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Egmont Key State Park Facing Budget Cuts

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By MIKE SALINERO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 26, 2009

TALLHASSEE - Egmont Key State Park is once again a target in the sights of legislative budget cutters.

A state Senate budget committee has recommended pulling state park rangers from the island at the entrance to Tampa Bay and returning oversight to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which owns most of the land. The state has been patrolling the island and protecting natural resources and historic artifacts there since 1989.

"The park rangers are the only people out there looking after the historical artifacts, the tortoises, the sea turtles and the nesting birds," said Jim Spangler, president of the Egmont Key Alliance. "The state is now providing 24-hour-a-day service and the Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't have the capability to do that."

The proposed abandonment of Egmont was part of a broader package of budget cuts to environment and conservation programs recommended today by the Senate Governmental Appropriations Committee. Everglades restoration and the popular land-buying program, Florida Forever, were also casualties of the budget-slashing session.

The Senate is looking at cutting between $900 million and $1 billion to help make up for an estimated $5.7 billion shortfall in the state budget in the coming fiscal year.

The state House has not given a target for budget reduction yet.

Florida Forever, funded in recent years through $300 million in bond issues, is unfunded this year in Senate and House committee appropriation budgets. About 2.4 million acres of environmentally sensitive land has been purchased through the program and its predecessor, Preservation 2000.

"Florida has the better part of a 30-year legacy in land acquisition that's protected some of the most important parts of Florida, but there are still special places out there to protect from development," said Julie Wraithmell, a lobbyist for the environmental group, Audubon of Florida.

Restoring the Everglades, which has been a priority under Democratic and Republican governors, also receives no funding in House and Senate budgets.

The state Department of Environmental Protection first proposed returning Egmont Key to the federal government late last year as part of proposed budget cuts that included closing 19 state parks. But the agency later said that Gov. Charlie Crist didn't want to close the parks. The Senate committee budget adopted Thursday would leave the 19 parks open, but give Egmont and two other parks back to their original owners.

Reporter Mike Salinero can be reached at (813) 259-8303.

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