As Amendment 3 nears the finish line, voters are being asked to decide whether to approve a tax cut that could dramatically reshape the half-century old agency that maintains flood control for more than 9 million residents in South Florida and helps oversee Everglades restoration.
If passed, the South Florida Water Management District stands to lose more than $415 million in ad valorem taxes over the next five years, according to a state analysis.
“If someone took away a fourth of my budget when I was running that agency, I would have to get rid of a fourth of my people. I'd have to close a fourth of my parks,” said Eric Draper, who served as Florida Park Service director from 2017 to 2021 and opposes the amendment. “It's just not practical to think, oh, the Water Management District can just absorb a cut.”
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Ad valorem taxes make up about a quarter of the district’s budget from year to year.
If there’s a contingency plan to deal with the potential shortfall, they were not part of budget hearings this year when neither the director or board members adopted a $1.6 billion budget in September.
District officials, including its media spokesperson and executive director, did not respond to requests for comment. Governing board member Ron Bergeron declined to comment. Board members representing Southeast Florida also did not respond to requests for comment.
The district is one of five across the state created in the 1970s to protect water supplies and provide flood control, but it's the biggest by far in terms of people served and the scope of its work. To service 16 counties, its aging waterworks system iincludes 2,300 miles of canals, 2,100 miles of levees, nearly 100 pump stations, 28 miles of dams and more than 1,500 culverts and water control structures.
The district also partners with the federal government in the ongoing environmental restoration work across the Everglades expected to cost over $26 billion. the partners have so far shared the cost of just over $16 billion in work. But as projects are finished, the district will shoulder most of the expense of maintaining and operating works, including three major reservoirs aimed at helping control pollution and boosting water supplies.
“When you look at the water Management district's overall spending plan, it looks like they have a lot of money because they're getting money from the federal government for Everglades restoration,” Draper said. “But those restoration projects are literally construction projects. Once they're built, that money goes away.”
Over the next year, its operations and maintenance budget alone will cost nearly $423 million, with billions more needed to update structures in danger of failing their level of service.
“Holy cow, man, there’s a lot that's going to happen over the next few years, and in government you should always be planning for what's coming, not just what you have going on today,” said Jacqui Thurlow-Lippisch, who served on the district governing board from 2019 to 2023, when Florida lawmakers failed to confirm her re-appointment after she criticized lawmakers contemplating a bill that favored sugar growers.
Without a reliable flow of ad-valorem taxes, Thurlow-Lippisch worries that the district could lose that autonomy voters intended it to have when they gave it authority to collect taxes from residents decades ago.
“It becomes more political,” she said. ”Water funding is shifted to a lobbyist-driven process.”
That puts the district in competition with demands across the state, a situation early planners hoped to avoid when they created the districts in the early 1970s when the state was in the throes of a development boom.
With planned communities gobbling up farmlands and forests – the General Development Corporation alone boasted of building seven planned communities covering 200,000 acres in the 1960s – Gov. Reuben Askew appointed a panel of 12 to craft a suite of laws to better protect water supplies and coordinate growth.
At a secret meeting, they write proposed legislation including laws establishing the districts and a constitutional amendment allowing them to collect taxes.
“The mandate from the governor came out of his water conference in Miami Beach,” Earle Starnes, an architect, former Dade County Commission and Florida’s first planner said in a 2005 interview with University of Florida historian Julian Pleasants. Starnes, who died in 2021, said the goal was to come up with "legislation for the 1972 legislature to deal with this whole set of environmental land use, water management problems.”
To do that, Starnes said the team decided they needed “a whole new creature” with its own tax base coming from residents receiving its services.
To his surprise, four landmark conservation laws passed, including the voter referendum giving the districts independence.
“It was an incredible political feat,” he told Pleasants. “The people carried the day on that one.”
Asked years later if thought the strategy had worked, Starnes said it had withstood the test of time. “That was probably a stroke of genius.”
As South Florida grew and new cities sprang up, the district’s regional flood control system also became the backbone that allowed development to continue, Thurlow-Lippisch said.
“ As the water management districts matured, the state legislature and the governor – the governance – really expected the expertise and the monies to be primarily coming from the district,” she said. ”Also, you were taxing people from that area because it was a service for those people.”
District governing boards, appointed by the governor, also provided cover on tough decisions.
By making them reliant on local taxes, she said it also meant there was “more skin in the game,” she said. “ They have something more to say about what they want improved and all of that. Now it's going to Tallahassee.”
She lawmakers from other regions will care less about the flooding woes in South Florida, and the needs of its aging system.
According to the district’s most recent annual resilience report, much of the system no longer meets flood control limits it was designed to handle: a 25-year storm that equals about a 4 percent chance of flooding every year.
With expanding development, sea-level rise and heavier rainfall, staff said the risk of flooding has jumped to 20 percent chance in vulnerable areas. Nearly 40 water control structures – from canals to pumps and flood basins – will fail to meet their level of service in just five years, the report said. To repair or replace them is expected to cost more than $11 billion.
“ Tallahassee has not done its homework on how this is really going to affect the Water Management Districts,” she said. “ We bring a lot to the table in monetary value. And so we deserve to let our people pay their taxes, and let them be safe.”
