A lawsuit unsealed Thursday in a Florida federal court claims one of the state's most prominent and politically connected families — the Colliers — lied to state officials and covered up a hazardous waste site contaminated with lethal Creosote.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Myers, alleges claims by Sonja Eddings Brown — described as a longtime aide to family matriarch Parker Collier and a "whistleblower" — that the Colliers bamboozled the state of Florida into paying $30 million for a site near Everglades National Park while concealing the fact that it was contaminated with lethal hazardous waste.
According to court documents, the land, previously the subject of at least ninety claims of cancer deaths, neurological diseases, infertility, respiratory disease, and birth defects among neighboring residents, was sold as an "environmental win" to protect 10 to 11,000 acres adjacent to Everglades National Park from potential oil drilling.
The documents allege that the Collier family sold it personally, uniting local environmental groups behind them, but withholding the land’s toxic past.
"This case centers on a businesswoman and matriarch of a powerful Florida family, Parker Collier, and the unlawful acts she perpetrated to enrich herself by engineering the promotion and sale of 8,000 acres of land contaminated with deadly creosote in the Everglades ('Everglades Parcel') in May 2023," the "Nature of the Case" portion of the suit claims. "Not only did this sale relieve the Colliers of the burden of continued remediation obligations under the decades-long Consent Decree they signed with the State of Florida ('Consent Decree'), but Mrs. Collier and her family actually made money from the polluted land—nearly $30 million."
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