Beware of Governors Bearing Property Tax Cuts
At a time when Florida is facing severe drought conditions and serious unemployment as well as the long-term potential of sea flooding due to climate change, its governor, Rick Scott, has managed to potentially make all three worse with one political clout to its water management system.
Although the full extent of any damage will emerge slowly, the mechanism was unveiled as a $210 million tax cut in the portion of the state’s real estate taxes that will be collected to fund the state’s five water management districts. More than half of that was cut from the funding of the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), which includes what is left of the Everglades, as well as Lake Okechobee and the system of lakes and rivers that feed into the lake. The cutbacks are seen as impacting not only water management but conservation measures statewide, as well as cutting a significant number of jobs, both at the water districts and at the companies that work for them.
The southern and central water management districts (WMDs) were formed in the Forties to control water for irrigation and provide drinking water to the localities in its area. But it was not0 until the Seventies that the Florida Resources Water Act formalized the five state-wide WMDs, funded them through marked property taxes and gave them broad powers to regulate the state’s water use. And it was not until the Eighties that the SFWMD was directed to restore portions of the Everglades.
Now all but the smallest district in the north face cuts of from 26 to 30 percent of their budgets, with directions to cut back on regulatory functions such as land acquisition, a central tenet of water conservation efforts. In resurrecting the Everglades, land acquisition has been used to create new reservoirs and water treatment areas to diminish the impact of decades of draining land for agriculture and development.
The cuts came as part of a change in the law that governs the districts, which had been created as independent entities. Although they were governed by a governor-appointed board, the board members were unpaid and had to meet fairly strict professional qualifications. Now the districts have been brought under the oversight of the state legislature, transforming them into de facto political entities. Accordingly, the new law requires the legislature to approve each district’s budget annually and determine the tax rate, which is no longer fixed.
David Flagg, a former board member of the Suwanee WMD in the north, said he had decided to withdraw his name because of “This sort of bureaucratic control over what are supposed to be independent policy-making boards relating to water management…….I do not want to be a part of what I consider the beginning of the dismantlement of our five WMDs authority and responsibilies.”
Signing the bill at the SFWMD headquarters in West Palm Beach, Governor Scott defended the cuts as necessary for job creation, although it is clear that there will be significant cuts to the 6,500-person workforce of the five districts. It was in this context that Florida Representative (D) Jeff Clemens decried the governor’s triumphal appearance in a district which would face significant layoffs as “insulting and unnecessarily cruel.”
Kirk Fordham, head of the Everglades Foundation, said the insult was asking the public to trade an average annual tax cut of $25 per household for less protection of their inland waters. “Since the water management district’s mission is to protect our natural resources and our water supply,” he said, “I’m not certain that gutting the agency in the midst of a massive water crisis is either smart politics or very good policy.”
Joe Collins, Chairman of the Board of SFWMD, has no problem with the cuts. “We are still going to be able to provide,” he says, “all of the necessary flood control and water supply and environmental restoration.” Collins position on this is hard to determine as he is a Vice President of Lykes Brothers, a family corporation that is one of the biggest and most established landowners in the state and would have a strong interest in flood control and water supply.
The environmental restoration is something out of his control for the moment. The previous SFWMD director, Carol Wehle, had completed a deal to buy 26,500 acres from the U.S. Sugar Corporation for Everglades restoration when she came under fire from Scott for spending too much money on conservation and resigned. While the new legislation bars acquisition of new land for further restoration, it did not withdraw the money for done deals like the Wehle’s last effort. Hopefully Collins and his conservative cohort will be satisfied with taking credit for ‘environmental restoration’ by using the land to continue to restore south Florida’s last great ecological wonder.