Soaring Prices Hurt Conservation Effort
The Florida state government landed a major conservation victory last week, according to the St. Petersburg Times. By voting to spend $350 million for three-quarters of a historic ranch that’s home to panthers and bears, the legislature handed the Sunshine State its biggest ever land conservation purchase. Governor Bush lauded the acquisition of Babcock Ranch (pictured) which straddles Lee and Charlotte counties, as “a historic purchase.” As the largest conservation effort in Florida history, other officials hailed it as the crowning jewel of the state’s program.
Some environmental groups worry, however, that the Babcock deal signals that the Florida Forever program - the state-run program administered by the The Division of State Lands that buys land to preserve Florida’s future - is in trouble, and going to get worse.
Keith Fountain of the Nature Conservancy, which works with state agencies to line up environmentally sensitive land purchases, says that conservation groups simply cannot buy as much as they used to. “Land prices are going up and up, and the amount of land we get for every dollar is significantly less,” he said.
As the nation’s largest conservation land-buying program, Florida Forever has $300 million to spend annually on property to save it from development. The funds come from bonds paid off by the sale of documentary stamps on Florida real estate transactions. The program succeeded the similar Preservation 2000, a 10-year program launched in 1990, and combined, the two efforts have spent $4 billion on 2.2-million acres of beaches, forests, prairies and scrubland.
The problem? You can’t buy Florida land for what it cost in 1990. Or anywhere close. Real estate prices have risen dramatically across the board, and more and more buyers have the capital to out-bid public agencies for property. This is why environmental activists fear Babcock is as much an ominous sign as it is a victory. Florida didn’t even have enough money to buy the 74,000-acre ranch parcel right away — instead, it plans to buy a little at a time over the next four years. If all the money comes out of Florida Forever, it will drain the fund so no lands can be purchased elsewhere.
State Senator Paula Dockery of Lakeland, who chairs the Senate Environmental Preservation Committee, hopes the state will use some of its projected $3 billion budget surplus to fund the Babcock purchase in full, which would prevent cleaning out Florida Forever. Dockery, who helped write the Florida Forever bill in 1999, recognizes that the preservation money doesn’t stretch as far as it used to, but she sees no way to increase funding.
From sand dunes in the Panhandle to swamps in South Florida, the state has a long list of areas targeted for purchase in the upcoming years. The list contains 98 properties totalling some 2 million acres, and to buy them all would cost an estimated $3 billion, double what the state has left to spend between now and 2011. With skyrocketing Florida home prices and funding that hasn’t kept pace, environmental groups are at a loss for how Florida’s pristine areas will be saved.
Cragin Mosteller, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, said Florida Forever “will continue to move forward,” thanks to creative spending strategies. The state has bought the development rights to many properties, which is cheaper than buying the property outright, for example.
Nevertheless, officials have begun scaling back ambitions, removing land from the target list. The advisory panel that compiles and ranks the Florida Forever list, the Acquisition and Restoration Council, dropped a number of proposed purchases off its “must-buy” list, downgrading them to “wish-list” status.
“We’ve got to be real careful we don’t focus on anything but the best resources; that is our highest priority,” Mark Glisson, the council’s director, told the Tallahassee Democrat.
Some efforts to preserve vast areas of Florida’s dwindling wilderness are being cut back. For instance, only 11,000 of the 31,000 acres of the Annutteliga Hammock in Hernando County (which has been on the Florida Forever list for 10 years) have been acquired so far, at a cost of $35 million. Obtaining the remaining land would cost another $36 million, so last year the state trimmed 6,000 acres out of its proposed acquisition plan, and may trim it yet again.
The longer it takes to acquire land, the more it is likely to cost. Rising demand and prices have taken a major toll on Everglades restoration plans and other vital environmental causes. There is risk that some land not soon acquired will be developed or grow far too expensive for land acquisition programs to secure it. When Florida Forever goes up against developers or land speculators, the state is usually at a disadvantage because its offers must be tied to appraised value.
Last month, a tract of Central Florida real estate - over 27,000 acres of valued citrus and ranch land near Frostproof - that the state had been trying to buy instead was sold to a South Florida developer.
“Nobody likes to talk about a crisis, because there are a lot of other fiscal needs in this state,” said Andy McLeod of the Trust for Public Land. “But the chance to meet the requirement that the voters, the legislators and the governor put forward for this program is not being fully achieved.”
