A follow-up to the P2000 program needs to ensure the continuation of the public-private partnership that enabled the acquisition and preservation of so many lands around the state. Although P2000 started the project of acquiring lands important as habitat for native plants and animals, a new program needs to complete that work. It should also seek to protect and restore water resources, ensure that lands are properly managed, connect conservation and recreation lands, and provide for the protection of urban conservation and recreation lands.

     Perhaps most important in determining what a successor program should look like is to remember that P2000 is a land acquisition program. A program which does not maintain a focus on using bond proceeds for land acquisition would represent a move away from the goals of the original program -- a program which has received strong public support. The studies that supported the original program indicate that additional land needs to be acquired to protect Florida’s ecosystems, as well as the native plants and animals they support. A successor program should finish the work that the original P2000 program started.

     Second, the successor program must provide for appropriate management of lands -- including strong protections to ensure that where lands are purchased with P2000 or successor program funds, those lands are managed in such a way that the conservation and recreation values of those lands are maintained or restored. Managers must have the ability to designate lands as "single use" where the lands, given their conservation and recreation values, would be inappropriate for timbering, water resource development projects, or other multiple uses.

     Moreover, where lands are open for multiple uses, such uses must be done in such a way so as not to defeat the purposes for which the lands were acquired and to protect the environmental value of the lands. For example, during the past legislative session, several groups pushed for increased ability to use these lands for water supply projects -- including wellfields and aquifer storage and recovery projects. If these kinds of projects are going to be allowed on lands purchased for their environmental value, water and land managers must have enough information on hand to make the educated decision that a particular project will not harm the water or other natural resources on such lands. At a minimum, before a water supply or resource development project should be allowed on lands purchased under the P2000 successor program, minimum flows and levels for waters (including groundwater) potentially affected by a project need to have been established, and the proposed project must comply with relevant permitting criteria and with regional water supply plans. Without these protections, lakes and wetlands on program lands may dry up (as they have as a result of groundwater pumping in certain areas in the state), and sinkholes or more general land subsidence may occur -- not an acceptable result on lands purchased with environmental conservation goals in mind.

     Proper management may also mean restoration. Florida includes some of the world’s richest and most renowned ecosystems. Unfortunately, as a result of population and development pressures, some of these areas, including the Everglades, are teetering on the verge of ecological collapse. Purchasing lands because of their restoration potential would help prevent such collapse. Such purchases would also accord with the original P2000 program’s goal of forging a public-private partnership to respond to increasing development pressures.

     Finally, a P2000 successor program needs to protect against bond proceeds being used to subsidize county growth. Under language proposed in the past legislative session, the state would be forced to sell lands bought with the new environmental program’s bond proceeds to local governments for the price the state paid for them. That creates two problems that become roadblocks for success to the new program: (1) the new conservation lands become magnets for local government growth needs because they’ll be cheaper and cheaper to buy as land values increase; and (2) the new program will be denied the ability to purchase acreage to replace those acres sold to local governments -- the revenues generated from a sale to a local government will never be sufficient to replace those acres with other conservation lands. Such a subsidy for local government should not be included in what the public understands to be a program aimed at protecting environmentally important lands around the state.

     The P2000 program has generated broad public and bipartisan support. Without the P2000 program, instead of visiting a rare native ecosystem at the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve in central-southern Florida, Floridians would likely be wandering through a citrus grove. Without P2000, a visitor a few years from now to the Perdido Pitcher Plant Prairie southwest of Pensacola would also be out of luck -- perhaps fighting her way through condominiums instead of bird watching. And without P2000, instead of open longleaf pine forest, a tourist in 2005 might be faced with thousands of homes in the Sugarmill Woods parcel of the Annutteliga Hammock in central Florida. The program’s original goals, however, have not yet been achieved. A successor program needs to be established in the next legislative session to protect our state’s water resources, restore environmentally damaged lands, provide for sufficient habitat for native plants and animals, and protect recreational lands for our rapidly growing population.

Ansley Samson practices with the Tallahassee office of Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, a national non-profit public interest environmental law firm. She concentrates on water law litigation and legislative advocacy. She graduated with honors from Yale College with a degree in Literature and Environmental Studies and received her J.D., also with honors, from Harvard Law School.