Mar 17, 12:35 AM

Panel pursues green-space ballot

Biologists push buying habitats

BY JIM WAYMER
FLORIDA TODAY

VIERA -- An advisory panel to the Brevard County Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to move ahead with a ballot initiative to buy more conservation land.

Next comes explaining it to the public.

"You need to show everybody the road map and why you're going there," Cape Canaveral Mayor Rocky Randels told fellow members of the Procedures Committee for the Environmentally Endangered Lands Program.

Local biologists say the county needs millions more to buy the most important habitats, such as scrub, pine flatwoods and oak hammocks. They've identified about 70,000 acres that are left.

The proposed referendum would shift the existing Beaches and Riverfront tax -- due to disappear this year -- into EEL program. It would ask voters whether they want to keep paying 20 cents per $1,000 of property value to buy and manage preservation lands. EEL already levies 25 cents per $1,000 of property value.

"We just want people to have a choice for what they want their future to be," Amy Tidd, a member of Sierra Club, told members of two advisory committees to the EEL program.

Tidd, along with several developers and citizens, plans to set up a political action committee to push the referendum, which could go on the Aug. 31 or Nov. 2 ballot.

County commissioners would have to put the issue on the ballot at least three months before the election.

Extending the Beaches and Riverfront tax would raise $60.5 million over 20 years, Tidd said, without increasing existing property tax rates.

The money would be used to buy up the gaps between as much of the existing 17,580 acres of EEL land as possible. Threatened wildlife such as indigo snakes, scrub jays and gopher tortoises need large areas connected by corridors to maintain viable populations. When isolated, wildlife is less genetically diverse and less likely to recover from large die-offs.

Conserving the high, sandy scrub ridge that extends through Brevard also helps replenish ground water.

Contact Waymer at 242-3663 or jwaymer@flatoday.net