Politics

Low land prices lure Cabinet

Despite a deficit, it wants Florida Forever to snap up environmentally sensitive acres.

By JENNIFER LIBERTO, Times Staff Writer
Published August 29, 2007

The Babcock Ranch in Charlotte and Lee counties is the largest purchase to date for Forever Florida, a program that buys environmentally sensitive land.
	[Times files]

TALLAHASSEE -- After years of paying top dollar for environmentally sensitive land, Florida wants to jump into the buyers' real estate market.

The Florida Cabinet signaled on Tuesday a willingness to take advantage of low land prices, despite the budget crunch that's crippling incoming revenue.

"If there are other innovative ways that we can make these purchases while the land's a little less expensive, in the long term it's good for Florida," Gov. Charlie Crist said.

The program, Florida Forever, buys environmentally sensitive land with some $300-million funded by the Legislature each year. Recently, the Legislature had been unwilling to commit more dollars to the program, ignoring Crist's request for an extra $100-million for the program earlier this year. Now facing a $2.5-billion deficit over the next two years, more funding for anything could be a big fight.

How to manage?

Yet, Crist, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink and Attorney General Bill McCollum all said they think the state should take advantage of the buyers' market. On Sink's suggestion, the Cabinet unanimously voted to direct the Florida Board of Trustees staff to look into "creative" and "financially prudent" ways to buy more land.

Agricultural Commissioner Charles Bronson was the only skeptic. He said he is concerned that the budget crunch will mean less money available to manage the land that's already been acquired, much less new acres that might be acquired more quickly.

"I know a lot of people want to buy more and save more," Bronson said. "If we can't take care of it, then we're not doing ourselves any justice by that."

However, McCollum countered that he thought it was better to buy now and "figure out how to manage it later."

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has already committed most of the land purchase dollars it expects to receive over the next three years.

So far, the program's largest purchase to date is the Babcock Ranch, which was purchased with an extra $310-million allocated on top of the Florida Forever's usual $300-million. Babcock Ranch is 73,000 acres of cypress domes and pine forests in Charlotte and Lee counties.

"That was an extraordinary circumstance, when they augmented Florida Forever that one year, and now again, we're in an unusual circumstance looking for money to augment the program," said Andrew McLeod, associate state director for the Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit dedicated to land conservation.

Why not bonds?

The department may be able to find funding by issuing bonds. State law gives the program the ability to bond $3-billion over 10 years ending in 2010. That's where the program's annual $300-million comes from.

However, in two of those years, the Legislature paid cash to fund Florida Forever, instead of issuing $300-million in bonds, McLeod said. DEP will look into whether or not the program can bond out the $600-million it didn't use during those two years.

Sen. Burt Saunders, R-Naples, who heads a Senate environmental committee, said he also thought bonding would be a way to buy land during this prime buyers' market, because it "doesn't take money from someplace else."

Jennifer Liberto can be reached at jliberto@sptimes.com or (850) 224-7263.

[Last modified August 28, 2007, 23:33:06]