Imagine a Florida with lakes, rivers and creeks whose shores are as bald as a desert. No stately cypress trees with roots clawing at the land. No perch from which egrets can eye their next fish dinner. No shade for
Imagine a Florida with lakes, rivers and creeks whose shores are as bald as a desert. No stately cypress trees with roots clawing at the land. No perch from which egrets can eye their next fish dinner. No shade for the fisherman.
If a proposed piece of legislation is passed, you might not have to imagine it. Spin doctors are already at work touting a bill before the Florida Legislature that would privatize at least 500,000 acres of state's navigable waterways. If passed, the attorney general's office and environmental groups say the measure would open the door for clear-cutting along Florida's waterways and make it easier for property owners to dig mines, fill lowlands for development and limit access to creeks, lakes and rivers.
"It would be the biggest land grab in Florida's history," says Diana Sawaya-Crane, with the Florida attorney general's office.
Current state law says that navigable waters belong to the public. For example, if you own a lake lot, you can't prevent someone from coming ashore up to the point to which the water rises. Since Florida became a state in 1845, waterways have been used much like highways; they provide a means of travel. And because waterways in Florida grow during the wet seasons, an average high-water mark is used to determine the width of public domain.
Basically, the proposed legislation would give property owners ownership to that land, submerged or not, if the body of water isn't mentioned on their deed. Otherwise, the deed specifies that the land owner does not own the body of water. More than two-thirds of land deeds containing navigable waters do not note the water's existence in part because the land was originally sold in huge bulk tracts.
Backing the bill curiously called "Florida Land Title Protection Act" is Florida's timber industry, a property owners' rights group and the Florida Farm Bureau. The spin is spun by a pro, April Herrle, once a spokesperson for former Gov. Lawton Chiles, who said she's lobbying on behalf of friends at the Florida Forestry Association, a nicer name for the timber industry.
Herrle says the environmental concerns are erroneous. The bill will preserve public access to the waters and won't affect "tree harvesting," because that's already controlled by the state Division of Forestry, the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
The same goes for filling in the wetlands, she says. There's already a regulatory permitting process for dredging and filling that would have to be followed.
But Susie Caplowe, who lobbies for the Sierra Club, says such assurances are weak at best. Once private ownership rights of the waterways have been awarded, it will be difficult to prevent owners from doing whatever they want to do. "The DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] is already looking to not do permitting regulations. It's up to the water-management district to issue permits. If they don't issue a permit, the developer is going to yell property-rights violation. Local governments could go bankrupt trying to fight them."
Herrle also says that owners of land with navigable waters whose deeds fail to note it are unfairly taxed. They pay property taxes on the waterways, but have no ownership rights.
The attorney general's office and environmental groups say that's not so. Most property appraisers either don't charge the property tax or charge a nominal fee for record keeping, about a $1 a year, according to the Sierra Club.
Another reason Herrle gives for the legislation is that the state arbitrarily changes the high-water mark. "The battle, they [environmental groups] say, is over the waterways. It's really over the uplands," Herrle says.
Herrle complains that the attorney general's office has been movi