Lawsuit: Put $237 million back into Florida land buying

Four conservation groups asked a court Friday to force the Florida Legislature to transfer $237 million back to an environmental land-buying fund.

The nonprofit Earthjustice had filed the suit in June in the Leon County Circuit Court on behalf of the Florida Wildlife Federation, the St. Johns Riverkeeper and the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida.

The Sierra Club has also joined the suit.

The groups had initially hoped the court would better define what the Legislature can and can’t do regarding Amendment 1, which passed by a 75 percent margin last fall.

The amendment allocates a third of the state tax on real estate documents to conservation.

But earlier this summer, the Legislature approved a budget for the governor to sign that includes $17.4 million to a trust fund that buys conservation land. Conservation groups had wanted $300 million for the fund.

Amendment 1 requires for the next two decades that a third of the revenue from real estate documentary-stamp taxes go for land acquisition. The tax is projected to bring in more than $740 million in the coming year.

At the time the environmental groups first filed their suit, they had thought it unlikely the suit would change conservation funding this year. But they’d hoped the court could create guidelines that would in the future prevent the Legislature from diverting so much Amendment 1 revenue to spending other than land purchasing.

Now they hope to force the state to shift the money back to land buying before the next legislative session.

Legislators want to spend more than $300 million in Amendment 1 revenues on paying salaries for parks, the department of agriculture, the forest service and other state agencies, as well as for managing existing state lands and other operational expenses such as new vehicles and maintenance.

According to the complaint, legislators misappropriated Amendment 1 funds, devoting those funds to uses not allowable for the Land Acquisition Trust Fund.

The suit cites $174 million in Amendment 1 money allocated to salaries for state environmental and agricultural agencies. They also cite $1.2 million legislators appropriated for an insurance fund to protect state environmental and agricultural from federal civil rights act violations.

David Guest, the Earthjustice attorney representing the four groups, expects the matter to ultimately be decided by the Florida Supreme Court.

“Nobody’s done it before,” Guest said of whether a lawsuit has successfully forced the Legislature to transfer misappropriated funds. “There’s never been an Amendment 1 before.”

Contact Waymer at 321-242-3663 or jwaymer@floridatoday.com Follow him on Twitter @JWayEnviro