from … I don’t know why Governor Scott didn’t stop it, but it was under his purview, and ended up under the Agriculture Commissioner, where it still is today.

Heidi Otway: Wow, okay.

Jim Murley: It just took the wind out of the sails.

Heidi Otway: And all of that work that you had done, you say you were very focused.

Jim Murley: The work at the state level. But it really reinforced that regional collaboration. We had started it, and it had gotten sort of stimulated by Governor Crist’s statewide initiative. But then when we saw that go away again, it just reinforced the fact that we couldn’t count on Tallahassee or Washington DC. You know, in the situations that were evolving there, not today in Washington, we needed to prioritize this issue, allocate our own local resources, and empower the staff, working with consultants, and eventually foundations came in to help us to do the work.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Jim Murley: So we never had very much federal or state assistance.

Heidi Otway: And this is at the regional level you’re talking about.

Jim Murley: Yeah, the four counties. The regional planning council still is there, but what we had to create was a separate regional entity called the Southeast Florida Climate Change Compact, parallel to the Regional Compact.

Heidi Otway: In other cities-

Jim Murley: They’re starting to do-

Heidi Otway: We’ve got one in Tallahassee.

Jim Murley: Tampa Bay. Thinking about Tallahassee, there’s one along what we call the Space Coast … Brevard, Bellucia, over to Orlando. And recently our neighbors over on the other end of 75 told us in Collier and Lee that they’re organizing.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Jim Murley: So we actually become, you know, we go out there and preach the idea of doing that, and we welcome that opportunity.

Heidi Otway: So how does that tie into your current position?

Jim Murley: Things were moving along, just sort of bopping along at the state level, and starting to really become formative in terms of what we were able to accomplish regionally. In Miami-Dade County, where I live … I’ve lived there since I left Tallahassee, but my jobs necessarily weren’t in Miami-Dade County or in Dade County government or the city. They appointed a Sea Level Rise Committee under the Clerk of Courts, his name is Harvey Reuben. Harvey and I go way back, and Harvey called me and said, “I want you to be my advice chair because you know what’s going on, and I’ll just [inaudible 00:29:48].” So Harvey and I and seven other citizens of Miami-Dade County have a year to come up with a framework for addressing sea level rise in Miami-Dade County. We certainly knew what was going on regionally, but this was-

Heidi Otway: Specific, yeah.

Jim Murley: And we did that, and it was well received by the County Commission. Eventually, the mayor who … Miami is a separate legal entity from the County Commission, unlike most of the other 66 counties. We have a very kind of like a state government form, an executive who runs the county full-time and the county commission.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Jim Murley: They mayor said, “Okay, I see what the commission’s interests are here, and we’re going to take an existing office of sustainability and repurpose it, put more resources in, and create a position of Chief Resilience Officer,” and I got the call.

Heidi Otway: And you got the call.

Jim Murley: And I couldn’t have been happier. That was November of 2015.

Heidi Otway: Right. So since that time, I’ve noticed that you have been working with the City of Miami and City of Miami Beach to, you know, address sea level rise through the International 100 Resilient Cities Network.

Jim Murley: Yeah, that’s an exciting additional chapter, because what we’ve been talking about is climate in the context of … turn that around. We’ve been talking about resilience in the context of climate. Right? So “sustainability” continues on, we still see that word used. “Adaptation” continues to be used. But you start seeing the word “resilience” used in the context of recovering from hurricanes and other storm events that are climate related and being sort of a word that was coming into that vocabulary.

The Rockefeller Foundation invested significantly in a model of resilience, and they said they were going to invest in a hundred cities around the world, and they were gonna test the model … this is what the Foundation is allowed to do, they call it a Theory of Change. And they were gonna pay for it, and they’re a wealthy foundation.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Jim Murley: And one of the things that were required for any of the 100 cities was they had to have a CRO, which they had written up the job description, even had the whole thing mapped out.

Heidi Otway: Right.

Jim Murley: So I started probably in about 2013. They were gonna take 30 plus cities the first year, 30 the second, 30, and then after that they’d have a hundred cities they could move through a process. City of Miami, City of Miami Beach both applied and in year one and year two and didn’t get in. Miami-Dade didn’t apply because the rules were written only for cities. We’re getting into year three, the Rockefeller Foundation notified us, actually notified us through the Miami Community Foundation, which is our … like many counties and regions have a community foundation. They said, “Look, we’ve got this experience of working with individual cities, but we realize, especially in urban areas, that a single city can’t really do this alone. So what we’d like to do is have Miami-Dade County,” which because of our charter we operate like a city for a million people who are unincorporated, “and two cities … we suggest Miami Beach because they had previously demonstrated interest … come together, have one application, and we will recognize you as a participating single unit.” And we call ourselves Greater Miami Beaches.

Heidi Otway: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim Murley: And we got in. And that’s the way we’re going through the process that all hundred cities are doing. We do work in the community. We eventually, and we hope this year, we will finish a resilient strategy for our entire county with the cooperation of those two cities, but ultimately the strategy will be for all of our cities, we have 34. Now, important point, this is resilience as defined beyond the boundaries of climate. So there’s two key terms that I think are the major takeaways for anybody. And you don’t have to be in the Rockefeller program to everything we’re talking about. You certainly would get a lot of help from them, but they’ve done this in a way that you can go online to 100resilientcities.org and pretty much-

Heidi Otway: Yeah, I’ve looked at the website.

Jim Murley: … and get the game plan. Right?

Heidi Otway: It’s amazing. Game of Floods and all this [crosstalk 00:34:36]-

Jim Murley: Yeah, shocks and stresses.

Heidi Otway: Yeah.

Jim Murley: The shocks are pretty self evident. That’s the hurricane, the other climate … It’s also an infrastructure collapse. It could be Zika showing up unexpectedly, a major pandemic. It could be a major recession that knocks the heck out of your tax revenues and causes government panic. So shocks are shocks, and Emergency Management helps you prepare for them in many ways. But what makes the shocks worse, what amplifies the shocks, going back to that term the military likes to use, “force multiplier,” is stresses. So the segue from the shocks into the stresses discussion, especially if you are a coastal community is that sea level rise is not a shock, it’s a stress. Because it’s not an event. It doesn’t take place, you know, with a high tide. It doesn’t take place during hurricane season. It takes place every day, every month, every year, and we know that over the last hundred years we’ve had about nine to 11 inches.

But what the science is telling us is that because of the change in the climate ’caused by carbon and the reactions that occur, that that extra heat is being absorbed by the ocean, which is expanding. Ocean expands, it rises. And the models that really are the game changers will tell you that if the heat goes up by centigrade … or you can measure it in parts per million of carbon, greenhouse gases … at some point, the masses that miles deep ice on Greenland and Antarctica start to melt. They melt every day, but they also have winters and the ice reforms and the snow falls and … That’s the game changer. When that polar icecap melts, which it has been doing, it’s really not adding volume of water to the mass, because ice … if you have a glass half full of water, half full of ice and the ice melts, the level of the water never goes down. You heat that, and it’ll expand. And if you add the volume of the water that’s on the glaciers that are on land, that’s a net gain to the ocean.

So as those two things happen and the sciences track them and they tell us we’re in “scenarios” we call it … you know, ’cause there’s uncertainty, like in any science … you go from looking at a foot over a hundred years to two feet in the next 40 years, to six feet by the end of the century. Those are dynamic … and that’s just the level of the sea relative to the land, not the storm event on top.

Heidi Otway: Right, right. So you know, you just gave a really good overview of the science and how you all are looking at it and knowing that this is to come. How do you prepare for that? And how do you engage the community and the dialogue about it?

Jim Murley: The community is … half of that is a great number are alert to the shocks. So you take the shocks as they come, and you make them learning events.

Heidi Otway: Yes, right.

Jim Murley: You explain that that particular high tide, which we know the exact date is gonna happen in the fall, called King Tide, and you go out there and people … sunny day … and the water is coming up through the storm water system and it’s salty.

Heidi Otway: Yes, I’ve seen the pictures.

Jim Murley: And you get people to recognize why … It’s not a rain event. It’s sunny, and it’s saltwater, it’s not fresh. They start asking, “Why is that happening?” It’s happening because the sea has now gotten relatively higher and it’s enough to back up those pipes we used to drain to the sea, are draining the sea to the land.

Heidi Otway: Wow.

Jim Murley: Today we have a landscape which is a lot of land relative to the water and we’re managing. And we’re mostly not building out. We’re not sprawling anymore. We’ve pretty much drawn a line on what we call the “urban growth boundary.” Divides us, the urban, from the agriculture and then eventually to the west to the Everglades. And we’re going up, we’re building 90 story apartment buildings.

Heidi Otway: 90?

Jim Murley: 90 story apartment buildings.

Heidi Otway: 19?

Jim Murley: Ninety, 9-0.

Heidi Otway: 9-0?

Jim Murley: The future hundred years of Southeast Florida will be about managing the water relative to the land, building vertically, and connecting them with elevated transportation systems.

Heidi Otway: Okay.

Jim Murley: That’s what we’re building.

Heidi Otway: And that’s the solution.

Jim Murley: It’s the way we will manage?

Heidi Otway: It’s the way we’ll manage.

Jim Murley: It’s the way we will adapt.

Heidi Otway: So this is all about adaptation.

Jim Murley: It’s a verb, not a noun. There’s no end … You know, there may be areas, especially in South Dade, where we don’t have much development today, that it won’t make sense to try to do some of the interventions that we’ve talked about.

Heidi Otway: Well, we always wrap up our interviews with just some questions about you and, you know, the things that you like. So I’m gonna go ahead and throw them out there. The first question is: Who is a Florida leader that you admire? This could be someone from history or someone active that you work with.

Jim Murley: There were a number, but I will mention one that I had the privilege of working for at 1,000 Friends of Florida and recently unfortunately attended his memorial service. That was Nathaniel Reed. He was a really true leader. His facility were developers, but they developed in such a way they really respected the land. He became … we can’t recite all the things he did, but anybody who wants to read about somebody who … He would tell me this, he was my chair at 1,000 Friends of Florida. He said, “Never be afraid to use the word love.” He said, “Always say ‘I love Florida.'” You would think you were doing a technical paper or you were doing a policy. He said, “Always end by ‘I love Florida.'” He knew how to make that emotional connection.

Heidi Otway: I love that. In my office I have a sign that says: I love Florida.

Jim Murley: Yeah.

Heidi Otway: Hashtag.

Jim Murley: So he was the leader I would … Yeah.

Heidi Otway: Okay. So what person, place, or thing in Florida needs more attention than it’s currently getting?

Jim Murley: I think, you know, the state has been very proud of its land acquisition programs, and a lot of them are focused on preserving large areas for habitat for animals and critters and for national system. People can enjoy them and even go through them, but they’re not … I think we have a wonderful state parks system, and it’s award-winning. We also have … I know at least I speak now from the standpoint of my county parks system, which is turning 90 years old in March.

Heidi Otway: Really?

Jim Murley: Extraordinary natural areas that are parks that are not just parks. You know, they are places after school where kids go to get tutored. They are places where elderly people go for special care. They are places where even our interventions in the school to prevent crimes take place. They are part of the community in many ways. I think that our parks in our urban settings and where there are parks, high activity parks, passive parks, we need to envision them as part of that natural system. Because let me tell you, when we do our long term planning, our parks is where water can settle, even if it’s for a period of time that we don’t want it in our streets. But it can be in the parks. The park may not be able to be used for a while, but bringing it back online is a lot cheaper than the alternative. So we very much think of our parks as multiuse activities, and I know Tallahassee is proud of its parks.

Heidi Otway: Yeah, we are.

Jim Murley: Yeah.

Heidi Otway: So what’s your favorite Florida location to visit?

Jim Murley: Well, we brought it up earlier. I think Topsail Hill is one of the most beautiful places anywhere. We’re not … you know, we don’t have much elevation, but I don’t know the exact height there, it’s one of the highest spots along the coastline of Florida. I think there’s some places interior where there’s some high hills. So to the elevated on sand dunes overlooking the Gulf and to see these coastal lakes. Really, not much has happened to them since the glacial period.

Heidi Otway: Oh, I’m gonna have to go check that out.

Jim Murley: You should.

Heidi Otway: I need to go check that out. It’s not too far from here.

Jim Murley: You go west, you take 90 out west, and as soon as you get out of Bay County and go into Walton you take a county road called 30a. 30a will take you right to the park.

Heidi Otway: All right. I might have been there but-

Jim Murley: They have camps, they have camping, they have cabins, they have RV trailer hookups.

Heidi Otway: … I probably didn’t pay attention.

Jim Murley: And they have trams that can take you, so you don’t have to walk far.

Heidi Otway: Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being a guest. This was so enlightening. We may have to have you come back, ’cause I have many more questions. I want to hear more.

Jim Murley: Thank you. You guys were fun. I enjoyed this.

Chris Cate: Thanks for listening to the Fluent in Floridian Podcast. This show was executive produced by April Salter with additional support provided by Heidi Otway and the team at Salter Mitchell PR. If you need help telling your Florida story, Salter Mitchell PR has you covered by offering issues management, crisis communications, social media, advocacy, and media relations assistance. You can learn more about Salter Mitchell PR at saltermichellpr.com. You can also learn more about the Fluent in Floridian Podcast and listen to every episode of the show at fluentinfloridian.com or by searching for the show using your favorite podcast app. Have a great day.