Popular Florida Forever land program bites dust — again

Once again, the Legislature has turned the politically popular Florida Forever program into Florida Never. The budget that legislative leaders have approved — but which Gov. Rick Scott has yet to sign — calls for spending zero dollars on the Florida Forever program to buy up environmentally sensitive land.

That’s not what Florida voters had in mind when they approved Amendment 1 in 2014 by an overwhelming margin, say environmental advocates.

“I am terribly disappointed that the will of the voters has been ignored by our elected legislative body,” said Nat Reed, founder of 1,000 Friends of Florida. “Every year that there is no funding for Florida Forever is a lost year for Floridians.”

The chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, state Sen. Jack Latvala, R- Clearwater, calls himself “the father of Florida Forever” because he backed the bill that created the program. But he told reporters that he was “obviously disappointed” that he couldn’t find any money for it.

He blamed Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, RLand O’Lakes, saying that the House insisted on holding back millions more in reserve than the Senate. Still, Latvala contended that environmental spending as a whole made out pretty well, with funding for an Everglades reservoir, the beaches and the springs.

“If buying raw land suffers for a year, so be it,” Latvala said. “Next year I’ll try to fix that.”

But “wait ’til next year” has become a familiar refrain for Florida Forever. Legislators have repeatedly stripped money out of the program and spent it on other purposes. That’s the reason environmental advocates crafted Amendment 1, said Will Abberger of the Trust for Public Land, who led the group that pushed for the amendment's passage in 2014.

“The main impetus was the fact that the money for Florida Forever was zeroed out in 2009,” he said. So his group designed a constitutional amendment that would tell legislators “this needs to be a priority for our state.”