Manatee County accelerates land conservation from 2020 referendum

After more than three years, Manatee County is starting to acquire the conservation land it promised voters.

In November 2020, the Conservation and Parks Projects Referendum passed with 71% of the vote. The first property purchased as a result of the referendum, Crooked River Ranch, will close early this year. 

The program is funded through a 0.15 millage ad valorem tax and the issuance of up to $50 million in bonds. The goal is to acquire and improve land, protect water resources, preserve wildlife habitats and provide parks. 

“I’m not going to pretend that it didn’t take longer than it should have, but we were creating something out of thin air,” Commissioner George Kruse said. “It’s a brand new fund, a brand new millage. We’re just figuring out how it works.” 

The tax was estimated to cost under $30 per household and generate $6.7 million annually. While passed in 2020, it took another year for the taxes to be collected. 

Then procedural issues slowed progress. The Environmental Lands Management and Acquisition Committee, which has gone from nine to 17 members over the past two years, was required to ask the commission’s approval before spending any money on appraisals and investigations. 

But commissioners wanted answers that could only come from appraisals and investigations before voting to pursue a property or not. Natural Resources Director Charlie Hunsicker said discussions began in June 2023 and the extra step has since been eliminated. 

Streamlining the process will only do so much. It takes time to evaluate each property and identify grant funding. Plus, the lands are often nominated by families, versus brokers, that are seeking alternatives to development offers. 

In turn, the county will often ask families if they can hold off for three months. 

“What appears to be delays from the outside looking in — we’re beating the bushes to see if we can get other funding to let the money we have go as far as possible,” Hunsicker said. “You’ll be seeing that happening with a lot of these properties.” 

Appraisals, alone, can take up to seven weeks to complete. They’re complicated and costly. The appraisal for Crooked River Ranch, 68 acres along the Manatee River, cost $25,000. The county is pursuing a grant through the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to help pay down the $11.2 million purchase price.

Mixon Fruit Farms nixed

All nominated properties can be found on the “Environmental Lands Candidate Property” dashboard at MyManatee.org. One property listed as “no longer active” is Mixon Fruit Farms, and it offers a look at how the evaluation process works and why even publicly favored projects might be turned down. 

Hunsicker, Kruse and Commissioner Mike Rahn all lauded the Mixon family and the farm’s legacy. In June, the county announced its interest in acquiring the 39 acres and said it wanted to use the purchase for environmental education, special events, bird watching, hiking and even a golf driving range.

However, the property went on the market in February for $15.8 million, and ultimately Kruse said it was out of the county's price range.

Rahn said the land didn’t meet the criteria of what’s considered “environmentally sensitive.” 

The property was recommended for purchase by the Environmental Lands Management and Acquisition Committee, but Hunsicker said at the time it could take up to 18 months for research before the project could be brought to commissioners for approval.

Projects must fit into at least one of four categories to be eligible for the program: ecological quality, rarity of species or habitat, importance to water resources, and/or connectivity (to existing conservation lands).

“Our program is centered around finding those special places,” Hunsicker said. “We thought, with grants, we could widen the creek (on the Mixon property) and return it into a meandering, broad floodplain type of movement, thereby improving water quality and building more habitats for the breeding birds that were downstream.”

The creek had been channelized over the years, but the main issue came with a million-gallon tank for reclaimed water that sits in a corner of the property. The pipe that supplies the water to the tank runs parallel to the creek, only six feet off the northern bank. 

Hunsicker estimated it would cost $1 million or more to move it. Without moving it, stormwater improvements wouldn’t have met the requirements to get funding through the Water Management District. 

The city of Bradenton was offered a 3- to 4-acre portion to expand the golf course, but it declined.

“As we found our funding sources beginning to erode, the property got more and more costly for us to be able to make the changes we wanted to do, and the pipeline presence prevented us from doing what we really wanted to do,” Hunsicker said. “We had to go back to the pursuit of other properties that didn’t have those limitations and where we had a higher potential to bring in other financial partners.” 

The county currently has eight properties in the acquisition process and seven more that have been reviewed by the committee and have to go before the commission for approval.