{"id":846,"date":"2019-09-10T07:58:20","date_gmt":"2019-09-10T11:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/conservation\/?p=846"},"modified":"2019-09-10T08:04:46","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T12:04:46","slug":"legal-fight-over-conservation-land-spending-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/?p=846","title":{"rendered":"Despite Appeal Court Reversal, Issue Of Whether State Misspent Conservation Funds Remains Unanswered"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Florida&#8217;s conservation community received a slight setback this week when an appeals court reversed last year&#8217;s circuit court ruling that the Florida Legislature&#8217;s spending of land conservation funds was unconstitutional.<br \/>\nThe court case involves the implementation of a constitutional amendment overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2014 that was intended to provide the funding to restart the Florida Forever program to finish purchasing state conservation lands.<br \/>\nThe suit by a number of conservation groups including Sierra Club&nbsp; alleges legislators diverted money intended for conservation land acquisition and management to cover day-to-day agency expenses that would normally be funded from other revenues.<br \/>\nBut while Monday&#8217;s&nbsp; ruling reversed part of last year&#8217;s court judgement, it left open a further examination of the propriety of the Florida Legislature&#8217;s funding decisions.<br \/>\nThe ruling&nbsp; struck down a conclusion that the money authorized by the amendment could only be used for lands acquired after 2015, the unanimous ruling added <strong>&#8220;<em>By our ruling we do not speak to the legality of the appropriations since enactment of Article X, section 28, a question which remains pending,<\/em> &#8220;<\/strong> adding&#8221; the cause is remanded to the circuit court for further proceedings. &#8221;<br \/>\nThat appears to give Sierra and other plaintiffs another shot at arguing for mores responsible funding decisions by legislators. It also involves&nbsp; Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet, who oversee the executive and cabinet agencies also named in the lawsuit.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t over yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Florida&#8217;s conservation community received a slight setback this week when an appeals court reversed last year&#8217;s circuit court ruling that the Florida Legislature&#8217;s spending of land conservation funds was unconstitutional. The court case involves the implementation of a constitutional amendment overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2014 that was intended to provide the funding to restart [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gci"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=846"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":856,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions\/856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}