Florida voters passed Amendment 1 last November, and funding to carry out the amendment was considered a priority when lawmakers went into the regular session in March. The amendment is also known as the Water and Land Conservation Initiative.
For the next 20 years, the amendment requires that one–third of the revenue from a real estate tax known as documentary stamps goes toward environmental preservation.
The Florida Legislature determines exactly how the money is spent, and Amendment 1 fell to the sidelines as lawmakers squabbled over Medicaid and healthcare funding. They failed to craft a state budget and had to return to Tallahassee for a special session.
Michael Auslen in the Herald/Times Tallahassee bureau has been following the budget talks. He spoke with WLRN about how lawmakers plan to carry out the amendment in the coming year and whether their actions follow the intent of the voters.
Lawmakers will vote on the proposed state budget on Friday. How much money do they have to spend on Amendment 1 for the coming year, and how are they using it?
Amendment 1 generates more than $700 million in funding for the environment for buying land and conserving it, and what they’re spending a lot of that on is existing projects. About half of the money that was generated is going to be spent on agencies that have in the past been funded by other parts of the budget, and only about $55 million will be spent on buying new land – which is something that a lot of environmentalists have raised concerns about, that number being lower than they had hoped for.
There are critics, and even lawmakers seem to think that there’s going to be a lawsuit regardless of what they do. Do you think lawsuits are coming?
Senator Tom Lee, the Senate’s top budget chairman, said the other day that he expects somebody will file a lawsuit. Right now, environmental groups are waiting to see exactly how this money is spent. The budget is sort of vague, and so they’re waiting to see exactly how the money is used. But it’s definitely something that people are talking about, basically claiming that the way the Legislature has appropriated these funds isn’t in line with what the voters intended when they voted for the constitutional amendment.
A lot of voters have said that they were thinking that more money was going to be spent on buying and conserving new lands, but the lawmakers themselves have said that they’re within the boundaries of the amendment which allows them to spend money on maintaining property the state already owns.
So, lawmakers will have to go through this every year for 20 years, right? They’ll have to decide every year how to spend the money and face potential lawsuits every year if environmental groups don’t think they’ve followed the intent of the amendment.
Amendment 1 has never been a one-year issue. This is going to continue to come up for years to come – just how this money that’s been set aside is spent and what’s done with the land that it buys, how that land is preserved and conserved. So, in some ways, yeah, they’re going to have to look at this every year. This is a pot of money that gets refilled based on certain taxes, and so what they do with it is going to be an issue every year.
