The Gilchrist County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) entered into a five-year agreement with Ginnie Springs Outdoors LLC (GSO) on Monday, aiming to increase public safety at the park.
The 10-page agreement, unanimously approved by the BOCC during a regular meeting, provides an outline of rules defined by the county to be incorporated into the 200-acre private campground and springs’ internal rules to make it more family-friendly.
While the agreement states the BOCC will help ensure the park remains safe and secure, GSO is primarily responsible for enforcing the rules.
A history of rowdy parties and rule negligence by GSO has resulted in six deaths since 2020, including a 1-year-old boy. Monday’s agreement is the culmination of over a year of negotiations between the county and GSO since two deadly shootings occurred over Memorial Day weekend in 2024.
“It was a lot of work, but it was necessary,” said County Attorney David Lang. “All these years have transpired without having any kind of memorialization of what is expected out there, and at least this is a start.”
Agreement terms address topics of marketing, camping, day admissions, traffic control, security and emergency medical staffing for bolstering public safety.
All GSO marketing, promotional materials and banners around the park are required to promote it as “Family Friendly,” meaning a place where all activities are suitable for families with children.
Firearms, public nudity, the distribution of controlled substances and underage and excessive drinking are identified as “strictly prohibited” actions.
The agreement also bans camping and overnight stays outside of the park’s Designated Camping Areas (DCA). DCAs will be monitored on holiday weekends and closed once at maximum capacity. All camping patrons are to receive a copy of the GSO rules upon entry.
Barring dangerous weather, non-camping and non-handicapped visitors cannot bring their cars or other vehicles into GSO on Saturdays from May 1 to Aug. 1. Instead, they must park in additional parking lots on the property.
Memorial Day and Independence Day have been GSO’s busiest weekends, drawing around 20,000 people in some years, nearly equal to Gilchrist County’s population.
If the two holidays fall on weekends, the agreement requires GSO to secure in-house or privately contracted traffic, security and emergency medical personnel for those holiday weekends, as local law enforcement does not patrol the private park.
GSO must hire a minimum of two traffic control professionals to monitor the park’s two additional parking lots to keep them from exceeding capacity, one certified law enforcement officer, two security guards licensed under Florida Statute 493 (Class D or better), three in-house security guards trained to industry standards, or a combination of four personnel made up of any of those professionals and at least two paramedics or EMTs designated by the Gilchrist County Chief of Fire Rescue or carrying the same or more experience must be staffed.
Additional rules enforce quiet hours from midnight to 8 a.m. every day and prohibit amplified music that is not from small portable devices or GSO events, which are also not allowed to occur during quiet hours.
GSO will issue violators a warning before expulsion from the park if offenses continue and can get law enforcement involved. The agreement does not make the BOCC liable for activities that occur at the park, guarantee the provision of off-duty law enforcement by the county or deem GSO as an agent of the BOCC.
Any updates to GSO’s internal rules must be made in collaboration with county staff, the BOCC or both.
From 1991 up until Monday’s meeting, Lang said GSO had been operating with a special exception that didn’t define what it could and couldn’t do.
The BOCC and county staff said GSO’s owners had been very cooperative in negotiating the new contract and acknowledged improvements made in the last year, such as limiting park capacity and strengthening relationships with law enforcement, that’d made a noticeable positive impact.
Gilchrist County Sheriff Bobby Schultz said, “Hats off to GSO,” as calls to his office from the park had decreased and he has no reason to doubt the measure put in place will continue helping.
“I’d be lying if I said we don’t have issues out there, but it’s nothing compared to what it was,” he said. “Ginnie Springs Outdoors has done everything that they said they were going to do it appears.”
Chair Tommy Langford said he hoped the agreement would weed out the troublemakers and gain family-oriented patrons of GSO. But he asked if, by signing the agreement, the county would be entitled to enter into similar agreements with other private entities that would want to partner with it.
Lang clarified that GSO maintains responsibility for upholding the agreement, which serves more as a memorandum of understanding. If GSO doesn’t comply, the county can leverage authority over the park’s special use permit.
“Now there’s some rules that we can kind of go back to if there’s a violation and they then know what the board is going to expect out of them,” Lang said. “So I think it’s kind of a two-way street.”