Another constitutional fight involving the Florida Legislature will be revving up this week.
The issue is whether House and Senate members followed the requirements of a newly approved state constitutional amendment that mandated the state spend some $740 million on environmental programs, with a heavy emphasis on the purchase of endangered land.
Visitors at Wekiwa Springs State Park in Apopka enjoy a canoe ride in October 2014, a few days before Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment for the state to conserve more environmentally sensitive lands. AP ARCHIVE
David Guest, a lawyer for Earthjustice, the environmental advocacy group that filed the lawsuit, said he expects the Legislature to file a motion asking a trial judge to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed in late June on behalf of several environmental groups, including the Florida Wildlife Federation, St. Johns Riverkeeper and the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida.
Guest said the state’s motion is a standard legal move in what is likely another protracted battle over whether the Legislature is implementing or ignoring a citizen-backed constitutional initiative approved by 75 percent of the Florida voters last year. In the last month, lawmakers settled a three-year battle over 2010 citizen-backed amendments that were aimed at removing partisan decisions from the redistricting of congressional and state legislative seats.
“That is not only a challenge to the constitution, it is a challenge to our system of representative democracy,” Guest said. “The Legislature was in open defiance of the constitutional mandate on redistricting and they are in open defiance on this part of the constitution too. That’s what courts are for.”
Lawmakers say they met the requirements of Amendment 1, which directed that one-third of the annual collection of real estate transaction taxes, known as the “doc stamps,” be directed to the state Land Acquisition Trust Fund to “acquire, restore, improve and manage conservation lands.”
The amount totaled $740 million and Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, who oversees environmental spending in the Senate, said the new budget actually allocated $741.8 million toward that goal.
But the real crux of the fight is that environmental groups expected more money to be pumped into land purchases, including reviving the moribund Florida Forever program, which once had a $300 million budget under former Gov. Jeb Bush. The Legislature ended up providing $15 million for Florida Forever, with leaders like Hays, who has been openly skeptical of the need to acquire vast new tracts of land, arguing that there is more to conservation than land buying.
“Addressing Florida’s environmental needs is a marathon, not a sprint,” Hays wrote in an opinion piece after lawmakers approved the budget in a June special session. “Our budget not only meets, but by every measure exceeds the requirements of Amendment 1, which, unlike the current rhetoric, recognizes that being good stewards of Florida’s natural beauty means more than simply buying land.”
The lawsuit contends that in spending the $740 million under Amendment 1, lawmakers “misappropriated” some $300 million, while giving little weight to the primary purpose of the Land Acquisition Trust Fund, which was originally created in the early 1960s.
“It is a trust that dates back 50 years and has an unmistakable purpose: land acquisition,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit math works like this: the environmentalists agree with some $432 million in Amendment 1 spending, including $190 million to pay off bond debt from prior land purchases, $15 million for Forever Florida, $38.5 million for springs protection and $20 million for land buying related to the Kissimmee River.
The lawsuit identifies a total of $88.7 million in land acquisition funding, less than 12 percent, of the $740 million total. But if the bond debt, which represents the cost of land purchases, is added, it rises to about 38 percent of the total.
The environmentalists also support some $100 million in restoration funding, including $59 million for the Everglades, $33 million in land management funding and $20 million for facilities improvements at state parks.
But that leaves more than $300 million in dispute.
It’s not spelled out in the original complaint, but Guest said he will argue that lawmakers spent much of that “misappropriated” Amendment 1 money on basic operational costs for various environment-related agencies, including the Department of Environmental Protection and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
“They simply took buildings full of workers sitting in front of computers and claimed they were land acquisition,” Guest said. “Through that artifice, through that specious argument, they managed to take a 75 percent mandate of Florida voters to acquire land and turned it into a mandate to change the accounting system and buy less land.”
Environmentalists say the reason they developed Amendment 1 was to lift the priority of Florida Forever and other land-buying initiatives to allow Florida, which is now the nation’s third most populous state, to protect disappearing natural features, including the Myakka River in Southwest Florida.
“We had to fight every year for Florida Forever money,” said Becky Ayech, a member of the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida, a coalition of groups, individuals and businesses in Sarasota, Manatee, Charlotte and a half-dozen other counties in the region. “This amendment was a way to clearly etch into the minds of our legislators that land acquisition is what the voters wanted.”
Ayech, who runs a “sustainable” farm in Old Miakka in Sarasota County, said one of the results of lawmakers short-changing the land-buying programs is that the state could lose out on acquiring a conservation easement on place like the Triangle Ranch, a 1,067-acre tract in Manatee County that has more than three miles of frontage on the Myakka River.
“If there was ever a parcel that needed to be purchased that would be one,” Ayech said. “It would definitely be an asset.”
The Triangle Ranch is part of a group of three ranches that conservationists say need to be preserved, including the nearby 720-acre Shep’s Island Ranch and the 5,774-acre Orange Hammock Ranch near the city of North Port.
Ayech said obtaining easements or purchasing those properties would help protect the Myakka River.
Instead, she said, while the future of those properties remains in doubt, the state is preparing for a lengthy legal battle to minimize land purchases under Amendment 1. And like the three-year redistricting litigation, Ayech noted the long-term lawsuits are costly for taxpayers.
“It’s a kick in the teeth what they’re doing to us,” she said.
