Land shuffle starts with biotech lab, ends with gun range

Frank Cerabino

Metaphor alert: The site once imagined as Palm Beach County’s epicenter of a biotech industry has begun its transformation into a shooting range for gun enthusiasts.

The former orange groves of Mecca Farms near Palm Beach Gardens was a controversial choice of land 12 years ago for what was to be a biotech cluster that would create 50,000 high-paying jobs. The idea was that a 545-job Scripps Research Institute lab there would lure other labs and hundreds of companies to the area.

And before we’d know it, northern Palm Beach County would become the Silicon Valley of medical research.

It was this predicted avalanche of tens of thousands of new jobs that greased the way for $200 million in county money and $310 million in state money going to the venture.

But environmental concerns over the Mecca site moved Scripps to its current location adjacent to Florida Atlantic University’s campus in Jupiter. And this million-taxpayer-dollars-per-job gamble has yet to deliver on its trickle-down promise.

Meanwhile, the county, which paid $60 million for the Mecca site, unloaded it to the South Florida Water Management District three years ago for $26 million.

The Water Management Dis- trict plans to use most of the 1,900 acres for water storage and treatment. But it put aside 150 acres for a gun range to be built and operated by the state.

The Legislature authorized $3.1 million of taxpayer dollars to be spent on the gun range this year. And like the original plan on that land, it’s being touted as another good deal for taxpayers, one that will bring a predicted $6.7 million annual boost to the local economy.

I’m willing to let this rosy prediction slide.

After all, it’s foolish to under- estimate the lure of guns in Florida.

This year, there have been a record 244,726 new concealed handgun permits issued in the state, bringing the total of concealed weapons permit-holders to more than 1.6 million Floridians.

To put this in perspective, 30 years ago, there were about 360,000 concealed weapons permit-holders in Florida. And while Florida’s population has grown 59 percent over these past 30 years, the percentage