Budget deal steers $100 million to Florida Forever

TALLAHASSEE — The state’s Florida Forever program will draw $100 million next year for land conservation efforts under an agreement reached Sunday between House and Senate budget negotiators.

Florida Forever financing has had more ups and downs than a rollercoaster in the decades since it began in 2001 as a descendant of a land-buying program launched in the 1980s under then-Gov. Bob Martinez.

The $100 million approved for the budget year starting July 1 meets what Gov. Ron DeSantis has recommended and tops the $33 million set aside for land-buying last year. Environmentalists had maintained an email and phone campaign to push lawmakers to pump more cash into the program.

In announcing the $100 million deal, a lead House negotiator, Rep. Holly Raschein, R-Key Largo, said, “So the emails can stop.”

The House and Senate also reached agreement on spending $650 million for water quality improvements and Everglades projects – meeting DeSantis’s second-year installment of his bid to spend $2.5 billion over four years on efforts to combat blue-green algae, red tide and pollution of freshwater springs.

While agreement on DeSantis’s water funding was expected, the two sides had been far apart on Florida Forever. The Senate wanted $125 million and the House only came up with $20 million in budget proposals that negotiators are trying to reconcile as lawmakers begin the final scheduled week of the two-month session.

The organization 1000 Friends of Florida was among groups pushing its allies to contact lawmakers to support the Senate’s $125 million in Florida Forever funding. But in the end, that fell back Sunday to the level sought by DeSantis.

In its first two decades, Florida Forever had drawn $300 million annually in state funding, which remains the goal of many conservation groups.

But years of scrimping, first because of the Great Recession and later due to what many see as indifference to the program by DeSantis’s predecessor, now-U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, have taught environmentalists to expect a lower level of state support.

“The urgency to protect conservation lands from being paved over and lost forever grows every day, especially as climate change alters our natural landscapes,” said Aliki Moncrief, executive director of Florida Conservation Voters, which also led the email campaign to legislators.

“Dedicated funding will help us protect our remaining conservation gems,” she added.