Thousands of Miami students visit this nature center. Now its future is uncertain
A dark-haired child leaned forward over the burbling saltwater tank, her brow furrowed in concentration and her hand raised.
“How does it move?” she asked, nodding toward the soggy, spiky lump in the hands of a polo-shirted naturalist guide — a sea urchin. The guide swiveled the creature slightly, prompting it to twirl its spines in a rhythmic wave.
A chorus of “ooooohs” rose from the crowd of Miami-Dade County public school students clustered around the tank on a Monday field trip to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center in Key Biscayne’s Crandon Park. For more than 40 years, the critters in Biscayne Bay have awed Miami-Dade students at these field trip programs, run by the tiny nonprofit that helms the nature center.
But that legacy is under threat, the nonprofit says, from Miami-Dade County itself.
In September, the county abruptly told the center it had until Nov. 23 to pack up its belongings and leave the building it has occupied since it was first opened in 2001. At first bewildered, but now furious, employees of the Biscayne Nature Center have dug up documents that suggest the county might not have the legal authority to require the move.
“They’re going to have to put handcuffs on me and drag me out,” said Theodora Long, longtime head of the nature center. “I love the place. You just can’t walk away from something you’ve dedicated your life to.”
A series of increasingly contentious meetings, emails, phone calls and now, a biting letter from a powerful law firm, show an escalating conflict between the county and the nonprofit over who gets to run the programs at the Biscayne Nature Center and who profits from them.
In a highly unusual move, the negotiation between the groups appears to have included a top political advisor to the mayor with no formal government position — a charge the county denies.
Late Tuesday evening, the county formally backed off the Nov. 23 eviction notice and moved into a month-to-month agreement with the center, with no interruptions to the center’s programs for now.
“The County is committed to working toward a new agreement to allow the continued beneficial relationship between the Center and the County,” the notice said.
However, the center does not consider the fight over.
‘The money mattered’
On the beach near the nature center, another troupe of children marched — shrieking and splashing — into the surf, nets in hand. Naturalist guides toted floating buckets to carefully examine and classify the treasures they pluck from the seagrass beds: slender pipefish, scuttling crabs, or if they were very lucky, maybe a seahorse.
They are among the 20,000 students a year that go through programs at the nature center, about half of which come from lower-income schools in the Miami-Dade public school system.
The conflict centers over a signed agreement between the center and the county over who gets to run the children’s programs at Crandon Park, including field trips, spring break trips, summer camps and a weekly family seagrass expedition that’s been a staple at this park since 1969.
At $15 dollars per kid per visit, the dollars at stake in this fight appear to be few.
Long said the center sends Miami-Dade 10 percent of its revenue a year, about $20,000. Miami-Dade says it has a plan to potentially raise revenue at the center to a million dollars a year by expanding programming. Despite multiple requests from the Miami Herald for the document outlining that projection, the county did not provide it.
The dispute erupted during a tough budget year for Miami-Dade, which has seen cuts throughout the county. The push for more revenue at Crandon Park comes along with 49 slashed parks positions, deferred maintenance at parks across Miami-Dade and reduced hours at county pools.
Roy Coley, chief utilities and regulatory services officer for the county, said Miami-Dade wants to expand programming at the site by using its own staff, instead of taking a cut from the center, which employs three people full-time and around 15 part-time. He said the idea was a “seamless” transition.
“It was the parks department intention all along to expand the offering to the public,” Coley said. “We’re looking to have more children’s programs in spring break, summer, new field trip options.”
The nature center wasn’t singled out, Coley said, it was just the only vendor with an expired programming agreement this year. He said the letter ordering the nature center to leave the premises on Nov. 23 was following “normal business procedures.”
“While I didn’t consider the money being the catalyst for everything, of course the money mattered,” Coley said. “We didn’t want them out. Their agreement expired. We don’t have a legal way to keep you there, and you don’t have a legal way to be there.”
A strange aspect of the negotiations is who appears to be involved on behalf of the county. While the nature center has primarily met with Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and top members of her staff over the issue, including Coley, at one point in the process, Christian Ulvert, a top political advisor to the mayor who holds no government position, appears to have been involved.
A letter from law firm Stearns Weaver Miller, who represents the nature center, sent Friday to the county said the nature center was “directed” to meet with a “third party advisor” over the center’s future. According to the letter, the advisor “refused to disclose what the Parks Department’s ‘new plan’ was, and insisted that the Center’s only option was to accept the plan it could not see.”
That unnamed advisor appears to be Ulvert, per an email sent to Ulvert and Levine Cava and obtained by the Herald. In the email, the president of the nature center’s board expresses dismay that the parties couldn’t come to an agreement after a meeting.
“Unfortunately, despite our constructive conversation, that letter — which effectively instructs the MSDBNC to vacate by November 23, 2025 — remains in force and continues to cast a shadow of instability over the organization at best and imperils our future at worst,” it read. “While both you and Mayor Cava have stated clearly that ‘no one is being evicted’ and that the letter is ‘not an eviction notice,’ the language of the letter itself contradicts those assurances.”
Miami-Dade denies that anyone was ever directed to meet with Ulvert on behalf of the mayor or county and said he was not involved in the negotiations.
Ulvert told the Herald he met with members of the nature center’s board as a concerned private citizen who attended high school at nearby MAST Academy.
“I did my personal outreach as a MAST Academy graduate and someone who spent my entire youth on Key Biscayne,” he said.
Who owns what?
While the land is owned by Miami-Dade County, the building itself is owned by the school board. It was a gift from the Biscayne Nature Center after Long and compatriots raised $3.6 million in grants and donations to build it 25 years ago.
“I think they pulled off a minor miracle to build an environmentally focused facility on beachfront property,” said Mark Diaz, president of the center’s board of trustees.
The building was an upgrade from the portable trailer the programs had run out of since 1971 — a collaboration between Miami-Dade schools and the nature center, a nonprofit started by Marjory Stoneman Douglas herself.
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“They’re removing Marjory’s legacy from Miami-Dade County,” Long said. “We didn’t just put her name on the building. She formed the not-for-profit. She stayed president until she was 100 years old.”
In the months since the county’s notice to pick up and get out, Long said her board found lease documents with the school board that show the center is allowed to occupy the building until 2039. Plus, they found an open-ended agreement with the school board from 2006 allowing the two groups to provide field trips and programming for the school district.
The school district did not respond to a request for comment on the validity of the lease or programming agreement.
The soon-to-be-expired agreement in question was signed in 2010 and details an agreement between the county and the nature center to provide programming in Crandon Park with a 10 percent revenue cut for the county.
“Because they asked us to sign it we signed it, never thinking at the end of the 15 years they would kick us out of the park,” Long said.
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The county considers the two groups in “open negotiation” over the future direction of the center’s programming.
Although the Nov. 23 deadline is now gone, the center said the county’s latest move to consider the center on a month-to-month basis ignores the documents the nature center found suggesting it has a home in Crandon for decades to come.
“While our demand to rescind an improper and unwarranted eviction notice was obeyed, our concern and disbelief over the Mayor’s and County’s overreach remains,” Diaz, the board president, said in a statement. “The County’s rescission letter perpetuates the dismissiveness of the Center’s right to provide programming through 2039 by suggesting that we are now allowed to stay month to month until some unknown plan with the County is developed.
Yes, we are grateful that the eviction episode is behind us, however, our resolve to ensure Marjory’s legacy is preserved for generations to come remains.”
This story was originally published November 19, 2025 at 11:19 AM.
