Florida county wants motocross course on land bought for conservation

One of the great things about hiking around Florida’s precious conservation lands is how quiet they can be. You can get away from all the noise and — I SAID, YOU CAN GET AWAY! FROM ALL THE NOISE!

WHAT? YOU CAN’T HEAR ME? IT MUST BE BECAUSE OF ALL THESE DIRT BIKES ROARING AROUND!

Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?

Volusia County, where Florida’s practice of preserving land for environmental purposes has a rich history, has gotten itself tied into knots over the proper use of some recently purchased conservation property

The county spent $4.6 million in taxpayer-approved preservation funding to purchase 365 acres. Then, after the deal went through, county officials decided to preserve only 279 of those acres.

The other 77, they said, would be used for a county-sponsored motocross course.

They voted for motocross even though that land is smack in the middle of the Florida Wildlife Corridor. It’s supposed to be for bears, bobcats, and panthers, not dirt bikes.

“None of this makes any sense,” said DeLand resident Lourdes “LuLu” Gonzalez. She’s a court interpreter and outdoor enthusiast who has sued to stop the motocross course.

The county official pushing hardest for motocross is a DeLand lawyer named Don Dempsey. He’s a Volusia County Council member whose son just happens to be — surprise! — a motocross racer.

Dempsey denied he’s pursuing this for personal reasons.

“I’m not doing this for me or my son,” he said, according to the Daytona Beach News Journal. “I’m doing this for the community,”

He insisted motocross can get kids off the couch and into the great outdoors, explaining, “I don’t want video game vegetables on my watch.”

Of course, hiking, camping, fishing, kayaking, canoeing, and horseback riding have the same effect, but with a lot less noise, gas consumption, and exhaust fumes.

Far less chance of scaring away wildlife, too.

Bait and switch

Volusia County has long been known for what Tom Cruise once called “a need — a need for speed.”

In 1906, a steam-powered car called the Rocket Racer blazed across Ormond Beach’s hard-packed sand to set a world record of 127 mph, a speed you now occasionally witness on I-95.

In 1935, a British driver, Malcolm Campbell, set a new world record on Daytona Beach of 276 mph. When he got home, he was knighted, which perhaps inspired the TV show “Knight Rider.”

In 1947, racing promoter Bill France Sr. gathered some friends in Daytona Beach’s Streamline Hotel to form the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing aka NASCAR, created to promote the practice of turning left a lot.

Volusia County also holds a different historic record. It’s where voter-approved land-buying programs began — not just in Florida, but nationwide.

Forty years ago, an environmental activist named Clay Henderson helped spearhead the nation’s first voter-approved land-buying project. Volusia County’s 1986 Endangered Lands program used a $20 million bond issue to buy 34 properties.

Voters liked it so much, in 2000 they approved a new version called Volusia Forever. They approved it a third time in 2020, this time by a 75% margin. It was far more popular than any politician. So far, the program has saved 63,000 acres of forests, swamps, and beaches.

Henderson is well aware of the controversy over using Volusia Forever land to build a motocross course, calling it “a classic bait-and-switch.”

He worries that turning it into a racing venue will erode the public’s support for the preservation program. The track will hurt the county’s track record.

“Clearly, the optics are bad,” Henderson said, then pretended to be the county officials pushing the idea: “Hey, let’s put something there that makes a lot of noise and attracts a lot of people!”

He’s not kidding about the “a lot of people.”

In 2024, the council hired a consultant, Hunden Strategic Partners, to analyze what it would take to build a motocross facility. County officials said Hunden could skip the usual study of whether such a thing was needed. They’d already decided on that part.

The 40-page Hunden report said that to make the motocross work would require two tracks — one for practice, one for competition — plus 50 to 100 R/V slips, bathrooms, concession stands, electrical hookups, a pro shop, and parking for 250.

Although the plan doesn’t mention bleachers, I think they miiiiiight need some. The plan says, “The total attendance in Year 1 is projected at roughly 9,400 and is estimated to grow to nearly 35,600 by … Year 5.”

The cost: a mere $10 million.

To the critics pointing out that motocross isn’t synonymous with environmental preservation, Volusia County Council Chair Jeff Brower had a simple response: There’s no asphalt! It’s all made in the mud!

“There’s no paving going on,” Brower told WESH-TV in May. “It’s dirt.”

I don’t think “it’s dirt” is what all those conservation-minded voters had in mind.

Risky business

I’m no Paul Krugman but, as I understand economics, the two key factors in making a business work are called “supply” and “demand.”

When it comes to supply, there’s no shortage of motocross courses in Florida. But the demand is questionable.

The MX Parks website lists 32 tracks in Florida. They include the Orlando MX Park, which has been around since 1969.

Although it’s an expensive sport — dirt bikes cost at least $6,000, plus protective gear, gas, and maintenance — nobody’s making a ton of moolah. In other words, what Volusia County wants to get into is (to shout-out a different Tom Cruise film) risky business.

At least one member of the county council has acknowledged this. Brower told his colleagues that “local track owners … expressed concern about the financial viability of the project.”

The closest track to Volusia is one in Bunnell called Pax Trax. Its owner, C.H. Harris, showed up at a January meeting to warn the council not to do this.

Harris is so passionate about the sport that he named his son “Moto.” But if he saw sufficient demand for a new track in Volusia County, he said, “I would buy the land myself and build a track.”

A county-sponsored track would hurt the privately owned tracks like his before it sputters to a stop, he said.

“I know you want this, but it will shut me down,” Harris told them.

Dempsey refused to believe him.

“To say that this sport … is just a niche sport for just a small percentage of people is not true,” he insisted. “There’s a ton of kids that do this stuff. I did it as a kid.”

I talked to Harris this week. He hasn’t changed his mind. He told me Dempsey had invited him to bid on building the Volusia track. He decided against it.

“That land they purchased is absolute garbage to build a motocross track on,” he told me. To make it work, he said, you’d need to destroy even more of the wetlands that were supposed to be preserved.

Whoever Volusia hires, he said, “It’s probably going to bankrupt somebody.”

Like a bad dream

The people opposing this motocross move include the leaders of Volusia County’s chapter of the Sierra Club.

The county’s original location for the track was too close to a neighborhood that didn’t want it, they told me. That’s how the county wound up putting it on conservation land not close to any homes. Instead, it’s adjacent to the county’s Longleaf Pine Preserve.

Say goodbye to the peace and quiet of the preserve. Dirt bikes can generate more than 100 decibels of noise. That’s actually worse than a data center.

The Sierra Club leaders see the council’s actions as a perversion of the popular conservation program.

“It’s like a bad dream you can’t really wake up from,” said Melissa Lammers of Ormond Beach.

This particular Volusia Forever purchase was handled differently from previous ones, she and another Sierra Club leader, Steve Wonderly, explained.

Normally, the land purchase doesn’t go through unless Volusia Forever gets matching funds from another agency, such as the state government. Then, any infrastructure needed — bike paths, picnic tables, etc. — is paid for by the county’s ECHO fund, which stands for Environmental, Cultural, Historic, and Outdoors.

But for this purchase, the county council “matched” the Volusia Forever funding by pulling money from its ECHO fund, they said. The county matched ITSELF, using money that’s never before been used for buying land.

The county didn’t disclose that some of the wetlands on the property had been illegally damaged by a previous owner, they said. Instead of restoring the wetlands, that became the site for the proposed motocross site.

But what particularly infuriated opponents was when Dempsey began waving around a paper that he said justified building the course on conservation property.

A bigger debate

The contract to build the motocross track is now steaming toward approval like the Rocket Racer rolling over Ormond Beach.

In her lawsuit, Gonzalez accuses Dempsey of arranging for the contract to go to a business associate of one of his family members, a potential conflict of interest she alleges he never disclosed.

Her suit names the contractor as Tyla Rattray, a former South African motocross racer who trains other racers and who in 2022 got into a noise dispute with neighbors of his motocross track in Sumter County. My efforts to reach Rattray for comment were unsuccessful.

The need for speed in signing the contract seems to be driven by the fact that there’s an election coming up. The motocross has become an issue in Dempsey’s reelection campaign.

His opponent, a Ph.D. biologist named Wendy Anderson, says the idea of building a motocross course on conservation land is cuckoo.

“If Amendment 3 passes and we have to cut expenses,” Anderson told me, “the first thing to go on the chopping block in Volusia is that motocross course.”

Dempsey, meanwhile, has been trying to change the focus of the debate from the motocross course to something bigger: the whole land-buying program.

Despite the Volusa Forever program’s incredible popularity, he sees problems with it. He delved into those problems in a series of five, count ’em, FIVE YouTube videos that he posted to his campaign website.

He doesn’t like that the land is supposed to be set aside forever. He thinks there should be a time limit on keeping it undeveloped. Nobody knows what Volusia County is going to need in the year 3000, he said.

In his fifth YouTube video, he makes the argument that Lammler and Wonderly found so infuriating. He says the rules governing Volusia Forever not only allow but actually encourage building a motocross course.

As proof, he proffers a list from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Among the approved “resource-based recreation” uses are motorized off-road vehicles.

“So, all this talk that you’re hearing that we shouldn’t allow motorcycles and dirt bikes in conservation lands is not what we voted for,” Dempsey says. “I think it’s high time that we started giving people what they voted for.”

Henderson — also a lawyer — told me he thinks Dempsey’s argument is a stretch at best. He pointed out that the county comprehensive plan says Volusia Forever land “should receive the greatest degree of protection and suffer the least impacts from development.”

That doesn’t allow for repeatedly reenacting Steve McQueen’s motorcycle jump from “The Great Escape.”

Dempsey’s argument is similar to what we’ve been hearing a lot in Florida lately. Our state parks with breathtaking natural views need golf courses too! We should add pickleball courts to our pristine state-owned beach! Our quiet state forest should be bisected by a busy connector highway!

Nature is never enough for some people. Even though we see less and less of it, these people think a quiet natural area is a waste of space. They want some big, noisy manmade distraction.

I did a quick search of Volusia County Property Appraiser records and Dempsy owns a lot of land. I bet he’s got room to build his own commercial motocross course without using any taxpayer dollars. Then the conservation land the county bought could be used for what the voters intended.

I tried calling Dempsey several times to make this suggestion, but I could never reach him. Maybe he couldn’t hear the phone ringing over all the motorcycles. I SAID, MAYBE HE COULDN’T HEAR THE PHONE!