Clay Smallwood, Florida’s new Director of the Division of State Lands, made a presentation to Governor Rick Scott and the Cabinet Tuesday that offers some enlightenment on the possible future of the Florida Forever program and the management of state owned conservation lands. Embedded within the presentation were some suggestions that offer Audubon and others concerned with protecting Florida’s ecosystems and special places that the Rick Scott administration may at some time in the future be willing to re-start environmental land purchases?
One of the things that came clear is that much of the $7.8 billion in debt that Florida incurred to fund the Preservation 2000 and Florida Forever Programs, which have spent $300 million each year to buy environmental lands since 1990, will soon be paid off. The total debt will drop by more than half to $2.8 billion in 2013, and annual debt payments that the state must make will fall from a high of $429 million in the fiscal year that just ended in 2011 to only $159 million in 2013.
The presentation by Smallwood was one of the clearest and easiest to understand portraits of the status of Florida’s conservation lands and the history of the state’s various land buying programs. Audubon has been in the forefront of advocacy of these programs for over 50 years.
Smallwood’s presentation was upbeat on the topic of state conservation land ownership. He pointed out to Governor Scott and the Cabinet that the 20 million visitors to state parks annually result in about $1 billion in beneficial economic activity in Florida. He claimed that for every dollar budgeted for state parks, the economy gets $10 in return. Smallwood also pointed to the half-billion dollars generated annually in the economy by state forests, and the 2,500 jobs produced by the state owned forest lands." Director Smallwood also sounded a bit like Audubon of Florida when he termed the state’s conservation land assets as “Special Places” that “People want to come and see."
Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who along with Governor Scott had asked Smallwood to prepare the presentation, remarked that future purchases should emphasize conservation easements and focus on closing gaps in wildlife corridors between existing state and federal conservation holdings – objectives strongly shared by Audubon of Florida. Putnam also suggested that any lands declared as surplus to the conservation inventory could potentially be sold or traded to fill in those gaps.
In all the presentation offered hope of a renewed land buying program, perhaps with a somewhat different focus than we have seen in past Florida Forever efforts.
Audubon takes encouragement, both from Clay Smallwood’s presentation, and from the positive reaction to it seen in the remarks of Governor Scott, Commissioner Putnam, and other members of the Cabinet.
Fore more information, see this article from the Florida Current.
