With more than 6.8 million acres already under state and local government control, the Florida Legislature is angling to sell and buy more land.
The dirt-dealing plan, buried in a Senate budget bill, directs agencies to sell off unneeded property. But it also would funnel all proceeds into the Florida Forever trust fund for the purpose of acquiring still more acreage.
"What one hand saveth, another spendeth," says Robert Weissert, of Florida TaxWatch.
The land-recycling operation is a perversion of what TaxWatch has long advocated: a responsible cost-benefit inventory of public lands, and a program to put unneeded property back onto the tax rolls.
But the Senate plan falls short on at least two levels.
It exempts the public land sales from market appraisals, opening the door to profiteering by crafty land dealers.
It earmarks all revenues for the purchase of more public lands, meaning that government agencies may realize no net gain in terms of tax proceeds.
A comparison of public and private landholdings is illustrative. Florida Trend magazine recently listed the top 10 private landholders in the state. Headed by big-name development companies such as the St. Joe Co., and agricultural concerns like U.S. Sugar, the 10 land titans control a combined 3.5 million acres.
But that figure is dwarfed by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the state's five regional water management districts. They control a total of 6.8 million acres.
The state figure does not include the millions of acres held by local governments or by state universities and colleges.
"It's a question of how much is too much," says Gaston Cantens, an executive with Florida Crystals and a former state legislator.
Florida Crystals ranked ninth on the list of the state's largest private landholders with 155,000 acres. The sugar concern pays $10 million in annual taxes on that Palm Beach County property.
Cantens questions the state's ongoing purchase of property.
"There are certain lands the government should want to preserve. But when they're buying land for the sake of buying land, with no rhyme or reason, that's a problem," he says.
Cantens cites the sprawling South Florida Water Management District, which controls 1.3 million acres, as a case in point.
"The district has been buying land for years, and they don't know what they're going to do with it," he says.
"You have to draw the line when land purchases start to interfere with the operation of government. SFWMD crossed that line when it spent $200 million, and then leased back the land. You have 100,000 acres just sitting there -- it's a complete waste of money."
SFWMD officials acknowledged that cash-flow problems required them to downsize their land purchase from U.S. Sugar, a Florida Crystals competitor, and scale back their controversial Everglades restoration efforts.
As for the Legislature's land plan, TaxWatch President and CEO Dominic Calabro said the Senate has it about half right. His organization has long called for the inventory and divestiture of unneeded public lands.
"We have proposed sales. The state does not manage land nearly as well as it should," Calabro said.
But he bridles at the idea of designating the proceeds for the purchase of still more land. "Use the proceeds for any purpose but that," Calabro advises.
Weissert, TaxWatch's vice president for research and development, said the land-recycling scheme doesn't surprise him.
"When we've worked on this [land sale issue] before, the [legislative] plan was to sell first to local governments, universities, etc.," he related.
"The goal should be to get land on the tax rolls, not transferring from one government agency to another."
That said, Weissert acknowledges that state and local agencies could, at least theoretically, parlay land for better value, especially in the current depressed real-estate market.
"They could be buying for better value," Weissert says.
Still, the legislative provision exempting land sales from market appraisals raises a big red flag with Cantens and other critics of the state's property portfolio. They see the exemption as more evidence of government beholden to private land interests, or simply a bunch of incompetent bureaucrats.
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Reach Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
