Manatee Club Battles Audubon Society

MIAMI —  Meet the Florida Audubon Society’s worst nightmare. Jimmy Buffett, the laid-back crooner, the barstool poet who sings of margaritas and waterbeds, is marching with a sign around his neck that reads “Audubon is for the birds.”

Buffett is locked in a nasty custody battle with the Florida Audubon Society over the fate of its offspring, the Save the Manatee Club, which in 10 years has grown into one of the largest and best-funded environmental groups in the South.

Appointed by former governor Bob Graham, Buffett is the front man for the Save the Manatee Club, which for years has operated under the auspices of the Florida Audubon Society. Its mission is to save the ungainly but gentle sea cows from extinction. The manatee’s greatest enemy is the drunken or idiotic boater, of which Florida seems uniquely blessed. Manatees are forever being run over.

When Buffett and the manatee club announced their intent to go a separate way from the Audubon Society, Audubon officials responded by dismissing the club’s executive director, changing the locks on the club’s offices and seizing control of the club’s extensive mailing list and assets of $700,000.

“I’ve been calling it a hostile takeover,” said Buffett, reached recently in Key West after a day of fishing for tarpon.

The usually private hostilities among environmental groups have become public and ugly, with Buffett and his allies accusing the Florida Audubon Society of having been corrupted by corporate donations from polluters and Audubon officials countercharging that Buffett is acting like a fickle and naive child.

The clash between Buffett and the Florida Audubon Society points to a growing tension between large, established environmental groups and their smaller cousins that operate at the grass-roots level.

Thom Rhumberger, an Orlando attorney for the Save the Manatee Club and a friend of Buffett, said that big environmental groups have grown fat and slow, more tied to the Establishment and less dedicated to rabble-rousing. “It’s natural,” Rhumberger said. “But that doesn’t mean we have to go along with it.”

The manatee club started small but is now big. It rivals the Florida Audubon Society in size and perhaps even clout. The Audubon group has 32,000 members and collected $1.2 million last year; the manatee club has 30,000 members and $700,000.

Buffett said the manatee club wants to be independent from the Florida Audubon Society to gain control of its own resources and agenda, and because the two organizations have become “philosophically incompatible.”

The Florida Audubon Society accepts, often courts, corporate donors.

Buffett said the Audubon Society knew all along that sooner or later the manatee club would go its own way. The singer-songwriter maintained that Audubon doesn’t want to let the manatee club go because Audubon has come to rely on the offspring group’s donations and membership lists to secure grants.

Florida Audubon Society president Bernie Yokel said that’s bunk. “This is not a money issue,” Yokel said. “It is not a hostile takeover.”

Yokel said that from its inception, the Save the Manatee Club has been “a special program under Florida Audubon,” and that there was never any agreement that the club should go its own way. Moreover, Yokel said, he sees nothing wrong with taking corporate donations. It is perhaps the best way to get companies to change, while regulation and lawsuits often seem to do little.

Yokel said he met with Buffett on three occasions and basically reached an agreement to keep the two groups together, but then received a fax from the singer telling him the deal was off.

Yokel said he did change the locks and put the manatee club’s executive director, Judith Delaney Vallee, on administrative leave, but he did so to protect the club and its mission. “If you got some sort of a rebellion going on, you’ve got to act to protect the assets of the corporation,” Yokel said.