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'Prices are just out of sight'

Environmental groups say increases in the price of land could make purchases harder for Florida Forever.

By CRAIG PITTMAN
Published November 28, 2005

Last week Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet landed a major prize for environmental preservation, voting to spend $350-million for three-fourths of an old Florida ranch that's home to panthers and bears.

Bush called the acquisition of Babcock Ranch, which straddles Lee and Charlotte counties, "an historic purchase."

As the largest conservation purchase in state history, other state officials hailed it as the crowning jewel of the state's Florida Forever land-buying program.

But environmental groups worry that the Babcock deal signals that the Florida Forever program is in trouble and it's only going to get worse.

"We just can't buy as much land as we used to," said Keith Fountain of the Nature Conservancy, which works with state agencies to line up environmentally sensitive land purchases. "Land prices are going up and up, and the amount of land we get for every dollar is significantly less."

Florida Forever, the nation's largest conservation land-buying program, has $300-million a year to spend on property all over the state to save it from development. The money comes from bonds paid off by the sale of documentary stamps on real estate transactions.

Florida Forever succeeded the similar Preservation 2000, a 10-year program launched in 1990. Together the two programs have spent $4-billion on 2.2-million acres.

Like Florida Forever, Preservation 2000 also used $300-million a year buying up thousands of acres of beaches, forests, prairies and scrubland before they disappeared.

"We're dealing with a program that's spending the same amount of dollars that we had at the initiation of Preservation 2000 15 years ago," Fountain said.

But you can't buy Florida acreage for what it cost in 1990, said Andy McLeod of the Trust for Public Land. "The prices are just out of sight, and you have more and more buyers with the capital to out-duel public agencies for these properties," he said.

That's why environmental activists fear Babcock is a harbinger of the future.

The state didn't have enough money to buy the 74,000-acre Babcock Ranch parcel right away. Instead the state plans to buy a little at a time over the next four years.

And if all the money comes out of Florida Forever, it will drain the fund so no other projects can be purchased anywhere else.

State Sen. Paula Dockery, R-Lakeland, who chairs the Senate Environmental Preservation Committee, said she hopes the Legislature will use some of a projected $3-billion state surplus to bankroll the entire Babcock purchase. That would prevent wiping out Florida Forever's money, she said.

Dockery, who helped write the Florida Forever bill in 1999, said she agrees that the preservation money doesn't stretch as far as it used to, but she sees no way to increase funding.

The state has a long list of other properties it has targeted for preservation, ranging from sand dunes in the Panhandle to swamps in South Florida. The list contains 98 properties totalling some 2-million acres.

To buy them all would cost an estimated $3-billion, double what the state has left to spend over the next five years.

With skyrocketing land prices and funding that hasn't kept pace, "how will we protect the best of the rest of Florida, forever?" asked a coalition of environmental groups in an October letter to the governor.

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, Cragin Mosteller, said Florida Forever "will continue to move forward," thanks to some creative spending tactics.

For instance, the state has bought the development rights to property, which is cheaper than buying the property outright, she said.

But state officials have begun to scale back their ambitions, removing land from the target list. Earlier this year the advisory panel that ranks the Florida Forever list, the Acquisition and Restoration Council, dropped a bunch 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," council executive director Mark Glisson told the Tallahassee Democrat.

Some of the state's efforts to preserve vast areas of wilderness are now being cut back. For instance, the Annutteliga Hammock in Hernando County has been on the Florida Forever list for 10 years. Of the 31,000 acres of rare longleaf pine hammocks that were originally targeted for purchase by the state, only 11,000 have been acquired so far at a cost of $35-million.

To acquire the other 20,000 acres, state officials estimate, would cost another $36-million. So last year they trimmed 6,000 acres out of their proposed acquisition plan, and they may trim it further

"We kind of evaluated it and reduced it down to this size, and we may have to re-evaluate it again," Fritz Musselman, land resources director for the Southwest Florida Water Management District, said last year.

The longer it takes to acquire land, the more it is likely to cost. Rising demand and prices have been taking their toll on Everglades restoration plans, the National Academy of Sciences recently concluded.

"There is great risk that some land not soon acquired will either be developed or grow far more expensive before the land-acquisition program can be completed," the committee warned.

When the state's Florida Forever program goes up against developers or land speculators for a piece of land, the state is usually at a disadvantage because its offers must be tied to the appraised value, said Fountain.

Last month, a 27,400-acre tract of citrus and ranch land near Frostproof in Central Florida that the state had been trying to buy instead went to a South Florida developer, he noted.

"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."

Times staff writer Joni James contributed to this report.

The Trust for Public Land has launched a Web site, tpl.org/floridaforever, devoted to publicizing this issue.

[Last modified November 28, 2005, 01:03:04]