Palm Beach Post Editorial Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Why would the state give up preservation land - and pay land speculators as it does so? Yet that's what the St. Johns River Water Management District is poised to do.

Today, the governing board of the district that stretches from Indian River County to the Georgia line votes on a bad land deal that could set a horrible precedent for others anywhere in Florida. The district proposes giving 1,265 acres of state preserve land in Indian River County to speculators in exchange for 460 acres, with the district paying the speculators $657,300. The speculators, the Corrigan family, agree to release the district from a threatened lawsuit, and as a reward, get to assemble a long stretch of land along Interstate 95.

The Indian River County Commission and environmental groups want the district to reject the deal. The district staff's report acknowledges that the land is home to endangered wood storks, snail kites and peregrine falcons and has provided habitat for Florida's scrub jay. Wading birds such as the snowy egret, white ibis, tricolored heron and little blue heron have been observed. Environmentalists call the land a key wildlife corridor, and statewide conservation databases mark it as important to Florida's conservation lands network.

The "2.75 acres, plus cash, for one acre" deal is an exchange a kindergartner would question. But the precedent the district would set could allow other governments to decide that any state preservation land has lost its conservation value, as a way to justify bargaining it away. "(The deal) has the potential," Audubon of Florida spokesman Charles Lee said, "to place protection of all of our state's conservation lands on a very slippery slope."

The district acquired the 1,265 acres, and 2,000 acres west of it that is used for a reservoir, in 1999 under Florida's Preservation 2000 program. The Corrigans claimed that the reservoir damaged another 5,900 acres farther south that the family owns, and threatened to sue. The swap is supposed to make the lawsuit go away. Robert Christianson, chief of the district's land acquisition department, said the agency had no other way to placate the Corrigans. He defends the deal.

If the district damaged the Corrigans' land, it should address that issue and fix the problem. But bargaining away land all Floridians bought to preserve forever is not an acceptable solution to bad water management practices. District administrators pushed this solution once before and failed and are trying to sell it to new board members. On behalf of the state, they should kill this deal.

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