Reply #23: Florida Republican lawmaker: State's treasure could ease budget mess

[seafan]

Republican looters.


As far as offering comments on all of this, I'm fresh out.



Lawmaker: State's treasure could ease budget mess

A Miami legislator asks how many millions the state could earn by selling shipwreck treasure to fill holes in the state budget.

BY MARC CAPUTO
April 11, 2008



MIAMI HERALD FILE
A Miami lawmaker asks how many millions the state could earn by selling shipwreck treasure to fill holes in the state budget.

TALLAHASSEE --
As legislators scramble for cash in the worst budget crisis they've ever faced, tens of millions of dollars in treasure lies just within their reach outside the Capitol.
This is real treasure -- the kind hauled up from sunken Spanish ships. The state has one of the world's largest publicly owned collections of colonial Spanish doubloons and reales, as well as a few gold and silver ingots and chains.
Much of it lies safe and hidden in a vault, known only to a few, and occasionally loaned out to museums around the country.

But now Rep. Juan Zapata of Miami wants to crack it open and sell a little treasure to help fill some holes in the proposed $66 billion budget, which is more than $4 billion smaller than this year's spending plan. And the Republican is accusing the Florida secretary of state's office of throwing him off the scent and hiding the booty.
''In a tough budget year,'' Zapata said, ``we have some interesting goodies in the closet. Why not have an interesting garage sale, put them out there and see what we can get for them? The question now is, what's the value?''

No one really knows, though one expert says the more than 1,600 gold coins and nearly 22,000 silver ones have a value of at least $17 million.

.....

When asked about the value, Ryan Wheeler, chief of the state's Bureau of Archaelogical Research, sounded appalled.
''These are tough times,'' he said. ``But we don't sell treasure as a Florida family to make up for it. We don't sell the family Bible or grandmother's china to fix the problem because we'll be faced with the problems next year. And we won't have this to study our past.''
Wheeler and the spokeswoman for Secretary of State Jennifer Davis said these aren't just commodities for the marketplace. These are artifacts owned by all Florida citizens, stored in a library-like secure vault.

When The Miami Herald asked for a list of the artifacts and an accounting of the gold and silver, Davis said she was concerned that a story would ``be giving the reader the impression that we are sitting on, for lack of a better word, a treasure trove. And what we are is the repository of the historical artifacts of Florida, which are owned by the people of Florida.''
The artifacts are myriad: cannon balls, plates and cups, astrolabe and musket parts and even a one-of-a-kind 18th century wooden dreidel, pulled off the 1733 Keys wreck of the San José that gives a glimpse into the lives of the first Jews to live in Cuba.
Wheeler said selling off the artifacts sets a dangerous precedent.
''Do you draw the line with the gold and silver coins?'' he said. 'Or do you say, `Well, what about the American Indian pottery that we have in our collection?' Or the arrowheads that are 12,000 years old? Or the historic buildings that are managed by our agency? Well, what about our state parks? There are about 160 state parks. That seems like a lot. Maybe those could be sold.''

.....

But there's one mother lode from which the state has no booty: the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, which wrecked with a treasure-laden fleet in 1622 off the Marquesas Keys. It had so much treasure that its loss helped bankrupt the Spanish government. ..... Zapata mistakenly thought some of the treasure from the Atocha was the only one in the state's possession, so he drafted an amendment Wednesday night to require the secretary of state's office to appraise and sell it.
The office's budget manager told Zapata's aide in an e-mail that the state doesn't have ''any items in our custody to appraise and sell.'' But it didn't mention treasure from other ships he didn't ask about. ..... So Zapata withdrew the amendment. Now that he knows he wasn't told of the loads of treasure from other ships, it's too late to change the budget. Now he wants the Legislature to charter a study to find out what's there, and what it's all worth.
''They should have been more forthcoming with information,'' Zapata said. ``They're sitting on a treasure, and we didn't know about it. This is a treasure hunt right now.''

Florida is a Republican treasure hunt, indeed. All of these greedy bastards need to GO.