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Highlands Today

Land-Buy Tax Proposal Won't Appear On 2008 Ballot

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By DOUG CARMAN

Highlands Today

Published: August 1, 2008

SEBRING - Efforts to place on the 2008 ballot a property tax to help the county conserve environmentally sensitive lands appeared to be dead late Wednesday afternoon after its backers conceded to a county advisory commission that the worsening economy would dampen its support.

A spokeswoman for an international land conservation group said at Wednesday's Natural Resources Advisory Commission meeting that she and the core backers of the new tax agreed with some of the county commissioners' complaints, suggesting that such an initiative to fund a $20 million bond for the conservation effort wouldn't be successful right now.

"I think the people that have really been behind this have agreed... because of economics, that now is not a necessarily good time to move forward with this," said Tricia Martin, the director of the Nature Conservancy's Lake Wales Ridge program.

Martin instead suggested to NRAC that the initiative could be voted on either in a mail-in vote or during a primary election in the future, after the county and the tax's supporters have more time to educate the public about it.

NRAC agreed with Martin before it voted unanimously to recommend to the county commission against putting any ballot proposal for the tax on November's general election ballot.

"I don't think we're ready for primetime yet, but this raised in my mind that this is much more of a reality," NRAC member Hillary Swain said.

In May, NRAC voted to send an earlier draft of the ballot initiative to the board of county commissioners that would have let residents vote on a 0.2-mil tax, which amounts to $10 for a home valued at $100,000 after the $50,000 homestead exemptions are considered. Early this month, however, county Administrator Michael Wright and the county commissioners sent the ballot initiative back to NRAC for further research and public input.

At the NRAC meeting, county Community Services Director June Fisher added that the county commissioners would have a hard time meeting a Aug. 26 deadline for the proposal to be on the ballot because of the time it would take to gather that public input and set up the workshops needed to revise it.

Outside of the commission meeting, Lake Placid veterinarian and state representative candidate Elton J. Gissendanner, who had advocated the new property tax, said that he realized the worsening local economy would weigh against it, but he believed it could be brought back up next year or in 2010.

"We'll just keep moving forward," Gissendanner said.

About 8.8 percent of Highlands County's land is currently protected. These lands are split into several parcels scattered from the Kissimmee River to the Archbold Biological Station. Martin said Thursday that the money from the tax would be used to buy land connecting these already-protected parcels to create wildlife as well as potential recreational corridors, which would allow wildlife to move between the protected areas and give them a better chance at survival.

Doug Carman can be reached at 386-5838 or dcarman@highlandstoday.com

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