we'll call this meeting to order just as a sidebar if anybody on the desk would like to order lunch please give the admin person your suggestions a few of us are going to go to fresh market for i'll now do the roll call uh dan brady tom campenny vicky davis here david hafner beth kavinski john keller hello merrick matheson here scott turnbull and jim snedeker um do i have a motion to approve the minutes from our june 25th meeting so moved second all in favor aye all opposed they're passed do i have a motion to approve the agenda for today's meeting all in favor moved aye um staff will now update us on the parcels presented during our previous meetings um mike and staff please address the tax revenue starting january 1st um michael houston senior project manager in the martin county environmental resource division uh i have stephanie murley here to provide an update in terms of uh how uh the money that's been generated by the tax good morning um for those of you who don't know me i'm stephanie murley i'm the director of the office of management and budget um for martin county and today the sales tax was approved in november and it began collections in january of 2025 and today i just pulled it just a few minutes ago we have collected 10 million one hundred and forty four thousand two hundred and thirty three dollars and those are for collections through june of 2025 um the state takes a few months to remit um their their monthly revenues for sales tax so it's usually about three months behind so we we can expect to collect about 12 mil 12 million through the end of september for this fiscal year 2025 which ends on 9 30 um and we are hoping to have anticipated collections in fy26 of around 20 mil 20 million dollars so um if you have any questions about that i'm happy to answer it but otherwise around 10.2 million so far thank you um staff please review those properties previously voted on by the eloc in which we submitted to the board of county commissioners good morning sebastian poprowski senior assistant uh county attorney um we brought before the board a way to um i would say do a faster track to close the deal with uh be a man buy land in palmar uh in the palmar area to purchase those uh acres um we needed to get board approval normally we have to then come back to the board so that the board accepts the deeds it's a separate hearing we uh we sort of rolled this into a way that we don't have to come back to the board the second time we're currently reviewing um the deeds we're looking for any uh post settlement we entered the settlement agreement in november of last year uh any encumbrances are the real estate departments doing that going through all that um and uh as i said we did that so we wouldn't have to come back before the board of county commissioners one more time to formally accept uh land uh via a meeting so i guess uh that's that's the update that we have on that and in terms of barbie ranch on august 26 we went in front of the board and got approval to use sales tax funds for the acquisition of a conservation easement at barbie ranch the actual acreage of the easement we've since found is going to be about 1700 acres out of the 1900 acre property and at this point we're waiting on the state to approve the agreement uh it goes in front of the uh the governor and cabinet on september 30th i believe and once that happens we can uh finalize the agreement and then incorporate our funding and get the acquisition of that conservation easement completed in the next few months i have a question what question oh if the state approves it does the state pay for part of this yes so that we we don't have a final tally but what what what we've been asked is for about a five million dollar contribution on what would be a 17 million dollar easement five million from the state five million from the county from the county and then 12 million from the seven million the state would pay 12 million the county would pay about five million oh i miss under hurt didn't hear you state will pay 12 and the county five correct and council what's the timeline roughly on the bmn by land uh we were waiting for the finance department uh there had to be an amendment uh to the budget brought before the board to uh account for these additional monies um so we had to wait for that and we're still the real estate department still looking at each deed i mean each parcel by parcel um so i would say after that review is done we can probably proceed forward and you said there was 1900 acres originally on the barbie ranch that's the total property acreage but uh since the conservation easement is so restricted they've asked to leave out 200 acres right around their home site that won't be subject to the conservation easement okay so the timeline is to go back to that on the bmn by land topic how there was one parcel originally in last time how many parcels are there in total that are being evaluated uh it's over i think 300 okay got it thank you takes a little bit of time yes any other comments on those properties that have been broke before the board of county commissioners mike is that it okay um the staff and i have drafted this process that you have in front of you uh but it's not cut in stone so after we finish this meeting we're gonna we'd like to fine tune the process as you'll notice we've already done for this one and we welcome feedback well mr chair you have to follow the agenda that was printed and published you just can't make believe you have a new agenda you can add these questions under our comments or the staff comments but you just can't ignore the published agenda because this is the published agenda okay so thank you mr need to follow the published agenda and then we can do whatever you want with your other comments that are during the meeting got it um so let's go back to the uh each parcel which really goes through mr campini sagacious counsel um if we review the ranking process mike uh and staff uh then the presentation let's go through that which will pretty much follow the format that all of you have in front of you and i actually have the uh some slides on the review process incorporated into the start of my presentation okay so please proceed so uh today is our environmental lands oversight committee presentation uh i did want to throw a little plug in that we have a website that we've been developing it's on the old martin county forever web page but it has all kinds of information anything you could possibly want to know and probably a lot more in regards to this program it will look at the history it looks at the history of of our program it looks at the properties that we'll we are evaluating we'll have a we'll have web pages associated with that there'll be maps on there and just all kinds of information so if anyone's interested in finding out more uh it's martin county forever dot com so for today's meeting uh i've drawn up a map that shows all the different parcels that we're going to be looking at today and in total we're looking at 9 000 acres roughly 9 000 acres of land that'll be up for consideration these properties include areas within all four of our acquisition zones that we've discussed previously and the acreage varies from 3 500 acres in the palm beach heights area to as small as one acre in perry beach addition and it's a pretty good cross section throughout the county and just a little reminder of what our process is we have a nomination form gets submitted to the environmental resource division we look at that nomination and we see that if it falls with the ordinance number one two two one and that it is one within one of our acquisition zones and the other main thing is we have to have a willing seller letter so we have to have a some indication from the owner that if we go through this process get this property ranked and approved for sales tax funds that they would be interested in selling their property or at least uh entering into a conservation easement once that happens then we present the proposal in front of the environmental lands oversight committee for review and ranking and that's the step we're at here today once that occurs we then bring those projects before the board of county commissioners for reviewing and vote on whether to proceed with acquisition if that happens we enter into due diligence and negotiations and finally if all those things happen and we're we we can then bring it back to the board of county commissioners for final approval the purpose of our meeting is to review environmental information on these nominated parcels to fill in our project ranking forms and then to make recommendations to the martin county board of county commissioners on whether to move forward with acquisition here's our scoring sheet um we've discussed this before but basically we have the series of 10 factors that we're looking at but we are not and this is important to note for those who weren't here before uh category seven estimated cost per acre we're just going to leave those as being a zero so we're not evaluating these properties according to that based on feedback that we received from the uh oversight committee so in essence all you guys are going to do is you're going to fill in those project scores for each property and then there is a weighted methodology that we're using so that we'll then take that information your scores will plug in their weighting unit to come up with a total weighted score for each property for each committee member and this is just a tabulation sheet that shows how this is going to work so this is for the first nomination we're looking at today palm beach heights so it has all of your names and it has each of those categories we'll fill those in to come up with those weighted scores and then we'll be developing a total project score for each property and this just shows by property how this will work so it all gets added up for a total score and then on the right hand column there'll be a rank so we'll rank all these projects you'll notice at the bottom of this project ranking forms that it mentions barbie ranch and the palmar settlement what we have to do is we want to make a cumulative list so we want to add all these properties into that to come up with a new ranked score from one to what would essentially be 18. does anyone have any questions on that process just one as we're ranking these projects we're judging them on themselves not compared to another project right we're scoring them on itself on its own merits i you yes and no like you're welcome to change your scores based on what you see from another project proposal that's why you're gonna do all the ranking forms for all the property and you're not going to properties and you're going to hand them in at the end once all the properties we've gone through all the properties so you can make changes as you see fit so what we'll be doing is provisionally ranking each and then we'll have discussion following that you may wish to re revise your initial ranking at that point based upon the discussion thank you if i could make a request um also on this project ranking score if you could add a column at the end even though it's not part of the rankings that indicates total acreage of the parcels that are approved or up to be approved that would be helpful i think yep we'll get that in the minutes and then i'll look back at those minutes and get that incorporated michael i have a question uh on on on all the properties you eliminated some of the criteria one two or three uh criteria do those automatically get a zero score yeah the only one we've uh eliminated is category seven and those will just get a zero okay i have i have a question the the last two barbie ranch and palmar they've already been approved by the commission correct correct so i know you want to keep them ranked but what happens if something comes up and all of a sudden palmar no longer is number two right even though we've already uh had the money for it you're doing a budget amendment i mean should they even be on this project rankings at this point because they've already been approved by the commission the money's already been approved well you guys are the oversight committee i mean i i like the idea of putting the scores on there if you want to i'll leave it up to the discretion of the oversight committee whether or not you feel that we want one list or have separate lists for each time that you come forward and do a ranking meeting is there pardon me is there any precedent for this mike in terms of that question not that i'm aware of okay council is there any question relating to that process uh no sir all i would say is that obviously for barbie ranch and palmar the palmar settlement those scores cannot be changed those are done so uh i would revert back to whether you would prefer to have one list with two different columns or two separate lists you know where that so you don't see one or the uh with the other so my counsel my suggestion would be uh everybody please weigh in on this we wait until we've gone through these see where we stand and then discuss it how do you all feel any comments mr chair yeah i think tom is right to an extent there has to be a removal process and it should either be once the commission has approved our ranking or at least once the deal's gone through and been finalized or perhaps two separate columns or three you know the current list commission's approval and then a final deal but to lump them all together it doesn't make sense to me the one one thing i would say is that with obviously the county is moving forward with the palmar settlement and barbie ranch but we could rank all these projects and then come back to you in six months or at whatever point with a series of new projects and and those things they'll still be outstanding projects at that point so there is value i think then in having a overall ranked list that incorporates what's already been ranked versus what hasn't been and these you know we could be working on some of these for years so this isn't you know and that's all fine but once it once we've ranked it and once the commission has taken action yeah unless you bring it back to us for some reason right then we shouldn't see it again okay and i think it should be on a separate list yeah so that makes sense and that way because we don't want to re-rank something again well once once these you know once we move through this process then the county is going to have to you know we can look at these scores ourselves so you know at that point we don't need to bring it back to the oversight committee yeah let's keep it simple yeah um and let's just delete the barbie ranch and palmar settlement at this point um and then perhaps we can have a discussion offline however however you want to do this and just figure out what we do but well for now and it's still interesting to have it on there so you'll at the end be able to see how these new proposals compare but we won't rank those yeah because that just opens up a can of worms yeah and then yeah um that sounds good okay so please go ahead and proceed yeah so there's a um last time you guys were here we were looking at the barbie ranch project which was a conservation easement with the florida forever program today we are going to be bringing forward three proposals that are coming through the rural and family lands program which is a state program offered through the florida department of agricultural and community service i think i got that right fdax so they're a little different in how they operate they were established in 2001 they use perpetual agricultural conservation easements so it's important to state that it's still a conservation easement it still prevents those areas from being developed but the main purpose is actually more to protect working agricultural lands while also conserving natural resources the land still remains in private ownership and in production and easements are purchased by the state approved by the governor and cab cabinet and there's no public access requirements so these properties will not have public access in the future so i wanted to compare what florida forever and the rural and family lands program how that how they are similar and how they are different so whereas the rural and family lands program wants to keep land in production while conserving resources the main purpose of florida forever is to protect natural resources water habitat scenic and recreational values uh they're uh they're administered still by the state and have to get approval by the government and cabinet governor and cabinet they're once again uh rural and family lands can do conservation easements for but also incorporate agriculture and whereas florida forever can do a mix of fee simple so they can acquire the property outright or put conservation easements on it the selection criteria once again instead of just conservation values it looks at agricultural productivity threat of conversion or development and compatibility with working lands and either can allow for ongoing ranching farming activities but the florida forever easements tend to be stricter on development and once again they're more designed to protect ecosystems water recharge and scenic values and and florida forever can have uh public access incorporated into their easements is there any questions about that everything we're talking about would be perpetual and irrevocable correct correct perpetuity okay and we do not have any replication of what took place in palm beach county is that correct correct these are all irrevocable they would never be able to be removed but it you know if it could be more just the working ranch got it i just want to be sure that i got this yeah first time i've seen it i just want to be sure that there's no confusion on this in perpetuity and irrevocable and that we definitely do not have in there under any condition take place what took place in palm beach county yeah the ordinance does not allow for revoking or removing these the conservation easement status uh from an easement with the rural and family lands program thank you mr chair is there any way that we could acquire a copy of this spreadsheet for the committee yeah thank you we can send that out with the minutes okay any other questions on this all right then we're ready to start looking at our first proposal and once again so how this is going to work is i'll go through the proposal and at the end we'll have public comments and board discussion on each proposal so the palm beach heights area it's roughly about 8 000 acres of which there are still about 3 500 acres in private ownership while at this point with the recent transactions that have occurred there's close to 4 500 acres in public ownership so we're at about 60 plus percent in terms of our ownership in this area we care about this area because it's a connector between large state-owned conservation tracks we've had a significant investment from the state from the county and the south water water management districts in terms of acquiring and protecting this area and we do that because it has some of the most high quality wetland systems found in martin county in addition parts of it are headwaters to the wild and scenic northwest fork of the loxachi river and i put this map together to show the two areas that are in question it it looks a little confusing one of the issues we had is that we're still the the transactions that we've done out there recently are so numerous and large that we haven't been able to incorporate that into our mapping system so the areas in the chimney are actually not going to be in government ownership before but i incorporated this just to give you an idea of about where we're at in terms of the ownership so the green are things that are in public ownership and the areas that are clear that don't have a polygon are ones that are currently in private ownership so it's just to see that we're actually in some of the areas close to being able to put together some contiguous manageable blocks and i did i incorporated this map just so you can see you know once you remove that what the areas look like and get an idea of kind of the habitats that you find in in this area so you can see that there's really extensive wetland systems good natural communities throughout these areas you can see its relationship to hungry land wildlife and environmental area which are on the west side north of beeline and also to the east side of these properties it falls within the palmar acquisition zone and it's within the forda forever program lists this area as an essential acquisition so all the areas in yellow represent areas that are within the forda forever program the state land buying program so you can see it does fall within a forda forever program for palmar in addition another big state tracking system and state prioritization system is the florida wildlife corridor and it gets a little confusing all the areas are in yellow are areas of the florida wildlife corridor that have not been acquired so anything green or orange or that blue color are areas in the florida wildlife corridor that have already been acquired at this point so that just gives you an idea that it's in a forda wildlife corridor you can see how connected it is to all these other lands that are being prioritized for acquisition and a separate state metric is the florida ecological greenway network which lists it as a priority too in terms of funding partners we have been working with the south water water management district for 20 years now buying lots in palmar we haven't bought as many recently but we have an agreement in place and we would enter in discussions with the water management district for some kind of cost sharing agreement moving forward in terms of the habitat quality most of the area about 90 is relatively unaltered natural areas there is a ditch system that bisects through this area and you can see that on this photograph so each of those is a ditch and canal it does not actually connect to anything and so according to fna they weren't sure what impact that hat is having on the hydrology but you can see that you have some relatively intact wetland systems running throughout that area and some good hydrology in terms of the areas we looked at the eastern area is having extensive issue with off-road vehicle use and small camp uh encampments but overall the area appears to be in good to even excellent condition in terms of management considerations managing this area would be pretty difficult right now because of the small lot sizes it's only a quarter acre to an acre in size many but not all the surrounding parcels are in government ownership and as many of you are aware there's an issue with these off-road vehicle use in in the area there's invasive exotic vegetation prevalent in sections of palmar and once again it would be difficult to complete management responsibilities unless we're able to put together some larger contiguous government-owned lots in terms of rare enlisted species the map on the left shows the different habitat communities there's not a lot of areas that would be considered to be rare habitat but there are some species that could be expected to be found based on fna's predictor model which includes eastern indigo snake sand elk cranes wood storks and snail kites there really isn't much development potential of this area other than the fact that you have these off-road vehicles and these small encampments which are having a significant environmental impact on the area and represent a large threat to the natural communities found within palm beach heights in terms of recreational opportunities the county has long prioritized creating this jupiter indiantown trail that would extend all the way from indiantown road pretty close to the loxahatchee river all the way out to indiantown we have about six five miles of that are open at this time the eastern segments that go all the way out into the start of hungry land but the county has long wanted to continue that on to the west so that would go out all the way out to indiantown uh so you know we we would have to acquire all the lots along this or or be able to get easements in order to create this connection and that's the end of uh that presentation so we can now take public comment and committee discussion and i'll turn it back over to you public comments please zach very similar to what we approved our last meeting and the commission agreed to buy yes very same thing but uh perhaps mike is it appropriate for you to comment on that at this point or at the end let's wait for public okay go ahead zach thank you be a man by land we can't hear you zach zach as a be a man by land good morning i came for general public comment um i didn't realize that the public comment was specific to each each proposal so my question is can i comment on anything right now or do i have to wait till the end of the meeting for that question for council uh it's up to the board uh how normally uh public comment is either reserved general public comments either reserved for the beginning or the end um and mostly comment is limited to this topic uh that just been presented um but i mean we didn't take public comment general public comment in the beginning so you can open that up or you can wait to the end it's okay i'd like to open it up so zach go ahead thank you um regarding uh the last meeting and what your committee approved substantial or half of that was was properties that the county later agreed to at their commission meeting purchase based on your recommendation as your committee is the oversight committee um and i believe that the half cent sales tax was passed in this county because there was an oversight committee um i have noticed some issues with the actual goings-on of the county after your recommendation and after the board of county commissioners approval um my situation is unique as there was a settlement agreement um that the county is obligated to purchase these properties the board of county commissioners and staff chose to take that purchase responsibility and guide it through the sales tax process which then involved your committee the settlement agreement requires the county to close on these properties by february of 2026 however since they navigated this process through the half cent sales tax the money that they're sitting on over 10 million dollars is more than enough to close on the palmar properties i've already submitted the signed deed to sebastian he has it in his possession i have the email where the properties are approved everything's done if you look at the the video of the last board of county commissioner meeting their intent on pushing this to february my concern is it's not their money to sit on and there's some bad blood sebastian himself was the opposing counsel in the litigation between myself and the county when they blocked access to palmar which led to this settlement so it's my understanding that there's now some ethical concerns with the board of county commissioner and staff regarding the closing of these properties the money's there your oversight committee approved it the board of county commissioners approved it but they refused to close so my emails go unanswered i can't get any records requests nobody wants to talk to me i'll keep pushing the county as far as i need to because this is going to jeopardize this process this you know this half cent sales tax the money's there properties have been approved the county what's the next step no one knows you have the deed the properties that are approved this quick claim deed they're not waiting on anything that's my general comment my comment as to this specific parcel which i didn't plan on commenting but there were there were notes made about indian the jupiter indiantown grade which is a public road the board of county commissioners passed a resolution which is the last thing that i could find that it's a public road and it remains a public road to obtain easements or ownership of properties is is is going to be a tricky situation i own quite a bit of property that fronts on jupiter indiantown road which is a public road and to turn that into a trail is going you can't have through traffic and bicyclists and hikers it's going to be difficult it's only 30 feet wide so i think that your board should your committee should take that into consideration with the purchase of these other palomar properties as far as the use of the indiantown road or the old jupiter indiantown grade for scenic byway whatever the plan is thank you zach thank you um yeah hold on for a second no a technical question we're doing three minute comp not not to you zach three minute comments so who's keeping the three minute i'm keeping an eye on it thank you thomas yes there's a clock right up there so i and my only request to counsel would be whatever you can do to expedite the process to address zach's concerns uh would be appreciated uh it's really beyond the capability of us to do anything beyond what we've already done it seems to me so um but we're understand uh zach's comments uh they're duly noted and uh we proceed from there and i i just want to clear up a prior comment that i may and i understand mr gaza's uh situation is unique as compared to the other properties that you're all scoring um and the county has decided to use this funding vehicle for that litigation it is currently ongoing litigation but i'd like to remind the board that not one cent has yet been spent of eloc money as far as i know on any property we have scored it we are going through the process as i stated we have uh i've brought before the board uh the ability to fast track it so i don't have to go back before the board and um it's actually 429 separate lots so our real estate team is looking at that this is not their only project it's not their only job we are moving it as fast as we can so okay and i will remind the committee that we just reviewed and ranked these it was uh two months ago yeah so government can be slow sometimes so yeah and 429 is quite a few parcels but a very understanding of uh zach's comments so um would ask you do everything you can to expedite the process understood and uh you know and and back to mr campani's comment yeah we were went beyond the three minutes but i think that uh i'm not going to be a stickler when it comes to that especially when something's as material as it is relating to mr gaza so thank you um now at this point uh the committee what we can do is discuss it generally put a provisional ranking on it um and then we'll come back later so would anyone like to take the lead on that or do you prefer to wait until we're at the end no i just say it's identical to what we approved the last time and and uh seemed like we ought to get going it's really not identical we had one similar last time well i'm not sure if that's material my my take is that having visited the property last week um it's a beautiful piece of property or in in the aggregate um it is being uh adversely impacted if you as you enter the property you'll see that the signs are these little signs are uh filled with bullet holes so people are going in there shooting the place up um and you know god bless them they're permitted to shoot as they wish but it's pretty clear it's a free fire zone um it is a beautiful area yes yeah i have a question on on some of the material that was provided with respect to the palmar water control district and whether or not the canals that are going through some of the properties are they owned or only uh easement to palmar water control district and will that provide or pose any difficulties with respect to access uh their easements their easements from from uh dedicated to the palmar water control district and they're specifically for maintaining the works of the district and and their role for flood control you know uh so so there's no dedicated access along those um and that's why you know you'd have to get contiguous manageable blocks to be able to provide access to some of those areas okay thank you so if i wanted to go to these lots i could drive in or do i have to walk in or do i have to bicycle in can i use my horse can i use my horse how do i get there michael well the the county considers these to be the the ones that are in public ownership are are accessible via what we would typically allow for passive base recreation which would be hiking biking equestrian uses so the the rest of that is all tied up in all kinds of legal issues that we're not prepared to discuss today and the lots as you explained are from a quarter acre to about an acre correct and they're owned by many different people or just one person in this particular um i believe there's something like 2000 owners so so this would be something we would be doing over a decade or more probably yes so you're asking us to approve approve it as a which but you don't you don't think this will happen anytime soon that the public will say we have palmar this is only a very very small beginning and it's much different than just buying land from be a man yeah but we do have you know at one point we were paying just an appraised value that was a thousand fifteen hundred dollars an acre so nobody is going to have an incentive to sell their property at at that price so we we do have board direction that allows us even now to go above appraised value and so we can be much more competitive with offers that we make to the public to attempt to acquire those lots you're actually using the eloc money but it's something that the board has considered doing for quite some time as it did with correct your man by land but we're out of the money that was being used to acquire those properties so we would need to use sales tax funds in order to continue to acquire lots out there so that's why we want uh the eloc to weigh in and make a recommendation on whether that's a program that they feel that you feel the county should continue to focus on with this new sales tax fund thanks mike and i agree that we should buy these lots and and i'm sorry i'll just uh jump in here this would be a very as uh you said mr campani uh as you alluded alluded to it would be very piecemeal you know it would be maybe a quarter a lot pops up here and there an acre pops up here and there so we're not talking about uh a huge expenditure at once it's basically the green light to proceed with the process right i'd like to make a general aware generally uh this property but actually all 15 of them i spent yesterday uh time with john mail uh touring all these properties so i have some personal uh look at them and uh some idea of what each one of them are and this is a another beautiful property that would be wonderful to have and um i just want to say um i guess for the committee's sake that again and um these properties have been on the state and the county lists for approval or for acquisition for quite some time several decades at least and have made those um we the the state and the county have made inroads into buying parcels in in the palmar area i think the difference here is that we're approving the eloc monies for that acquisition as opposed to other county funds very good point beth merit my only comment is just we need to keep in mind this somewhat blanket approval while i do support it follows everything that the ordinance for the sales tax fund is meant for uh it's clearly desired by the state and the county doesn't follow the exact flow chart where we don't have willing letters of willingness to sell or do you from these roughly 2 000 property owners at the moment well we certainly don't have 2 000 but i i i don't have the exact total but i think there's 30 to 40 that are have contacted the county and we could move move forward with acquisition so there would be a large clump or a small clump out of that 2 000 that could move relatively quickly but then this would be blanket the county would go back and contact the rest of them whereas everything else we look at today there's already been communication with all the property owners and a willingness to either enter a ce or fee simple acquisition point sienna gardens which is will be coming up yes there's some similar we do have one landowner in there that owns like 40 to 50 lots i want to say i i don't i don't know the exact total uh that did provide us a welling seller letter okay so but those are the only two that are you know slightly different from the program because there's so many small parcels and parcel owners correct any more comments so please go ahead members and rank it on a provisional basis we'll adjust those later after we go through all of them um please present the next parcel so our next project we're bringing forward today is the fall fall family partnership so this is right near this area we're just talking about in palmar it's about a 1499 acre property that has large cypress and slu wetland systems and it's part of this huge contiguous interconnected system of conservation lands it really extends all the way from the indian river lagoon to lake okeechobee and it's in areas that can be considered to be the headwaters to the northwest fork of the loxatchee river this shows that it falls within the palmar acquisition zone and it shows how it's kind of at the west end of that palmar acquisition zone and it also gives you a sense of all the state lands that are around within this area this project is also within a florida forever footprint and we received correspondence from florida forever indicating that it will score well according to their metrics when you say go well mike what's that mean it would be probably score well okay got it that that according to their metrics it would be it would score fairly well thank you this once again shows the fort of wildlife quarter you can see where it is within the system and you can also see that it's part of this interconnected system of conservation lands that goes all the way out pretty much to lake okeechobee from the indian river lagoon so that's kind of unique there's not too many places that can boast that and it's also part of a system that extends from west palm beach up into central florida the florida ecological greenway network listed as a priority too this would most likely be a fee simple acquisition there is a possibility of of also having a conservation easement on this we feel that there's a good possibility of receiving florida forever funding and we'd like to talk to ducks unlimited which is a a group that helps to acquire land it's like a a land trust and restoration focused organization that we think there could be a partnership there does that mean to be open for hunting because usually ducks unlimited will fund those properties that are free fire zones for dunk hunting it it would well it would most likely be managed and i have a recreational slide but it would most likely be managed by fish and wildlife conservation commission and and could allow hunting fishing uh but also hiking biking and equestrian uses and has your experience been with ducks unlimited at least in martin county that you have a good dialogue where you could contain any uh possible over over hunting it's important to note that this would if we partner with florida forever that florida forever would take title to the property and it would be a state managed property so and and the i've only had a couple conversations with ducks unlimited but it could be an option it doesn't have to be an option but it could be an option got it thank you i have a question mr chair so any property that is has anything to do with fwc or with uh south florida water management they're they always allow hunting on it do they not um it would depend because of some properties with the water management district cal patioki is has ownership in areas from the south quarter water management district we have several properties um that don't allow hunting but ones in that area would be attached to a wildlife management or a wildlife and environmental area beth do you have anything to chime in on that no okay fair enough thank you go ahead mike in terms of the habitat quality it's almost entirely natural but it does contain a utility quarter and a small hunt camp there is some invasive vegetation that's visible on aerial imagery most notably old rural climbing fern there is a little bit of evidence of off-road vehicle use but it's pretty limited and overall the area appears to be in very good condition you do have a road next door which could cause smoke management issues if you wanted to use fire as a management tool and you have privately owned lands on the west side of the area but other than that it's completely surrounded by other protected conservation lands here's your listed species it does that in martin county we actually consider strand swamp dome swamp and mesochamic to be rare habitats and a very sizable chunk of the property are those habitats so you know i would say close to half of the property would be considered to be a rare habitat here in martin county in addition we have florida sandal cranes red cockade of woodpeckers which is actually was not found on any of the other properties we're removing or we're reviewing today and it found a pretty sizable chunk of the hat property could be habitat for red cockade of woodpeckers in addition wood storks and snail kites in terms of recreational opportunities it could be part of a link trail system that goes from hungry land into corbett wildlife management area there is actually a wildlife crossing it doesn't show up on this map but right in about this area that goes under the beelines so it could have that could be potentially used for hiking you know biking probably not equestrian uses the the the crossing isn't that big but it could be used for some recreational access in terms of development potential it's somewhat limited it's going to be outside the urban services area it has the agricultural designation it could potentially include 75 residential units it would be difficult though considering how much of the property is wetlands but they would be able to develop at about that rate if somebody brought in a development and it's adjacent to other conservation areas and agricultural lands and that's the end of my presentation thank you public comment please is there any public comment okay let's go ahead to the members uh comments please dan vicky it's a relatively large chunk it's a important one yes all systems look good yes merit you know the the condition and the the listed rare habitats uh put it fairly high in the the rankings on my list thank you tom i guess i have a question about how um the committee i've forgotten since the last meeting how we are ranking development potential are we are we ranking it high if it has development potential or yes is that the case great question my the way i'm doing it is the higher the number the higher the potential yes okay in this particular case where there's a lot of wetlands but it it's tricky because the wetlands regulations are changing as we speak so it's um one has to gauge that accordingly okay i think there was a description in your manuals yes there is but the trouble is we got a moving target because of what's going on in washington um good point well made mike david uh just to add that i i personally know this property my family leased it for our equine uh business for some time uh this property does go completely underwater during our wet season um so we actually had to move the horses out during that period um so i would definitely say the development potential is is really low um but i could see a lot of use in recreation and hunting before we had it was i know people in the community who used to hunt that and hunted it well and we saw wildlife there when we were there so the uh the recreational use is definitely there and a partnership with ducks unlimited would be favorable i think for that property very helpful thank you david any other comments so if you could please rank it provisionally members and then let's proceed to the next property um if anyone feels they want to take a break at any point please speak up in terms of the members okay mike go ahead please and on that note we'll probably break for lunch at 12 okay i guess yep about an hour and five minutes yep okay so our third property is the jr stewart land uh parcel and this parcel is a little bit different uh it's a 642 acre property it's actually been listed for sale for some time has large cypress and sluice systems the important thing is it's actually already under conservation easement uh as a private mitigation bank we were told by the realtor that they're trying to get that conservation easement removed but the south water water management district owns the easement and they indicated they had no intention of vacating that easement can i just ask a question uh beth how likely is that that even with change of boards and all that they would revoke uh i think it's pretty difficult it's it's not an easy thing to revoke a conservation easement um you know because it was offered for development of something else but didn't that happen in palm beach county beth where the conservation easement was overturned yeah it did and so that's it's possible i mean yeah county protects their conservation easements now by having duplicate yeah easements um you know between the county and the district or the county and some other entity so and and what the owner is what what the realtor has said is that they opened it as a mitigation bank but only got a couple mitigation credits so they they told me that they were going to remove it from the easement from 75 of the property for the areas that are not they didn't use for the mitigation bank that's just i'm just repeating what the realtor said but you know and there's value in acquiring a property like this you know even if it is already protected just in that you could provide recreation and it could become part of a bigger manageable block so i don't want to get too far and i'll proceed through the presentation we can is there an opportunity to um add another easement on top of the easement if the district does not is not willing to give up their mitigation bank conservation easement well i mean i i don't think the county would have i i don't know that the county would have a problem you know if we were willing to buy something under a conservation easement just keeping the conservation easement in place i even mentioned because of there's mitigation needs with serp projects so could you know if we acquired it could it then be used to mitigate you know uh for wetland impacts for the c2324 project or or what what not right this this is a this is an interesting parcel with respect to the serp project for the loxahatchee project um in maybe we'll invite you let's finish your presentation mike and then we can go into comments um if it were acquired it could be managed as a part of hungry land and as you can see directly south and east of the area you have uh hungry land who manages hungry land uh the fish and wildlife conservation okay yeah well you said that before but it's actually uh they lease it from the water management district in the state this shows its location and it is within the palmar acquisition zone it is within the ford forever program however it should be noted that ford forever sees this property as being conserved so we wouldn't be able to get ford forever support to help acquire it this shows its location in the ford wildlife quarter it's a part of that same segment it's a part of that same cross county greenway system and it's also pretty much all these are listed as a priority to by the florida ecological greenway network it's a fee simple acquisition under the existing conservation easement so might be difficult to find a funding partner for acquisition i'm not saying it's impossible you know we could approach this strict but it would be hard to get funding from a a partner for it there's little evidence of human alteration other than a ditch system that runs on the south and west side of the property there's limited apparent invasive plants and overall the area appears to be in excellent condition it's adjacent to other tracks of large publicly held conservation areas and could be managed as a part of hunger land there's little in the way of surrounding development and no large-scale infestations of exotic vegetation it would the reason why it's important with the little surrounding development is it would make introduction of prescribed fire easier on that property here's your rare unlisted species that doesn't list much in the way of rare habitats and these are the common species that come up in palm are with sandhill cranes wood storks and snail kites in terms of recreational opportunities fwc would be interested in managing it as a part of hungerland you could add hiking equestrian uses hunting and fishing and there's a possibility with one of the other properties that we're looking at today that you could create a connection between harmony ranch which is owned by the south water water management district in the county and hungry land mike just a quick question yes with recreational opportunities how would you get into this ranch now well there's a drive in or uh there's an access road to the south of the property and you you would not be able to drive in there but um and it's very wet so you know you will probably dry season your feet are still going to get wet uh but you know sometimes hunters don't care you know and sometimes i people do the ocean lake trail all the time and i see them spending a week with their feet underwater so you know people will brave walking through wet areas uh for recreational opportunities thank you uh the development potential is pretty limited due to the conservation easement and the fact that it's almost entirely wetlands you can see on that map you know there's maybe 20 percent of the area are uplands if even and in order to develop it the water management district would have to agree to remove the existing conservation easement uh however the fact that there is off-road vehicle use in area could be problematic in this particular area any questions comments so question mike if it's already preserved then what am i missing that we would be buying what's the real benefit by i by our buying it uh well the recreational access and the and the fact that you could add it to underland and provide the public with the opportunity to go out there and and enjoy it will be one uh there can be an argument made that having it as a part of a larger protected system makes management easier so we could so and and and in addition right now since the owner has only put a mitigation bank on a quarter of the property you know are they going to manage it as well as it as it would need to be managed does that make sense yes look the question then the question gets down to price um so it would seem to me that the price per acre would be a lot less we're not going to be discussing that ourselves but um is that a safe assumption yeah okay 100 because that would go into the appraisal you know we're we're basing our offers on appraisals and if it's already under a conservation easement then it would appraise it much less and the i would guess that the realtor is basically trying to say hey we can get this conservation easement removed so we can jack up the price so who's selecting the appraisal presumably the real estate broker is not selecting the appraiser the county has uh vendors that we use for all of our appraisals okay continuing service contracts yeah but i just want to be sure that there's no conflict you can see where i'm headed with that one yeah uh i'm i'm not i don't work for our real property division so i can't really answer questions about what their policies procedures are but but that's certainly you know uh important for them to have independent uh appraisal company no i mean we have a fiduciary duty to be sure that the money is being spent prudently so yeah yeah uh terms of public comment please uh any comments from the public okay around the horn dan vicky uh um it's in between two it pulls ties together to already uh properties that are publicly completes the uh area it's a plus i mean i would just say that clearly the development potential is little to none i mean you've got almost entirely wetlands and you know an existing ce on it so that low ranking but i i do see the benefit of acquiring it for management purposes and recreational opportunities but again that should be reflected these comments should help the board that should be reflected in the price yeah and if it wasn't in such a unique location you know if this was just west of us1 you know near uh in hope sound somewhere and then then it probably wouldn't even be considered but the fact that it's part of this big contiguous management system made me think that it should at least be reviewed by the eloc to see if if you thought it was worthy of a recommendation for acquisition thank you dan i mean i'm sorry tom i'm i'm with jim i think this would be a great property to buy at a certain price otherwise it doesn't have any development potential like merit said it's already provide providing some sort of a flow way and and for for the area so yes if the price is right we should buy it if it isn't we shouldn't and that doesn't come into this i understand but i mean i think if we're going to rate this i think it has to be like almost an asterisk for the board of county commissioners yeah let's but let's buy it because it does meet a lot of criteria but the price does matter with this particular project and then you would probably compare it with other you know that would be one where you would compare against other properties that are in the area you know in terms of how you rank them i would guess yes beth can you put the map up again please one of the first this one okay so as i said earlier this does have a kind of unique relationship to the cert project all and it was not included for land acquisition because it was already under conservation easement but it's adjacent to this um what used to be a pepper farm is now a container nursery if it's been converted yet i don't know it was sold for to be a container nursery and that is included in the cert project to try to kind of reroute some of the drainage for that so this could be helpful to that um it also is a parcel that connects to the parcel to the north which i believe is included in the cert project in the irl project that's correct okay um so it does provide that connectivity and um i mean it's a beautiful piece of property as well um so i i i think it's important as jim said tom sorry tom said that the the commission is fully aware of whatever restrictions there are with respect to the price um and the conservation easement but that it should be ranked fairly highly and can i ask could um if it remains in private ownership could that create a potential issue until the in terms of the loxachi surf project um if the conservation easement is given up and it and yeah i mean the development potential i think is low anyway because it's all wetland but there's a pretty easy access to seven um seven eleven so is that the right number for that road so yeah i've forgotten yeah so david so if everybody could rank it provisionally please uh can i say one more thing tom campini brought up the uh price consideration just as a businessman i overall have interest and uh and can be persuaded by the price considerations on all these properties and uh i don't like the fact that we're supposed to ignore that yeah it's tricky because once we put a price tag on it then it affects the negotiation that the county is going to have with the property owners i think my feeling is that uh we have a fiduciary duty to assess the property as best we can uh when it comes to the price tag uh that's going to really be up to the county commissioners i would take and the appraisers yeah that's i tried to incorporate that's why i had that cost per acre metric in there but i think it was confusing mike i think it would be helpful if you could real briefly tell us how the appraisers work and how much leeway does the county commission have to override the appraisals if they feel that way or how does that whole system work i would probably have to bring somebody from real property can you help on that sebastian i i wish i could i'm i'm not a uh per se real property attorney more in litigation but um i i know that the what i can tell you is i know that the county can agree to pay more than an appraised value uh if they find value uh in in a certain property um there's additional steps that have to go they have to go through to do that um but i i can tell you that the county does not uh regularly don't do such a thing it's what appraised value is is what is known that we're paid that we pay and how many appraisals does the property need to have in order for it to be bought by the county is there one or two yes yeah two right i believe so and having been a student of government for a while now and speaking to commissioners they don't like to spend too much money over an appraised value correct so i think they will probably adhere to whatever the appraisals come in with except if there is a really great piece of property and they all feel that way and they because i think they they just can't override it by a three two it has to be a four one i believe there yeah that that may be true yes i just you know i just wanted to get that out there they did they did vote uh to allow us to go above appraised value for the acquisition of those lots in palm beach heights previously because we weren't competitive because you weren't competitive yeah we could not like i said you know the appraised values were 1500 maybe two thousand dollars an acre and nobody is gonna only zach nobody is gonna sell their property for that much so uh so that can be used as a tool i'll also say that the state report a forever program will only go up to 90 of appraised value so so there's plenty of stop gaps yes in the in the way there there were a couple potential acquisitions that we did not actually bring before you because of the what they were asking was so far outside the realm of what would be acceptable that uh to us it wasn't a willing seller mike could you just drill down that 90 of the appraised value that the state will not fund anything beyond could you just explain that a little bit more fuller forever's policy has been they'll only pay up to 90 percent of appraised value so that let's say that uh that is that would be their share how about how about if the county says we still want to do the deal but they they wouldn't participate it'd kill it kill the deal for the okay thank you any other comments from the members okay let's proceed to the next all right well now we have elise jay which is the sister to that jr stuart land property and that it's just to the north of it so here's that jr stuart land property down here and this is elise jay which is a 322 acre cypress and slough wetland dominated system you can actually see all the cypress in here all that white are cypress swamps so uh it's a massive wetland system and it's an important connector between harmony ranch and hungry land which is going to be a little bit further down here and if acquired it could be managed as a part of hunger land this shows where it is uh this gets a little confusing because of it's it we we included in our palmar acquisition zone but it's actually in the cert footprint for the irl south but they call it the palmar complex you guys get all that so uh so but for all intents and purposes it's within palmar this shows its location uh between all these different areas um and in addition it has been included in the uh cert plan uh it's once again it's within the palmar complex which is within the irl south cert project and the importance of that has to do with the saint lucie river and estuary to capture storm water that is severely impacting the uh saint lucie estuary and if it was approved as an acquisition priority by the federal government in the 2007 word of bill and state funds could be credited to the to the state ledger and the serp cost share agreement so so there's a couple things that can get a little confusing to explain about that um basically anything that the state and the south water water management district spends on serp the federal government matches that so in terms of like dollars this could actually go to help complete other projects that are important to our region such as the uh what's the reservoir beth the the eaa reservoir yeah i don't okay yeah so so it can be helped it can help to complete features that will also help to attenuate damaging storm water runoff into our saint lucie river estuary does everyone understand uh that what what i'm what i'm saying there in addition to that it's within the serp natural lands components so when serp comes in and do a project in some areas they'll actually have to destroy good habitat like to build a reservoir like when they built the c44 reservoir so this program the natural lands component was designed to offset those impacts by acquiring other lands to be left in a natural state i guess it's within the ford wildlife corridor as you can see this is its location it's once again in this big contiguous block that we have running through our county and it's listed as a priority to by the ford ecological greenway network it would be a fee simple acquisition since the property is within serp natural lands it's possible that we could work with the water management district to be a funding partner or since it's adjacent to palmar we could work with and get it added to the palmar ford forever project and and potentially unlock state funds but that wouldn't put it into the palmar water control district correct no it's a separate area in terms of its habitat the natural communities are intact there's little little evidence of disturbance but there are some off-road vehicle tracks visible there are some pockets of exotic vegetation but overall the area appears to be in very good condition in terms of management considerations it's bordered on the north and south by other protected lands even though there's some pockets of invasive old world climbing fern but it wouldn't require a large investment in order to restore this area here's your listed species there are bay gall dome swamp and strand swamp which are all considered to be rare habitats and that once again takes up a pretty sizable chunk of this property and it lists florida sand hill cranes wood storks and snail kites as being potentially found in this area in terms of recreational opportunities i've mentioned this before we could potentially create a trail link between harmony ranch and hunger land it could be used for hiking hunting fishing and equestrian uses and it is pretty wet so there will be some issues in terms of providing recreational opportunities it has an agricultural land use which is one house for 20 acres but it would be pretty challenging because as you can see that's about 95 percent wetlands but based on our current zoning you could get potentially 11 to 12 residences out there and that's all for at least j any public comments please okay going around dan please any thoughts vicky john keller oh really another really good one yeah i like the property i like the potential comments mr campenny took a break he split uh beth of course um this is in the irl footprint um it is a really important piece of property because it it is actually the breaking point where water goes to the north to the south fork st lucie as opposed to the loxahatchee historically actually the piece um that we just looked at previously um it was kind of can go either way um but yeah this was included in palmar because it would flow toward the south fork as opposed to uh south very helpful very hydro hydrologic divide excellent thank you beth david yeah i think this is a good good move especially with it being within the the cert footprint you know we're 25 years into that project we need to do whatever we can to help with that so can you folks hear what david was saying oh okay so just speaking to the mic oh sorry great thank you no further comment everybody please rank it provisionally and then michael next one please i will say one more thing that it is listed on realtor sites as being for sale so yes our fifth project is ss farms so it's a 50 acre 53 acre property it's primarily improved pasture and is actively being ranched so i mentioned this before but this is for an agricultural easement with the rural and family lands program so in essence they actually contacted us and asked us if we would review and for funding to help them acquire this property and this was mentioned before but the historic jupiter indian tongue great bisects this property from east to west it falls within the palmar acquisition zone once again it is within the florida wildlife corridor uh in this area right here you'll see that it is connected to a lot of lands that are have not been acquired those so uh i don't know if that factors into your thinking at all once again it's an agricultural easement acquisition it's being considered by the rural and family lands program for acquisition and they requested a county contribution how much is that is it usually half and half 40 they're 50 50 for to forever is you know request less than 50 you know in terms of the barbie ranch but they're pretty specific for the rural and family lands program requesting a 50 percent county match so mike of our 50 can we get funds does it have to be all from us or cannot can we say get fed funds for 25 we kick in 25 uh that didn't come up but i would imagine like you could use other funding sources got it thank you so most of the property has been disturbed with improved pasture covering 60 of the property there's extensive invasive plants and altered hydrology i will say this photo is not of the actual property it's just basically what i thought the property might look like so interesting as an agricultural easement there would be no county management responsibilities so uh but on the same token unless there are it's called environmental services ecological services unless they're included in the agreement that fdax is working on it probably would not be restored and it certainly would be would remain as improved pasture with continued cattle ranching listed species survey it lists kind of the same three sandhill cranes wood storks snail kites no rare habitats and there are possible those rare species could be found in the marsh areas but it's kind of doubtful because the habitat quality is pretty poor this shows the location uh the main one of the main benefits of this is we could potentially include a recreational easement to the jupiter indian tongue grade in fact the county would probably insist that if you want money from the county to include an agro to put an agricultural easement on the property that we'd like to get an easement through that property for the jupiter indian tongue grade and that would then allow hiking biking and equestrian uses mike or council question so there concurrently would be so there'd be a uh an easement on this let's say that in the future the county wishes to purchase the property outright and and at that point it would be purchased how would that work uh in terms of being able to use it for recreation and that type of thing we would be purchasing it subject to the easement but since we would own fee simple ownership i think the easement would kind of go away and we do what we want with it but knowing i mean what else are we going to do with there then do a preservation we'd probably do a better job than the easement of preserving the property but it is publicly owned it's owned by you know it's owned by by us and we would be we would have the right to do you know trails or or opening it up for the public we could do i don't see how we couldn't do both have the conservation and and um but usually when you hold an easement over someone a conservation easement or someone else's property and then you go out and buy that property now you own it the easement usually disappears at that point well that would be the easement would be with fdax so it would probably so then it would remain yeah it would remain in that case okay yeah um it has an agricultural land use but an interim zoning it basically means that the area hasn't been zoned um and it could be possible with the current land use to put two to three houses on the property uh but it would have to have be given a zoning uh and and land use and that's it any public comment on this particular property out there okay going around the horn dan i'm good vicky john no further comment all right no real comment i mean it certainly should be considered but ranking it as high as some of the others just the easement potential and the already fact that's already impacted okay nothing i have nothing david i have a question and a follow-up so do i understand right that we would be purchasing the development rights on this property would remain in in agricultural use right okay so um based on what i've heard from our community many times is that people in this community want to preserve our agriculture and this would be a way of doing that with keeping this land on the tax roll right it would just be it would be reduced to its agricultural tax value um and then the we would it would be managed by the the rancher or the owner um so for those reasons i think it's a i think it's a good move this is one of those that the community has said many times they want our lands our farmlands preserved so for me this is a this is a good move that's why we have you on here to represent those agricultural interests well it's very important keeping these in the family is you know the barbie ranch perfect example of where it's being kept in the family it's a really important thing for the family um and those of us who were present for that particular presentation know how important it was for that particular family so uh i think to your point david well made thank you and so one thing and i'm just learning about uh uh ecological services and you can offer to pay more than what you normally would in exchange for them performing certain ecological services so that could be invasive plant removal that could be plugging ditches to hold more water on your property so there is a potential with some of these and and i don't know yet because we're still learning this whole system that we could use that as a tool to at least further some of the ecological values of of of properties that are to remain in in you know agricultural use so no good point and also we're not talking apples to apples when it comes to the price tag so it's gonna as we've discussed its fairies maybe 50 cents in the dollar maybe a bit more but that's that's a good point so florida forever because it's their types of conservation easements lean more heavily in terms of protecting the natural system so they're going to pay closer to appraised value than something that's just buying development rights yes so it's really in a different basket than most of these other properties again uh so it's important to bear that in mind so i may note that so i have one more thing yeah just just something i've observed from fdax and the commissioner of agriculture is right now they are really rolling in conservation easements they're they're rolling out and moving on new properties so they're with under commissioner simpson they're really eager to to preserve these wildlife uh you know these green spaces so yeah i didn't mention so the 5 000 acre bull hammock uh was a agricultural easement with rural and family lands we were actually that was going to be on our list to target but they beat us to the punch so uh that's a good thing yeah i know so but yeah 5 000 acres beautiful property uh that fdax has now insured will never be developed yeah and again we're preserving these in perpetuity and easements are irrevocable so it's highly material uh great thank you uh any other comments before we proceed john nope okay go ahead mike all right uh project six so uh everything we've done before was palmar so now we're actually moving on to the uh irl south acquisition area uh so our property is turnpike dairy it's a 488 acre property that is primarily improved pasture so 84 percent of the property is improved pasture and once again this is for an agricultural easement with the rural and family lands program uh it is adjacent to allapata which is to the south and to the east this is fox brown road here this is 714 on the north side uh it is within the uh irl south acquisition zone it's important to note that uh it was actually outside the boundaries of what i had originally drawn to be irl south but that doesn't necessarily mean that it shouldn't be considered as a part of irl south it just means that in my mapping exercise i left it out so i think it would be fair to assume that this property could fall within that acquisition zone even though it's outside of it it is adjacent to the allapata flats and serp natural lands program which captured stormwater that is severely impacting the st lucie river estuary in addition you know uh the whole natural lands offsetting impacts to natural lands within the serp footprint by buying other areas so if it was incorporated we don't know we don't have an indication from the water management district at this point whether or not it would be incorporated into serp if it were required and if they'd be able to use it for the state's ledger in terms of the serp cost share agreement it's possible but i don't know one way or the other at this point whether or not it would be incorporated but you would try to get them to take to include it certainly yeah yeah uh this shows the ford wildlife quarter a small portion of it 20 percent is within the wildlife quarter segment between west palm beach and central florida so but you can see it's pretty surrounded by wildlife quarter areas once again this is an agricultural easement acquisition the property is being considered by the rural and family lands program for funding and they requested the county match with the 50 county match so they're so in essence this acquisition would not be going forward without uh having them as a matching partner so in theory if let's say the price is 50 cents in the dollar we'd really be talking 25 cents in the dollar for us correct okay in terms of the habitat quality once again this is not a picture of the property but 80 percent 88 of the property is improved pasture there are some degraded wetlands and a couple small hammock areas and there is altered hydrology and invasive plant presence throughout the property mike what's the reference to cutouts in the map that you gave us in the handouts right so in some in some instances and i'll go back to the original slide so a lot of these they they don't want to put everything under an easement so so there's a cutout here for where there is like a dairy operation so so so chunk of the property is being left out of consideration for the easement thank you uh okay management considerations as an agricultural easement there would be no management responsibilities for the county uh but the area will most likely not be restored and will remain as improved pasture with continued cattle ranching so just to rewind a bit on the ranking so management considerations one would give that a 10 in theory because we wouldn't be managing everything well i mean you certainly could factor that in but then also you know management considerations to me are like restoring and improving the habitat so in the same sense you're not you you know a management consideration is that it's never going to be improved back to its optimal condition so it would be low so in that sense so so yeah it's like it's like both and i don't know how you want to parse that in terms of well we don't have any management responsibilities so that's good but then on the other hand it's not really going to be restored so you know so i don't know how you would then rank that well i would think it'd be low yeah and i mean there was that that was the uh there was some confusion on the last lands we did on management consideration yeah because of the timeline was it ever going to be developed or not and and are we going to have to manage it or not so my understanding would be low okay i just want to be sure we're all on the same page on that you can look at it two different ways i mean it could be a 10 if you're managing it for agricultural land because the county i mean and you're comparing how much the county has to invest in managing it that'd be closer to a tent but if you're managing it strictly for water quality and trying to restore natural conditions habitat quality it'd be a zero because it's not being managed for that and it's not going it's going to follow the guidelines of the rural and family lands well not conservation ease confusion into this but you know your role is to safeguard the citizens investment through the sales tax so then the question would be you know do you weigh what you feel that the citizens intent was when when they went to the ballot box and voted on this in the first place no under understand but we want to be sure that we're all on the same page because i i would yeah i would have given a zero i would have given it a 10 so tom no david had a question oh i was the same way you know we got to look as you just said that we look at the the intent of the voters and and again i've heard many people standing outside before county commission meetings saying we need to preserve our our aquifer recharge we need to preserve our green spaces but we also need to preserve our agricultural lands so for me i was looking at it as the county doesn't need to put any money into this so i would give it a 10 because realistically we cannot return all our agricultural lands to their natural stakes then we would have no food to eat so i think we need to amongst ourselves be on the same page because otherwise we're going to send conflicting signals to the border screws up the score yeah as relates to the score yeah so let's go ahead please well like i said i think it would go back to the intent so your take is that the citizens want agricultural lands but somebody else might be like well then really the purpose of this is to like clean up water going into the saint lucie river or to preserve rare habitat so it's it's i didn't bring my manual with me but could you go back to that in the in can you get to the manual or is that going to really mess you up uh all right because i think there was some guidance slide 80 yeah sorry about that no it's like it's fine um i gotta remember where it here it is right here the sage amongst us mr campaign what would your counsel well i i i see it both ways and so i'm i'm gonna fall more heavily on what michael said only because he's going to take these rankings and make some sort of sense out of them when he does his presentation so i i'm i'm if mike thinks it shouldn't really be a 10 but it should be something else because of the way the county looks at the management of these lands then i think we have to you know give him the benefit of that so i always had it as a as a low ranking and i turned to a 10 after the someone said i think it was you dan but then i said no mike's right it's a five yeah yeah and it's interesting to me like you're meant to have different perspectives based on your role on this committee so there could be some that think that something like this should be closer to a 10 and then you could think that it's closer to a five because of the values that you're bringing into this are different and i feel like that that's okay from our perspective from our perspective yeah okay for for what it's worth i'm glad this was brought up because i was having trouble with this one and the one prior of how to rank it as well and at first i was at zero then i was at a 10 and looking at both of them before this anyone before you commented jim i had settled my mind on a five for both of them because i go back to what the citizens voted for which was the specific language in the ordinance and it's again there's no cost in the county for managing it but it's not managed it's not going to be managed to follow all the specific guidelines optimally for stormwater and water quality protection as it potentially could be but it gets at least a five because there's zero cost in management yeah and i think so i'm looking through criteria five management considerations i don't want to have but the i don't i don't think we really thought about when we came up with that that some of these we wouldn't be managing because it was a conservation easement this was strictly from how easy would it be to manage the property so that's where that came from so it mentions like larger properties surrounded by other public areas or lands under conservation easement would get the highest ranking according to what we put in here uh and then towards the lower end too small and are degraded to maintain or re-establish of normal ecosystem processes so it was more about um the habitat itself but that being said said there still is some something to be said for your perspective uh from an agricultural standpoint true that clear as mud yeah uh well it's it i think what is presented to the board of county commissioners that without confusing things terribly uh just point out that maybe they don't weight that one too heavily uh but that's well i i i i would disagree with that but that's not why i raised my hand this to me is different than almost everything else we've rated today only because it's it's not even anywhere near like barbie ranch was right what we're actually doing is buying development rights yeah pure and simple we're not even land and agriculture again we're buying the development rights yeah and it's it's not like it's unique property to me this is not a very unique piece of property uh from what i read in the report okay so we're gonna buy the development rights and somebody will keep it in cattle but it doesn't meet a lot of the other reasons why we buy property like habitat there's zero zero management for this again yes we're not doing anything to it but we're not really preserving habitat anywhere we're not really preserving the wildlife right we're not doing much we're just taking it out of and you're and you're doing you're doing no fire management none none yeah but maybe on the referendum and ordinance uh the way we structured it the way we did was to have both the capability to buy the land outright and the capability to conservation easements and we were acutely we spent an enormous amount of time getting the conservation easements as david and rick will tell you uh whereby we could do that so we we understand we understood going in and we presented to the public that this land may not be pristine land that there will most likely not be public access but we want to preserve it uh and we want to preserve those farms for the families bearing in mind that we're not paying 100 cents on the dollar again you're right jim but from the way i looked at it from the very beginning was if we're going to have a a conservation easement or even an agricultural easement it would have to be on a piece of property that offered more than just let's just buy a ranch let's just buy a farm in the county you know but that's not the way it was presented to the voters well i i disagree with you well we we did the deal we spent three years pulling this deal together well i disagree i don't care frankly i don't care so the the way we did this just to explain to the public was the referendum and ordinance we worked very closely with the farming community and other elements of the community and it was very important and why we spent an enormous amount of time getting unlimited capabilities for the conservation easements for this type of situation so when the voting public decided to approve this referendum by 64 percent they did so on the basis that we would be preserving these farms and that we would be doing so in perpetuity and irrevocably merit do you want to or john keller since you were part of that yeah a big step that it prevents development exactly so i mean i clearly heard that just plus slow growth slow development from the voters and they clearly spoke on that um you know i mean that's why we're ranking these and we have different columns and we do need and hopefully i'm sure that the county commission is going to examine conservation easements separate than fee simple acquisitions and if they go further they're going to examine rural lifestyle easements versus florida forever easements um but there there is certainly value if you look at you know 488 acres is one of the stats for the the size of this property and i did have a question about that because there there were two different numbers for the size of this property but right now if i look at just one house per 20 acres the development potential is a 10. after this deal the development potential is zero so and you know we just had the discussion on management potential all of these can be discussed you develop it to its full potential and you've certainly impacted you know aquifer recharge stormwater you've reduced even though it's impacted pasture land you've reduced the wildlife corridor to an extent so i mean it was it meets the criteria of the ordinance that the voters voted on that this is a way to you know spending the money they approved for removing development potential not everyone is going to be like that and that's why we have to you know rank these accordingly but we do need the board to examine our rankings knowing that they're they're adjusted each one of us has adjusted them for right uh conservation easement or a fee simple acquisition and i'm confident that they're going to examine it that way i just want to say that we have 10 ranking criteria and taxpayers did not do not want to take land out of being taxed to keep just to keep it in agriculture unless the land also has some environmentally sensitive land attached to it uh this was very hard for me because i don't think it's i think we're just subsidizing the private sector and i don't think this is something that the taxpayers want to do well that's not what they voted on tom thank you very much are you saying are you cutting me off jim yeah no i don't think you are okay take it easy um i don't think you are okay so when i finish i'll let you know got it thank you and if we're going to take people's money to buy these properties it has to have more than just one reason especially if we're buying a business or helping maintain a business and that's fine you're right jim in a certain respect from the beginning we said we were going to have agricultural easements but i don't think we said we're going to prevent development from occurring on a piece of property because if that's the case let's buy harmony not harmony uh story yeah we'll prevent 3 000 homes from being built 4 200 so i don't think that's what the taxpayers had in mind or the or the voters had in mind so i think we have to be very careful how we go about the preservation of agricultural land now you can take back the time well i once again you know you have different perspectives and there are different things that you value so i don't feel like there's any problem with you scoring this differently based on how you feel about agricultural easements versus you know conservation easements i do have a question mike or sebastian say this happens and there's conservation easement right now am i correct it's it's zoned agriculture so it's appraised as agricultural land and taxed as agricultural land i think we're skipping ahead that won't change will it i i i mean you could look at uh for the tax purposes it's certainly far outside of where indian town is expanding right now but there's a potential you know indian town could work its way up that way and and you know but i don't know as it is right now as it is now it's zoned for agricultural land use and zoning is agricultural which would allow for one lot per 20 acres so how much are their taxes hypothetically with their tax taxes change though if there was a conservation easement they're still paying and they have an agricultural exemption to begin with so but i i can't answer that question so in terms of how much tax savings or would be i believe it'd be the same it would remain the same obviously if this was turned into 23 residents that would be a different story the tax base would go up yeah but um if if it has an easement on it it would remain uh agricultural is what i'm saying yeah it would still remain as an ag paying taxes as heck yeah i think that you don't pay taxes on land that's under conservation easement i'd have to look into that yeah so i think the state passed it might have been a a constitutional amendment that land under conservation easement would not be taxed that's we'll have to get back to you we'll get back to you on that know that because that would be helpful information if it we're taking entirely off the tax rule or we're just keeping it taxed as ag land as it is now but we're just removing the potential of you know one house per 20 acres i should we move things along yes no but that's a highly material question um no rare habitat on the property it could potentially be habitat for wood storks and sand elk cranes and some of these marsh areas an ag since there's an ag easement there would be not be a public access component to this project we already talked about the development potential and now for public comment and committee discussion public comment okay dan i'm good i just wanted to bring up the fact that the location of the property itself is really worthy of consideration by this board and by the board of county commissioners it's it's in a prime location it's on the corner of fox brown road and the martin grade um i just think it's it's valued property for the location and and for the ag um for the ag component that it brings to the table that's that's really important for me i come from from an ag background so um preserving preserving that that part of our county i think is really really important so vicki the development potential would be high as well yeah i have it at a hundred percent john pretty much agree i mean it's a development question yeah that we're preventing yeah that's that's that's a plus yeah when if you look i have the map pulled up so this is bull hammock right here so that should all be green yeah this is all alpata so this is all green so it does connect and buffer what's now protected lands yes yeah the neighborhood is part of the evaluation yeah no i'd just say that this is why we have the separate columns and why we have a diverse you know oversight board is to bring all this together and to rank them in separate columns something like this is going to be higher on others with recreational opportunities it's going to be a zero uh that's the point and then we're going to tote them all up and you'll try and we're doing our best to oversight but also assist the bocc in prioritizing different deals to go forward with all everything that's coming before us meets the criteria of the ordinance and that's important to remember good point tom oh about said anything i have to say um until i write it that that is the power of the press and uh if you don't get friends and neighbors mr kim penny would like you to get it um so i think my comments on this are not in the serp footprint but serp adjacent um and wildlife corridor adjacent uh which i would rank it fairly highly and development potential i think also is very high um because of its location and development is moving west in this county um and then the other the other item mike you said no rare or in um rare listed species no listed oh or habitats okay because i know that i have seen sherman's fox squirrel on this property um but yeah the the way since this was all just a gis exercise by fna it really was not able to pick up oh yeah the rare enlisted species i was hoping to you know from from this evaluation it's it's hard to evaluate based on the species on the report right there's not a lot of habitat though so yeah yeah but caracara yeah caracara as well yeah yeah yeah yeah i i think i i concur with everybody um yeah i i know this property i know the people who who ranch it i know that they're great stewards of the land they do consider the environment when they're making impacts to their land along with their agricultural decisions uh so i think this would be a good project um i obviously it's not habitat for these species but it is a place where they they live i i've driven that road so many times and i always drive slow because you don't know when a herd of deer i mean a literal herd of deer is going to cross the road in front of you in that area the wild turkeys the sandhill cranes they are abundant in that area um and the land like he said those were not pictures of that ranch if you drove it you would know you you know when you're driving past that property it it is a very pristine property um i know it's called turnpike dairy but it is not a dairy at one point it was but it is no longer it is a beef operation so very helpful thank you great sorry i'm seeing of sarah um was there a handout back there nope oh yeah um so it is getting close to 12 but we do have the the next proposal the family the owners are here so i would like to at least discuss that project before we take our lunch okay with it yeah absolutely so our seventh project is whitworth farms uh this is a aerial of the property it's a roughly 2200 acre property it's a mixture of pasture pine flatwoods and hydric hammock uh an important thing to note is that if it were acquired it would be a part of a protected land quarter that would extend all the way from cove road because you have how patioke down to the county line there's like one 40 acre parcel that wouldn't be protected but uh but all that area would be protected from development all the way from cove road down to the county line which is something that's uh important to mention in addition the property is bisected by the south fork of the saint lucie river you can see the the hammock looking area uh the river runs right through that area coming out of how patioke and it would help to create an ecological quarter and it is a part of the optimum boundary for atlantic ridge and jonathan dickinson state park this shows it is within the loxalusi acquisition zone you can see its location adjacent to how patioke to the north and atlantic ridge to the north east and further to the east whitworth farms is within what's considered to be the palmar complex which is within the irl south serp project so uh does everyone understand that the palmar complex is within irl south but we're putting it in the loxalusi zone so um and the purpose of that is to capture stormwater runoff that is severely impacting the saint lucie estuary it was approved as a part of the 2007 word of bill as an acquisition priority and funds could be credited to the state ledger and the serp cost share agreement and uh it could also help meet the the intent of the natural lands component of the serp project it is within the atlantic ridge for the forever project boundary so you can see it highlighted there that area in purple is that property it is within the forda wildlife quarter as a part of that greenway network uh priority to for the forda ecological greenway network we're most likely looking at a fee simple acquisition with possible funding partners from the south florida water management district or the forda forever program so a pretty sizable chunk roughly half of the property is is improved pastured and there is altered hydrology in some of the areas but overall the property seems to be in the the non-pasture areas seem to be in pretty good condition with um with a pine flatwoods that have fire rotation they've done some invasive plant removal on the property as well so there's some pretty good habitat out there relatively large size of the property with protected conservation lands nearby would make management easier um and previous owner or the current owner really has uh removed exotic vegetation and used prescribed fire which is important it would be difficult there are some challenges in burning a property like this and that it's directly adjacent to i-95 in the turnpike so that's something that would be uh makes burning more difficult and uh it would be hard to restore the pasture portions of the property due to the level of disturbance there are several rare habitats on the property including hydric hammock black water stream is what i'm using for uh the south fork of the saint lucie river which you can see uh on there it has the hydric hammock attached to it dome swamp strand swamp and bagel swamp is roughly 12 of the property listed species could include gopher tortoises sand hill cranes wood storks etc in terms of recreational opportunity we could use it to create a potential trail connection between how patioki park and bridge road and we could uh route hiking biking and equestrian uses on the property as well it could if with for uh further acquisitions it could also create a link trail link between there and jonathan dickinson state park in terms of the development potential the property is zoned for agriculture and is outside of the urban services boundaries but according to our current land use and zoning there could be 123 residences and the extent of uplands and pasture lands and its location would make it a prime target for development and that's it public comment dan i'm good i'm good this is prime piece of property for the county for the board to consider for all of the reasons that michael brought forward um i was able to tour the property and um it's it's a pristine piece of property with the river south fork of the st lucie running right through the middle um i think it's high target for development it brings everything to the table sure does well uh it's so close to the atlantic ridge state park i would think the state could be easily persuaded to participate in the acquisition of this piece of land yeah which uh adds to the attraction for me i mean it's a it is a beautiful i know that we all drive right by it i know the piece of uh it is a beautiful piece of land but i would put this pretty high on our list somehow i would personally like to thank the family for doing this uh preserving this their role in preserving this land uh but as opposed to the last one this is what this was all about this is a unique piece of property john is right this is something we should spend money acquiring yeah i'm in i'm in agreement i think i think this one hits all of the targets for the for the agree um referendum just imagine driving north from bridge road on 95 and you're looking to the right and that's what you're seeing you know is it's also very visible to the public yep david i agree this is this would be as far as the agricultural lands this is probably one of the most important um you know whether it be through an easement or fee simple i think this is definitely a definition of what people want i agree and very much what we intended when we went in starting this initiative thank you uh any other comments before we break for lunch uh let's take a what do you figure half an hour to 45 minutes how do people feel why don't we say one o'clock why don't we say one minute one hour okay so back at one o'clock please great very good thank you we we could leave all this out we could leave this everything here yeah i think so uh yeah working test yeah that works it'd be helpful if i talked into the mic um i don't think it was on so the question is as relates to this ranking topic that mike now has up on the screen this m1 uh there is uh let's say we've been working apples and oranges as relates to a few elements of that so does the committee would you like to talk about that now or when we do the final ranking do it now okay so then mike let's go through that what we just went through a minute ago with council um and this relates to the management considerations ranking uh i think we'll find that probably each of us may have been doing it a different way or at least i know i have so let's take it from the top mike so we had to we developed this manual right uh to be your guide yeah we we did this manual to be your guide and uh to help you in how you evaluate the properties and i can't say you know that it was a perfect effort but it was just some way to try and uh create uh a system for you to use so the item number five management considerations was strictly based more on the habitats and the ease of restoring and management it doesn't make any mention of who is going to be involved whether if it's a conservation easement and it's up to somebody else to restore it it's more just based on how easy it would be to manage and restore the property and based on that so let's say you have and let's let's say we're looking at bull hammock today because we're we're not right that's a five thousand acre property uh it's surrounded by other conservation areas uh that would actually get the highest scores based on our criteria and the lowest score would be a property that is too small and or degraded maintenance or re-establishment of natural normal ecosystem processes highly vulnerable to external impacts so based like if i may interject this for a sec so if it's close to a property that's currently being maintained it would be easier to manage is that correct correct and it also it has to do like edge effects so if you um if you have a private ranch next to this conservation piece then and and they're not managing it then you could have more invasive species or prescribed fire would be more difficult because you have might have smoke sensitive areas so managing properties adjacent larger properties adjacent to other conservation areas is easier to do from a management perspective than smaller and or isolated parcels so would that be rated as a one or a 100 it would be rated all ratings are from one to a hundred i forgot to mention that on your ranking form you're scoring everything from one to a hundred not one to ten one to a hundred well let's go back to the property that's next to a property that's currently being maintained and therefore would be easy to manage would that be a one or would that be a 100 it would be closer to a hundred okay okay i have any questions on that i go ahead go i'm sorry you don't mean to go if if you're if it's a small lot next to uh privately owned lots that would be a one correct okay and where do you break down between medium size and large properties i mean that's up to your discretion but i would think you know we're looking at properties that could be thousands of acres we're looking at properties that are hundreds of acres and we're looking at one property that's one acre so you know but just to clarify for dan that and for all of us the rating scale is in all of these categories with the exception of number seven we rate rank it from one to 100 i thought it was one to ten yeah no i yeah we could add a zero after that yeah i was gonna say that helpful i mean that we're i'm persuaded if a property is going to be managed by the uh south florida water management district or the wildlife commissioner or whatever that's a that is a plus in terms of management consideration for the county so the county doesn't have to spend money to do that that's a lower score that that's a higher score so that would be a higher score if the state or somebody's going to manage it and that's not on your list this way but that's the way i've voted that i agree i mean for us as a board how can we not consider martin county taxpayer dollars i mean i understand how you wrote the criteria but we i have a hard time not factoring in the use of martin county resident taxpayer dollars for management well and there's certainly you know um there it it would be hard to get these things perfect yeah it's just meant to be a guide to help you in evaluating these properties so so yeah they're going to be things that are missed in terms of things that could be considered and we can certainly at some point go back and update the manual too uh reflective of things like this yeah if another if if other funding sources are used to manage the property i would say that's certainly a plus whether it's privately owned you know in an easement or the district or some other source that's i don't think the committee or or even the county knows when they negotiate well until after they negotiate the deals whether or not like if if the district is a partner whether or not the county is going to manage it or the district is going to manage it you know and i know i know from what i've seen with my service at the district there are a lot of times where we just say okay county you you manage this property or or we turn it over to fish and wildlife service or the park service or depending upon where it is i do want to note that in every one of the f9 reports there's an edge effect yes um ratio that's provided which may help guide us maybe not i don't know i had a little trouble figuring it out i did too so here's a question we're not going to be ranking an estimated cost per acre should we not also be uh doing management considerations i mean is it material that we i think i think that's pretty much a pretty material jim okay i think we shouldn't rank it okay i think we're wrong we're wrong and okay mr chair stay the course i think it's consistency that matters yes yes okay so just to summarize if i've got this right mike if it's adjacent or near a larger property that's being currently managed then it would be a higher ranking if it's not adjacent to a current property or uh it may be problematic in terms of maintenance it'd be a lower ranking yeah and or if it's a small if it might be a little bit smaller but it's adjacent to a bunch of conservation areas then that would be a little higher too it might not be as as high as a large property with contiguous to other natural areas but it would it would certainly bump it up if it's adjacent to other conservation lands even if it's not you know even if it's like a 10 20 acre parcel thank you mike for explaining that i i have a another question regarding um the factor number one the relation to serp um if they're not within serp but they're in an irl or um one of the other categories we still rank them i think i answered my own question when i read it out loud relation to serp yeah i i've been doing if it's in serp in the footprint i've been giving it somewhere between an 85 and 100 depending on how close to the edge it is that sort of thing or 75 to 100 because i've been using zero to 25 25 to oh that's a good idea etc um but if it's if if it's adjacent like serp adjacent um it gets a higher score than if it's not even anywhere near assert project thank you for that that helps dan any questions on that or are you i'm good i think i'm good yeah because i was confused so i think it's helpful to hear it we need to go back and re-rank the ones we did a couple months ago yeah all right let's see okay michael you're on i got to get back into my presentations i'll take this time if i can uh to answer the prior question that was posed regarding the property taxes and so i just researched it during our break and uh yes there is a tax break is the short answer how much of a tax break uh it depends on the uh conservation easement if it's it's not in perpetuity i.e not forever then it's a 50 reduction in taxable value if it is in perpetuity it is an exemption from property taxes from from the egg yeah it's it's not they're not paying taxes on that yeah if it's in all we're and everything we're discussing is in perpetuity yes so it is effectively being removed from the tax so anything that moves forward whether it's a conservation easement or a fee simple acquisition by this board is is removing it from the tax rule yes it appears so and that was a state state statute statute that that was fairly what was the date with that i don't know what date it was enacted but it's 193 501 and 196 26 okay i'm pretty sure that was a it was a constitutional amendment too like on the state you know one of their state referendums that made that you know that the people voted for that okay now these were always likely highly likely these were properties that had were ag to begin with and then had an exemption put on them which reduced them so they're already pretty depreciated in terms of the tax yes so anyway i just wanted to bring that to your attention thank you all right so our next property that we're putting forward for your consideration actually series of properties is known as point santa gardens uh mini palmar basically uh so it's 225 acres and it's a mix of government but primarily privately owned lots uh includes uh pine flatwoods depression marshes and a large slough system it also would help to buffer atlantic ridge this is called the metalist parcel of atlantic ridge uh is right along its western side uh it falls within the loxalusi acquisition area you can kind of maybe kind of make out the little bit of green on there so it's in this top corner of the area right here it is within the florida wildlife quarter same designations and this is where it is within the quarter so it would be right on the edge the northeastern edge of the florida wildlife quarter for this area these would be fee simple acquisitions but given its nature finding funding partners would be uh limited what do you what do you mean why why so because it's uh because of one the uh piecemeal nature of the parcels so it's a smaller lots and it doesn't have an obvious uh thing that we could apply for funding for the quality of the habitat tends to be mixed there are some areas that and these actually were pictures taken from those properties so uh so some of the areas look pretty good you know have some nice big open marsh habitat or pine flatwoods but then there are other areas like the area on the left that has dense exotic infestations and off-road vehicles are a major major issue in this area with several portions being pretty degraded by the use of off-road vehicles in terms of management considerations you have to look at the parcel size or sizes are pretty small it is has some adjacency to government-owned property on the west side with atlantic ridge and i think we own the county owns maybe 35 acres of land within that area uh you also have exotic vegetation is prevalent in sections and it would be difficult to complete management responsibilities due to the small lot sizes in terms of rare enlisted species this is kind of a little bit dubious there's a little bit of scrubby flatwoods habitat on the east side so it lists some species we didn't find in other areas including perforated reindeer lichen large flower rosemary nodding pinwood and florida scrub lizards so those are your dry pine forest scrub habitats tend to have all those species and the others being sandhill cranes and wood storks and you can see uh the scrubby flatwoods is this uh this area right here so it's you know i i don't have the acreage in front of me but uh oh it's probably matches up with this 26 acres that you see for the reindeer lichen and the scrub blizzard so uh so about 10 percent of it's going to be that rare habitat in terms of recreational opportunity it would be difficult unless the county is able to acquire most if not all the lots but if we did there would be some pretty decent recreational opportunities that you can route in from the surrounding areas the development potential theoretically each lot could be developed and that's at about five houses per acre and i kind of did a rough count and based on the number of lots there could be roughly 800 residences on these properties there are challenges due to a lack of roads and need to mitigate for wetland impacts and i'll i'll scroll back up and show so so those are all the lots so each of those could be a house and these other areas could be roads so it has actually been subdivided uh it just hasn't been developed and you can kind of see the development pattern like this is what you would expect from this area is the is what the development pattern is to its east mike i have a question yeah these were platted correct back in the 30s or even before maybe after so 50s and 60s and 60s yeah and how come they haven't been developed probably because of how wet they are and uh they could be developed but they still have all the limitations because of the habitat correct and what are they what is the zoning uh up to five houses per acre i believe so i don't remember what that actual designation is um what's that it's on the screen it says five yeah but i don't remember what the actual like zoning you know r5 or whatever what's that would that be r3 or r4 one of those yeah and i looked at it and i just don't remember what it was if you really want to know i could pull up a map that shows it's fine so uh so any rate uh any public comment or committee discussion charles who's this the one you wanted to talk about okay public dan or vicky i'm i'm good i remember when they developed this it was it was the developer was mr i think his name was mr land at the time and uh and they and i think we had a recession and that's what what stopped it because did this come before the commission something about this like a decade ago i don't i don't remember you don't remember okay i can remember 50 60 years ago but i can't remember last year well what can i say i know there have been there have been some interests that have been trying to acquire lots on a larger scale and then potentially turn it into a development of some kind help me on the location is this is this sort of part of locks and lucy and is it also uh part of connecting atlantic ridge to jonathan dickens well uh so here is our locks of lucy map and so the parcels are right up here and then this is the area of trying to connect jonathan dickinson to atlantic ridge so it wouldn't directly make the connection down between the two because if it's really these properties are the ones here that would need to be acquired for that to happen but is it is within the same system and contributes ecologically to the whole locks of lucy natural area that's a i think that's important i didn't quite hear that i'll try and focus on that how well it can contribute to creating a connection between the the two parks yeah because that's highly material mike i think yeah so here is atlantic ridge state park is this area right in green and then this is called the medalist parcel right here so actually i was wrong it connects directly to what is the main portion of atlantic ridge state park here here's kyle patioki here and then here's jonathan dickinson right here so so the whole you know one of the big goals of locks of lucy is to secure this area right in here to have basically one giant super park but another potential could be if you know this is the whitworth parcel right here this is the canopus property right here so another potential connection could be a western leg going through this area on this property is there a chance that state will participate or take over take it up include it attach it to atlantic ridge i i think it would be difficult to finding up to find a public a partner because of the small lot sizes so this were like one big polygon and it was all just one property owner it would definitely be on radar to acquire and protect how many property owners are there uh i think it was close to 800 now some of those might be the same person but there's 800 lots yeah mike do you currently do you have access to the current serp atlantic ridge component map uh i have the one i pulled up for whitworth right there okay so it's uh the piece below it is on the edge but i don't think this piece is within that footprint right okay now there is a possibility i i don't think the district would want to participate in something like this but i think they've got enough to do with uh palmar yeah but well i was yeah and like larger pieces though if it were one that could be used as a natural lands once a land to once again offset impacts elsewhere and could be used in the cost share they you know we could have a conversation with them about incorporating it our next up is our lender property this is our third and final one that we're uh we've been asked to review by the uh rural and family lands program so this one is a 229 acre property that is a mixture of pasture and large cypress sloughs it is an agricultural easement with active cattle ranching on the property not contiguous to any public lands i will say that this owner has offered this property for fee simple acquisition but what they were asking was i i think it was 30 million dollars for a 250 acre property so you know we wouldn't have any interest at that price in in uh acquiring a fee simple uh this shows it in the uh loxalusi acquisition zone it's not in what i had included in loxalusi but it certainly meets the intent of the loxalusi acquisition zone even if it didn't get a polygon it is adjacent to but not within the atlantic ridge florida forever boundary now once again with florida forever you can amend the boundary so we can go to the state and request an amendment to florida forever to get it included uh if we wanted to but the fact that rural and family lands is interested means that we wouldn't probably need it to be in florida forever here's the florida wildlife quarter according to fna roughly 74 percent of the property is within the florida wildlife quarter and once again this is an agricultural easement acquisition it's being evaluated by rural and family lands program for funding and they requested a county contribution so basically once again if the state were to come to an agreement with the landowner to acquire it we would be spending half the funding we wouldn't be doing this on our own we wouldn't be requesting this agricultural easement other than the fact that we have a state partner that's interested in the acquisition so effectively we'd be spending in theory 25 cents on the dollar correct in terms of the habitat quality roughly 41 percent of the property is improved pasture and wetland habitat makes up the the remaining most of the remaining acreage the natural portions of the site appear to be in good conditions with condition with little in the way of hydrologic impacts so once again there would be no management responsibilities for martin county and the easement we could look to include requirements for maintaining exotic vegetation and to protect natural communities on the property but that's once again if you incorporate those things then you're looking at what be a little more than a quarter on the dollar you know for ecological services in terms of listed species you have sandhill cranes and woodstorks personally i could see you know with all these kind of ranch lands you know you having some caracara in the area and there were other species but they're more associated with scrubby flatwoods and i don't see those on the property so i didn't include them and roughly 20 of the property is is what we consider to be rare habitat which is a strand and dome swamp there would not be a public access component to this project in terms of the development potential it has an agricultural land use and zoning designation based on that current zoning there could potentially be 12 residences and there is significant wetlands on the property as you've seen which would be a hindrance to development but there are some substantial areas areas of unimpacted and upland habitat that would be available for development but it'd be kind of hard to even get a road in there to get them out well they've i mean you they would be allowed to build a road like you can't you can't prevent uh use of the property so but they would have to minimize where they put it and avoid wetlands to the maximum extent possible yep any public uh... charles okay dan i'm good i'm good john killer uh this is on the south side of bridge road correct so going back to the original aerial um so bridge road is right up here uh the county owns property right over here which which is kind of off the aerial um but there's a good map to show it i'm sure you'll tell me i'm nuts but you're nuts thirty or forty years from now i worry that bridge road will be six lanes wide and have arby's on the right and mcdonald's on the left and anything we can do to put chunks of bridge road into environmental easement it's just a wonderful long-term uh thing for the whole community yeah and on the previous rural and family lands proposals you know those areas were all mostly most of the property was impacted if not all the property was either improved pasture or heavily degraded habitat this property actually has good habitat on it and and an owner that wants to protect it i think the reason why they're asking price for a fee simple was so high is because they want to hold on to the property but they like the idea of seeing it protected so this is an expensive piece to buy it would be but i don't know what uh agricultural easement will look like i i doubt that that the state would use 30 million dollars as its basis for determining the appraised value to them pay half or a little bit more usually they come in a little more than 50 percent um so so i doubt that that they would use 30 million as the baseline to determine what the ag easement would cost but anything in the bridge road area right now is going to be pretty pricey and also worth putting it a long-term easement frankly to me how close is it to i'm sorry character of the community how close is it to jd park boundary uh it's it's a ways um so it's right up here okay and jd is right there if we were ever and we you know we were interested in trying to bring canopus for which is this property here but we hadn't gotten far enough you know or we we haven't even identified who to talk to with canopus if canopus ever came into play if that were ever required or an easement were acquired then suddenly that makes this property much more relevant because then you have a way into jonathan dickinson state park because it's right here and and it's not within i mean all of the county east west and central flowways are to the east of there right correct say mike something we should put on a future agenda some of us have pretty good connections with some of these landowners uh either directly or indirectly i think of some of the people that supported martin county forever are extraordinarily wealthy people and well connected so at some point once we've gone through a few properties we should just see if any of us do have some of the connections where we can facilitate your dialogue well kudos to vicki davis who was like pretty passionate about the whitworth property to begin with and started that process of tracking down that landowner so but let's for example what do we when we have a quiet period not like today but let's let's just brainstorm that let's just put that on the agenda if we could please and we can talk to individual committee members directly if a committee member were interested in trying to pursue creating a connection to these landowners yeah like i did last week yes uh but let's just if we could just put that on the agenda it'd be great sure uh okay moving forward yes david i mean i i know where this property is i don't know the owner um i don't know the property um but you know anytime we can partner and have you know really save the taxpayers money and also preserve land i think is a win uh and i've definitely heard the concerns from the community about bridge road as as we heard so i think that's definitely something we should look at thank you great mike our next up is uh julian rogers atlantic ridge property so this is an aerial of his property this is point santa gardens area right here uh it's a smaller property it's three acres uh dominated by wetlands but it could act as a buffer to atlantic ridge state park it's primarily disturbed wetlands with the very small area of scrubby flatwoods on the eastern end it falls within the loxalusi acquisition zone so this is actually adjacent to what's called the medalist parcel over here uh it's going to be right up in this top corner right up here it's pretty much in the florida wildlife corridor just within the corner of it right up in this area it would be a fee simple acquisitions options for funding partners would be limited however there is a possibility that the owner would accept less than appraised value for for it i can't say that set that in stone but we've had a lot of conversations with this landowner in terms of the habitat quality uh there's they at one point were a deeper wetland open water system and due to hydrologic changes in the region it's now shifting and becoming more of a shrubby swamp and there was a small area cleared along the eastern edge management considerations it is adjacent to a large tract of publicly held conservation oops i disregard what i said about hungry land wildlife and uh and so basically uh it it has a small size but it could be easily managed because of the small size since it's only you know a few acres in size it wouldn't be a huge investment to try and uh improve the ecology of it uh so here are your listed species scrub lizards grand hill sandhill cranes potentially scrub jays and that little bit of uh scrubby flatwoods and wood storks however given the small size of the property the value to rare enlisted species is going to be limited one of the biggest benefits is that the property could provide access to the atlantic ridge metalist property which is landlocked currently there is some i don't think that the local residents are too keen on the idea of providing access through there but you know if we could you could route people into atlantic ridge from that area because this area is currently landlocked there's really no way for the public to get out there and explore and enjoy it currently it has a county redevelopment area designation but the wetlands on site would make development difficult and that's it any public comment okay and is that vicki i'm good i'm killer you had a you had a picture of this with a golf course just north of it is that the medalist uh it is yes but just south of the medalist okay i got i understand where it is i don't know where the picture is not there i should have zoomed out a little bit more but there you go that was it right back there but uh one more there you go yeah so here's the golf course up here this is the uh the farther golf course that's being expanded right here and their existing golf course county can't work some deal with them to get access to the north side of this no nothing no nothing david yes the problem is parking too yeah but that could be developed right it's right next to development oh yeah but it is wet so you're gonna have you know most of the stuff we're bringing a port or wetland so you're gonna have to deal with that but you could certainly uh at least get a house in there okay let's go to the next one please all right the second one is the uh conservation fund julian rogers parcel it's a 4.5 acre property that could help link jonathan dickinson and atlantic ridge state park the property was acquired by the conservation fund a private land trust i will say it's not shown on here but this is actually a county owned property right here uh this is the go-kart track and this is an old uh landfill site uh that the county still controls and manages uh this also could be a potential location for uh western flowway to kitchen creek mike excuse me question can you go back to the is it a 4.5 acre piece of property or 15 acre piece of property i had two conflicting numbers as i went through i think it's 15 because i went to the property appraiser site too to confirm gotcha now is this bridge road it's bridge road yeah i think in this case uh i was i copied him and pasted the acre i think it's 15. i apologize it's 15. it is 15. yes so this shows its location within the locks of lucy acquisition zone you can see it's right down in this area right here and you can also see this little orange line that is a county owned right of way that has been included as a concept for a western flowway to kitchen creek it is within the florida atlantic ridge florida forever project boundary which is right here uh important point to make is that since the property is now owned by the conservation fund any money they get from the sale could be used for acquiring other conservation lands so you know they in martin county that would be up to the conservation fund but they're certainly actively acquiring properties in martin county at this point in time any money we didn't spend on it would be money we could use to get that's that's a fair point yeah uh entire property has been act impacted with weedy species and there's limited habitat value although restoration of the property would be labor intensive we could use it to create a wetland system or a stormwater treatment area type feature to store water to support the goals of regional watershed restoration aka restoration of kitchen creek and the northwest fork of the loxachi river and i will say that the conservation fund has actively been out there removing exotic vegetation from the property once again it's all impacted habitat so you're not going to have any rare habitats and currently other than florida sand elk cranes there's little in the way of listed species so the idea is that you could help create a greenway trail system connecting atlantic ridge to jonathan dickinson state park this would have to be a part of a larger program to acquire other lands before that could happen in addition we could build a wetland lake feature and you could provide public access facilities so this is for instance a central flowway of kitchen creek a county preserve area you know we have a parking area and the public can walk around go fishing around the lake it's actually fairly popular in that area it has an agricultural land use zoning designation so theoretically actually since it's 15 acres i yeah i think you still could just put like one house out there and public comment heisenberg i'd never got a uh willing seller yeah yeah heisenberg expressed an interest but never actually provided a willing seller um did you just send them good afternoon everyone my name is charles donaldson the field representative for the conservation fund in florida i'd just like to start off by saying thank you all for your time and consideration on all of these properties and thank you mike for all your work putting together these presentations the conservation fund or tcf has been operating in florida since 1985 it's completed over 250 projects and is protected with 190 000 acres of land and water we are a founding member and acquisition partner of the locks lucy headwaters initiative the initiative is a protected ecological corridor connecting sources of the locks ahatchee and saint lucie rivers informing a preserve for native plants and wildlife linking land mass of nearly 70 000 acres the initiative will provide a vital wildlife corridor stem urban sprawl restore degraded wetlands manage the demand for fresh water enhance aquifer recharge and improve water flows to locks ahatchee and saint lucie rivers acquisition restoration and protection of land in this area has never been so important it is the last section of unprotected land that's also undeveloped from fort pierce to homestead restoring i'll speak specifically about rogers now restoring natural hydrology hydrology will increase historic freshwater flows into kitchen creek and the locks ahatchee river the rogers piece is is that parts on the left red represents our acquisitions the lighter blue arrows are culverts that exist running underneath bridge road they vary in size from 8 to 20 feet in width um the inches could be inches excuse me those are culverts that run underneath bridge road the darker blue arrows are either canals immediately west of the rogers piece is a drainage ditch or canal um also below the current kitchen creek flowway that canal runs down kitchen creek road into jonathan dickinson the two curved arrows to the left and right of that are the historic flowways into kitchen creek or the eastern portion of kitchen creek rather um the rogers property and mike alluded to this earlier represents a tremendous opportunity for wetland and flowway restoration as well as being a part of the broader florida wildlife corridor connection project the existing bridge road culverts abutting the property to the east and west are evidence of the existing directional water flow and infrastructure we believe that the county is best positioned to manage to manage and restore rogers long term into a critical piece of hydrological infrastructure in the watershed comprehensive everglades restoration plan or serp calls for this kind of implementation and the initiative and properties like rogers provide an opportunity to restore existing flows under bridge road into loxahatchee and vice versa north of bridge road into the st lucie they also serves a microcosm of broader state and federal efforts to restore flows to the everglades this area represents the northeastern extent of the greater everglades watershed our goal with the initiative is to acquire protect and preserve the key tracks of land with highest conservation value in a timely and efficient manner these properties would then be moved into the hands of people who can manage them long term and enact larger scale restoration projects and merit to your question earlier some of these properties were acquired through fundraise dollars and as part of that any dollars that were spent on them would remain in the locks lucy focus area excellent thank you thank you so it does have serp uh benefit yes because it does it says no in the write-up it's the serp project boundary if i'm remembering the gis layer correctly is only in atlantic ridge preserve state park however it does benefit in river lagoon this is speaking more broadly about it it's not within the serp project boundary but it would enhance flows into serp projects and benefit the indian river lagoon i would think so makes sense i would qualify it as serp adjacent or moderately serp adjacent i mean i think it it is very important to try to restore that flow and you have to remember the connectivity between both the loxahatchee and the st lucie river projects i mean there there's there's a fine line um so i think the the flow is important toward the serp project but it's not directly part of the serp project and in conversations we've had with serp and the water management district if it's not within the project boundary but is adjacent or connecting parcel it can be considered i think i think one one point i'll make is that like one of if one of the characteristics is the serp cost share we couldn't expect that that the water management district is going to receive uh cost share credit uh so that is a part but not all of the reason why you know serp is prioritized uh on our list we often use it as an indicator of the ecological value of the property such as florida forever um wildlife corridor connectivity etc legal fine line mike any other questions for charles no thank you thank you all thank you charles and thank you conservation fund at that point that the money would still be retained in martin county is highly material so thank you which brings us to our next property uh which is the petway property so the petway property is a 20 acre property that is within what is considered to be the eastern flowway of kitchen creek it could be used to help restore wetlands in jonathan dickinson state park and support the restoration of the northwest fork of the loxatchee river it falls within the loxalusi acquisition zone as you can see in this area right here it is within the atlantic ridge florida forever project and the optimum boundary for the state park so here's your state park here here here's your property is going to be right over in this area right here it is a part of the florida wildlife corridor segment and is once again within the florida ecological greenway network this is a fee simple acquisition and we mentioned those funds from the rogers parcel we could potentially partner with the conservancy fund and maybe florida forever program to help to acquire this property in terms of the habitat quality it's relatively impacted it's your you have hydric scrub land with depressional marshes is what came up in the fna report the property is fairly overgrown due to a lack of fire there are some extensive populations of maluca and old world climbing fern and overall the area appears to be in fair to poor condition but it is still native habitat given the lack of fire the successional nature of the habitats and level of invasive plants there be some challenges to manage this property however it could be part of a larger restoration project that restores hundreds of acres of swampland in jonathan dickinson i will say that this is an active county project that we're looking at trying to to restore this area uh and create a flowway into jonathan dickinson state park in terms of listed species here is the list right here once again some of these are more associated with uh scrub habitat which you really don't find on the property and there's no rare habitats listed you could use it to create a greenway connection between the two state parks in terms of recreation opportunities but it would be dependent on other acquisitions namely this area right here but uh you can see it could be a link right here down into jonathan dickinson the development potential is limited due to the extent of wetlands on the property so the brown areas are going to be your uplands there's really only a few acres of upland habitat on the property but a portion of this property is zoned for an industrial land use while the other is rural density which is i have up to five per acre and that is all what was the acreage on this 20 acres 20 acres i would add that we own another parcel immediately to the southeast of this we call it the theme parcel and that wetland is contiguous you can see it there that's the northeastern portion of that parcel bordering and and then this is jonathan dickinson state park right here so this is under conservation fund ownership and management there's some talk about putting there's a house on it right and there is a residence on the property and and there's talk of housing a park service staff member in that house park staff has been to the property with us and said they would be interested in having it as housing the park and as another access to that portion of jd for management purposes yeah i will say one of the in terms of the eastern flowway project one of the challenges of completing that is we would need an easement through private lands for through this section in order to be able to move water through that property we have had discussions with the owner who is amenable but to a to providing a full easement but we don't have anything set in stone at this point thank you charles dan any comments john charles is the conservation fund willing to spend money uh for something like this your funds could you detail that charles a bit i have been in one in short yes and we actually have a price in mind i've spoken with representatives of the owner owners plural so you would participate with us yes or we would acquire it outright part of the idea for the partnership was that um this property is tied up in an heirs dispute and has been for some time to the tune of 15 to 20 years there are over 90 heirs in the property and multiple liens and we currently have a group looking into um doing title work for us to understand if there is clear title for the property to be sold in short okay that's a plus that's certainly a plus uh no other comments but no comments david thank you charles next property please okay now we are going to switch to our blue ways and i will say the next three proposals are in the same area the same kind of focus uh so perhaps i'll do the first one and then for the second and third if there's anything additional to add i'll show the location of it uh then i will provide that information so we can streamline and get these three next three done pretty quickly so the first one is the jane wild property which is the one that's highlighted in red that's a 6.5 acre wetland dominated property along the south fork of the saint lucie river helps to protect critically important saint lucie river shoreline and habitats the area in blue is the burst steam property and the area in yellow is the cressor property so all three of these parcels have been nominated for acquisition and we have willing sellers what's the name here it's jane it's got a bunch of different names yep so it's jane wild is one bursting the next which is the area in blue and then cressor the third is in yellow do we have something on james wild that's yeah we do what it's in the same it's hard to read the legend separate odors i don't have that that's all right it's all right okay the red interesting whatever yes the same story as first died yep all three are i have similar you know they're the same area same habitats uh same type of values there is some a few differences that i'll go through uh my general comment on this is i had trouble ranking this because it's so different the blue ways is so different than the other we should almost have different criteria you know or a different type of ranking system to do this because it doesn't fall into the same categories i i just found it very hard to to get it should get a better score than what i gave it in effect so i i maybe it's just me i struggled to find a good way to represent the value of the blue way so there's one the criteria 10 was specifically designed to boost those scores but perhaps it should have been a bigger part of the it should have been given a higher weight um to balance things out because we do value our blue way properties and you know typically what you have more rare and unique habitats associated with them you're protecting the saint lucie river which is obviously a huge priority for you know the citizens of martin county so um and and honestly once we acquire these three there's only a couple more properties we can even look to acquire on the saint lucie river everything's wrapped else is wrapped up as camps or county acquisitions and that's what this map shows and it's a little hard to read but the areas in these green colors and these beige colors those are all represent county properties that are currently owned along the saint lucie river so we have several hundred even if you include the how patioke and atlantic ridge thousands of acres of property and miles of river footprint that we've already set aside and protected and these three properties would fall right in the middle of that and as i said they're some of the last privately owned undeveloped lands along the south south saint lucie river this just shows that it falls within the blue way zone which is in this area right here it's a fee simple acquisition we would seek funding through the florida communities trust program which is administered by florida forever but it's a grant program so we'd have to actually put in grant applications to seek funding to help acquire them but it should score pretty well according to their metrics and and other grant agencies that look to protect wetland habitats in terms of habitat quality there's little evidence of human alteration you are going to get some invasive plant populations but the properties appear to be in pretty good condition with minimal restoration and maintenance needs once again uh if one of the issues with management is it would be difficult due to having poor land-based access you probably need to go in by boat to get some to some of these and but once again the needs other than doing some invasive plant removal there wouldn't be a lot of management needs that would be necessary most of these pretty much all these properties are either a rare type of hammock habitat or mangrove tidal swamp which is even if it's not that rare is critically important here in martin county and you would likely have manatees associated with the mangrove habitat and some alligators yes 100 percent well even actually and it didn't come up in a report small tooth sawfish you know uh could uh theoretically use these mangrove areas these shoreline mangroves for habitat uh providing recreational amenities would be difficult just because of it's all swamp but we could you know and if we find any upland areas on any of these put in a canoe kayak landing and a picnic table for paddle users once again the development potential is limited due to the mangroves and overall wet nature of the property but and and development would require mitigation but it would be possible to build one or two residences and in addition if you build those you're also not just going to have a house you're going to have a road to get to the house which is also impactful to the natural areas you can you can get to it by land you don't have to go have a boat to get to it you can but it's i mean so for this one you'd have to come up through this neighborhood and go through this swamp just to get to this swamp there is some uplands like right in here and there is some uplands on this property i'll go through that there is probably more developable areas on this because of like the southern half of this is uplands and in terms of development potential i can just go through it here the owner of this crescer the owner of this parcel right here has an easement that would allow him to transverse and create a road through county owned conservation lands to access this property it wouldn't be easy there'd be a lot of mitigation there'd be mitigation on developing his property but it is possible that they could build a road through an existing county conservation land you have to allow a road to keep yes it's an easement and boat access is is permitted but it can't be the primary access to the practice it would be an easement of necessity basically to not landlock right parcel so if you want we can go through them i'll just skip through this is the burst steam parcel that's the blue one right here interject is everybody okay if we jump ahead and go through i just want a quick question about florida trust yes um they require access to the public access so would it be more difficult to get them as a partner if we don't i mean because some of these parcels don't have legal access right um well you could once again and you're right um and at one point the the county used to over promise to florida communities trust and created a world of problems in terms of having to put miles of boardwalks into preserves but you could put a simple little board walking you could put a kayak launch you could put a dock like we could probably figure out some kind of access feature to get the points we needed to get it doesn't have to be access from land it can be access from water correct it can be any number of things just wanted to be clear on that and but bursting this one you could actually provide access through land um and just from this neighborhood there's a little uplands area here you know you could maybe put a little picnic shelter or something like that but that would all be basically you know we get it as an approved project and then we go to fct seeking funding so so we can figure that out later before i jump let's be sure public comment on any on that recent property charles okay go ahead okay so bursting it's this blue one right here um once again series of county-owned conservation areas all these details are the same this shows the habitat map for the property so once again maritime hammock and mangrove habitat you could potentially put access from the nearby neighborhood and add a canoe kayak launch and a picnic table for paddle users this shows the development potential you can see there are actually uplands in this area and the current land use and zoning would allow up to two houses per acre so you would probably in this situation they wouldn't be able to develop the wetlands but they could put in you know a few houses in this area of the property in this southeast corner and then finally there's cressor yeah any public comment on that one okay go ahead yep here's a cressor property this is the yellow one it is directly adjacent to the county managed oxbow preserve and the owner has an easement of necessity and so he theoretically could build a road and use it to access this area here but it is entirely wetlands so building on that property would be a challenge but he would by necessity be allowed to put something out here some kind of house some kind of establishment um just going through it's pretty much the same thing for this one it would be even more difficult to provide recreational activities amenities because of how it's just entirely swamp getting there would be a challenge and once again overall wet nature would be difficult to uh build on but they could potentially build one to two residences and this there's actually a parcel split in here so they would probably be able to put a house on each parcel or a dock and that's all for that property i have a few comments can you go back to one of just the maps on that one yes so i'm fairly familiar with these properties they're just down the street from down the river where i grew up i took governing board members of the district and army corps members around here um i actually rank them all quite high because i look at them all as a whole and connecting them as part you know filling in the gaps as part of a greenway corridor these oxbows hold a lot of rare species that are endemic really to the north and south fork of st lucie river or loxahatchee sword sword sword spine snook mahara opossum pipefish big mouth sleeper some of those i know the county examined as trying to get listed as endangered species specifically to help stop discharges from lake of ochobey and this is the water quality they're found to live in this habitat you know recreational opportunities there are some dry patches where it wouldn't be much but just like a picnic table or a kayak pullout rest stop you could even put a potential small campsite you know on some of these um so i i rank these as fairly high when i look at it as a whole and zooming out along what the county already owns along the st lucie river you know this is that natural area of the south fork um that actually makes the st lucie separate and biodiverse from a lot of other areas of florida um you know when you're looking at these oxbows it'll go from five six feet in the straight area and jump down to 15 feet and then another 10 feet beyond that i'll come back up to that five feet and that depth change in each one of those you know u-shaped curves um provides really rare habitat that you don't find a lot of other places so yeah and that's yeah that's an interesting point the south fork this this is the south fork of the st lucie this is the st lucie canal yes that's this this is like right at the defining factor so actually i specifically would take the army corps here and that upper left corner of your screen is is st lucie canal man altered and the right side where it's you have those 180 degree turns is the natural condition of how the south fork would flow and in it we would drive up and down looking at the depth sounder on the boat and you would literally see it sometimes jump to 20 feet down and then come back up in the straight aways at that normal five six foot area so there's a there's a lot of potential for just kayaking and stuff like that canoeing but also um protecting those the rare habitat that's there yeah i i think too just after going through all this if i were to submit for fct funding and we acquired all three of these i would submit for them together as one uh grant application and then that would mean that across the three of them we'd have to put public access facilities somewhere so it would alleviate the burden of having to do public access for each looking at them as a whole and and you know the the blue outlined area there is some higher land where you could put a kayak pull off a picnic table part of martin county's kayaking trail you know even a you know backcountry campsite or something thank you merit and any comments thank you um these these islands mangrove areas help clean up the water that go into the saint lucie that's a valuable uh aspect of these pieces to me they're important habitat for the fish habitat for fish yep very helpful yep and these properties are not going to break the bank you know so um although reasonable yeah although the one of the properties that i mentioned where there was an unreasonable price is the property right to the north of those um actually i'm on the wrong one um but mike we're not looking at that now right correct okay so we're just talking about these three properties yeah okay tom kim beth no david okay well we are on to our last one uh maybe theoretically so our last uh project that we were putting forward is perry beach edition it's also called uh goose 220 i guess uh so this is a small one acre parcel that includes beach habitat and mangroves with the property extending all the way across hutchinson island from the atlantic ocean to the indian river lagoon and it is directly adjacent to the county managed clifton s perry beach and then this is the house of refuge property to itself it's currently being listed for sale by a realtor also it falls within the blue ways acquisition zone as you can see right here it is a fee simple acquisition and this is another one where we would seek funding through the florida communities trust program they actually florida communities trucks actually funded the acquisition of the rest of of perry beach say that again seek funding through the florida communities trust program who funded the acquisition of perry beach which is right here what percentage of it they provided 50 of the cost to acquire those properties now mike if if this was acquired and you already have public access to perry beach could you just link the properties together with that sidewalk maybe or um you know dune crossover it's hard because of you know the you have a little bit of uplands right here and then here you know this whole area is within the coastal construction zone so your ability to build any facilities would be pretty limited there but you could put something like a dune crossover maybe a sidewalk connection something of that nature how many acres currently comprise cliff perry beach uh 18 so you do have a road bisecting the property which is going to affect your uh habitat value habitat quality but otherwise the area is pretty intact without evidence of large pockets of exotic vegetation and it appears to be in good condition yeah especially from the icw yeah you would have minimal cost for a property this size and with how much of its mangroves in order to to treat and maintain exotic vegetation especially considering that there are no large-scale infant stations of exotic vegetation on the property in terms of your rares and listed species you're going to have all your sea turtles here uh so your loggerheads greens and leatherbacks all would nest in this area uh in addition the mangrove side you could have florida manatees and wood storks and then some of those other species you know in terms of uh small to sawfish or other listed species could be associated with the mangrove habitat and it's all rare habitat including coastal strand which is uh coastal strand is only found on barrier islands it's probably one of the uh most impacted habitats that we have in the state because you can't impact mangroves so the area that and you can't put your house on the dune so the place where we put the houses is in the coastal strand and just to give you an idea of that habitat it's it's a palmetto dominated habitat with a lot of diversity of different species uh and it tends to not have much tree cover tends to stay six to eight feet tall uh in terms of the vegetation this is an example of coastal strand here on the left once again uplands area is too small to provide parking but we could try and figure out some type of access facilities a dune crossover a sidewalk connection or something else but mike you already have the the parry beach right so it's adjacent to that so yeah yeah so you're already said well if we went to florida communities trust for funding which we don't have to do we would have to put some kind of access facilities oh i see okay got it you it wouldn't qualify just to walk down the beach i mean i think it's a part of it's adjacent to public lands already yeah it's it's just a limitation of the florida communities trust program so you know they uh we could certainly speak to them but if we went to them without providing access through this project it would definitely hurt the ranking but the the acquisition and this is more expensive because it's a barrier island the property is right now listed for sale for two million dollars which is kind of what you're going to pay for barrier island and and habitat where you know or a place where you could put a house on the beach so so once again it's not something that's going to break the bank in terms of the overall cost of the program and there's very very few areas i think there's two or three areas where we could actually buy beachfront habitat undeveloped beachfront habitat at this point so so we don't have to and we don't have to have funding partners for everything so we could look in some of these isolated smaller instances where the habitat is really valuable to to just not have a partner because honestly i particularly like having undeveloped coastal habitats so uh development you would basically it would be limited to one house uh due to the coastal construction line and the mangroves i believe it's adjacent to the uh perry street parking lot you could extend the perry beach parking lot onto this property um i don't think you could there's uh the the on in terms of the parking at perry beach it's uh i don't the you may be right i drove in there with john mail and i'll have to extend the perry breach parking lot slightly onto this property you could not from perry beach uh we don't buy it it'll be gone as good news is 10 years from now the house won't be there that they put up so we'll have another opportunity the beach might not be there either if you'll just bear with me well i i would say mike it's something if you could look into that please because it's a very good point i i built that parking lot okay so the parcel is this is the parking lot up here and this is all perry beach and this is the parcel right here okay well i wasn't showing the right parcel then so okay got it we'll figure something out and again you're right mike it's two million dollars yeah and we're talking about 200 million plus partners on other things so we're talking about 700 billion dollars at the end of the day yeah at least that's what one commissioner said yesterday at a public meeting uh so i you know i don't think we need to go crazy yeah we got a partner on everything right public comment charles for the gentleman in back dan going around the horn i'm thinking john well i i think it's cool to be able to say we bought farmland and we bought water wet water and we even bought an acre on right on the atlantic ocean it's a good story had some sizzle to it thousands of acres to one acre that's what we're looking at my wife's in chicago and she'll say what do you do today i'll highlight the one acre on the beach well some of the people that put in money to help pass this referendum i also that's what i'll tell them and it'll make them swell up with pride my first project working for martin county was to restore about a mile of beachfront habitat where bob grant beach and beach walk paisley is so certainly those coastal properties have a special place for me in terms of protecting and preserving good well it's also one reason why martin county really stands out because you folks have over the years preserved this type of land uh so john any other comments are you good i do agree i mean you know if there's no funding partners for something like this we have the money you could just purchase it we're not making any more beachfront that's undeveloped not within the greenway though right not within within the greenway uh any green any greenway no uh i mean we would consider it to be a blueway property for us like but it's not going to be like us qualify that as a greenway for for the ranking yeah that's what i mean the ranking it was a hard to rank these four right yeah yeah it is adjacent to the uh uh aquatic preserve so the uh uh you know the indian river lagoon in that area is an aquatic preserve so that's as a special designation on its own right um and there are areas further south that they actually have a blue ways uh the state has a indian river lagoon blue ways for the forever project uh and but for whatever reason that area of the indian river lagoon got left out there's some areas south of the saint lucie inlet but to me it it kind of all is a part of that indian river lagoon blue way so when we're looking at greenway corridor which i think we're headed best we're looking at that as an in an expanded context if i understand it correctly back to tom's point that's what i'm asking yeah so are we when we rank that we can rank it as a zero or we could rank it as a hundred yeah which is it uh i i can't tell you that it's your job to figure that out what i'm saying is maybe it's a hundred based upon what beth just raised and what tom said uh yeah i'm looking at it as it it's i mean it's definitely part of a blue way right but because the blue way and the only ranking that we have really for the blue ways that's consistent is number 10 but if you pull that into the into the greenway as well all i just thought of something else it's um i don't know we have uh two state designated paddling trails in martin county and one is on the indian river lagoon and perry beach is actually one of the stopovers on that uh paddling trail so there you go but back to the question at hand when we're ranking this i i looked at it as an expanded point and looked at as a greenway we're literally expanding perry beach as public ownership so that in of itself it's a micro greenway i didn't for the blue ways parcels i didn't look at it specifically having to fall in the florida greenway corridor um i kind of expanded it to the blue ways corridor and same thing with the parcels on the south fork we're expanding already publicly owned land and furthering a greenway that's there um you know so when we're ranking these jump in it seems as if we should really interpret that greenway corridor as greenway or blue way corridor when you're presenting it so when we're ranking it could we do that but if you could please point out to the bocc what we're doing because they may interpret it the same way i did which is just a greenway well if you don't as tom said it's it's if you follow it strictly to does it fall in the greenway corridor it's going to be a zero and i mean we have to have some faith in the the commission that they're going to examine these properties a little bit like we are fee simple is different than conservation easements blue ways is going to be different than you know a loxalusi project that falls right in line with florida forever and the greenway corridor but just as long as that caveats pointed out to the board that's all okay and so what we're ranking it it's greenways or blueways folks everybody good with that yes okay david okay great very good job michael thank you and council uh i didn't do much it's all michael well sagacious advice so perhaps if we could go through that's sort of we've all provisionally rated these now what we need to do is go back would you like to go through each one individually or what's the what's the preference i would like to go through each one individually okay but i think we need to put a time limit on each because we're going to get bogged down in the weeds okay i'll be the electric prod you could vote but i think we need to have like maybe 15 minutes of property or not even that oh i think we will okay i'll i'll be the prize once you're done ranking them you're we're going to have to hand them all in and we're going to tabulate the results and then come back to you showing what the final scores for each are now is the protocol for me to go through each individually or for you to do that well they rank ours we just give them it doesn't matter okay so let's do palm beach heights first please and we start with beth i want to hear other people's okay ranking because i'm going to i think it would be helpful if you could just kind of pull up the presentation in case we have questions as we're going through this oh sorry um can you hear me now or am i not on okay just get closer yeah this chair is too short and i'm too short um so palm beach heights um i guess i started with the with the relationship to the cert project i gave it a 65 because it's not actually in the cert project but it is serp adjacent and it's a large amount of property that is serp adjacent so do we want to go through these one by one everybody yeah let's just quickly go through okay uh greenway corridor uh 85 although it probably should be 100 if i think about it um potential funding partners 100 habitat quality 85 um gave management considerations a 60 just because of the individual parcel basis of it all um rare listed species habitat that's 85 zero cost per acre uh i gave it a 70 on recreational opportunities um i didn't rank development potential but i think it's pretty low um maybe 40 um and waterways or shoreway protection i did not rank it so if everybody could please put in their final ranking for that and then go into the next one thal prop family projectorship tan do you want to take the lead on this or do we want to go around the horn no let me get down let me get past the first two couple yeah okay because i was a little little disjointed as to some of the definitions yeah and if there's oh there's opportunity for discussion as well because some of us made i mean my rationale is not necessarily the best rationale okay so palm beach heights any further discussion on that david once you go through this first one do you want to start handing in your sheets yeah i think we can hold them until then do you want to hold them great point yes that's why she can get going on it make sure you put your names on each i'll just tell you initials i differ with uh initials work i i gave in the war in the uh waterways shoreline protection i i gave it a higher score than you okay um i just thought it was important even though they were very very small parcels taking together they're unique in the way they present uh what's going on uh recreational opportunities i i think i'm also higher than you i gave it a 40 because as we acquire more it'll be more and more it'll be easier to have recreational in that i gave it a 70. oh okay and i don't know development potential was a 40. yeah i gave it a zero because i don't think there's any development potential because from what i understand it'll never have a roadway in it by county ordinance it will never have zoning by county ordinance it'll never have a parcel it'll have parcel numbers but it will never be uh a plat by county ordinance i'm a never say never well they have to change ordinances to do that so i i really don't think there's any development potential that's how it's helpful david any comments no i'm i'm right around the same area it's going around the horn dame vicky i'm good the only thing the only thing i had was different was on the first one on serp i hear you 50 or whatever you had but i i put it 100 because it's in the serp zone well it's serp adjacent it's not in the zone well it's yes it is in the zone i don't care what they say it's in the zone it's not in any for any serp footprint it's um you know there are specific parcels that are within the serp footprints for palmar okay that's why i ranked it but you can rank it how you like yes otherwise it'd be interesting you i had some of the same numbers okay that's great mary i had some different and some the same you know i i looked at development potential i gave it 80 because you know i look at the this area it is being developed and impacted actively and that's why it's been such a hot topic for debate so i'm not looking at development potential always as legally or illegally i mean you know that development that's going on isn't legal but it's happening so it's there um that's why i gave it a higher development potential um management considerations were 40 because of the individual parcels but as it's acquired if we're looking at this and there's 10 parcels left that we're acquiring them all that management considerations would be a hundred once we have a large group um so those were a few of you know where i i differed slightly recreational opportunities or a 40 um again because of the smaller parcels but that would change as the acquisitions increase thank you mary any further comments before we pass them in okay so if everybody could please uh colleen is going to come around and collect colleen you have access to the thing so all right let me know if you have any questions on that thank you colleen you're welcome thank you okay moving forward to the thal family partnership perhaps going let's see dandy do you want to take a pass on that going i'm happy going down there okay she's smarter than i am you're gonna be your default how about she has no hydraulic well i i mean i i don't remember why i did the scoring now but i could tell you what the scores were and i think this was one of my highest scoring projects uh i think relation to serp or serp adjacent was a hundred greenway corridor was a hundred potential funding partners was 80 habitat quantity quality was 90 management considerations with 90 rare listed species or habitat was at 80 recreational opportunities a 50 development potential of 40 and waterway or shoreline protection 100. it may come as a surprise to everybody but i pretty much agree with camp penny okay that's scary dan you want to jump in i'm good i'm good vicky i i pretty much almost the same it was almost the same i was fairly high on this one you know 80s and 90s i guess my general philosophy i've had a hard time ranking full hundreds out of many of the properties but that's i was always a b student and it's hard to you know get that straight a i guess some some did make the 100 mark but well maybe you should have a bumper sticker like mine which says i was an honors student but i don't know what happened true okay tom any other thoughts um so i was a little lower on relation to serp serp and greenway because they're adjacent and not actually part of so 65 and 85 respectively a little lower on development potential at 20 because it's already under converse conservation easement it's not oh this is the wrong one that's another one oh that's a different one i'm sorry um sorry can you bring it up really quick so i can look at it uh thal family partnership oh god sorry it's all right it's been a long day is that seven that's 7 10. uh yeah yeah um yeah i do about a 50 percent on that then on on development and then otherwise i was pretty close to the to the same other than i didn't rank any of them on the waterways or shoreline protection unless they were specifically related to the blueways so makes sense david that's right footstep with tom thank you okay so if we we could please this is what michael's excel spreadsheet this is colline's workout now if it was me i would have probably messed up the formulas by the sixth or seventh property she's going to be zoom bling through the floor probably yeah well we'll take you know we'll take a break after this yeah no and we're going to need time to still score everything so okay going ahead to jr stewart land uh going around the horn dan on the on the relation to the serp i've got uh 75 yep uh greenway corridor was excellent at uh 90 uh potential funding for the partners was low so that should be a 25 habitat quality was excellent 90 management considerations high so that would and and this is where we got into the management considerations yes uh and i'm i think it's a high number is that what is that what we're looking for that's what i thought if it's adjacent or near another property and where they okay all right uh rare where are listed species uh of minimum that's low estimated cost is zero recreational uh opportunities high uh 75 and development potential was limited very poor so i've got 25 on that and i didn't put a waterways on it i put a waterways just because of um it being 72 percent of the property is is wet so it's classified as priority one and then 28 percent of the acreage is is a three i really don't know how to measure these mike as far as you know these the waterway access yeah the waterway and i think i'm hearing that from others the intent of that criteria was more to ensure access to waterways please waterways specific yeah yes yeah so because we have other ones that could handle things like you know uh aquifer recharge you know that that could be considered as something for you know habitat quality or greenways or different ones like that so so it's more access related so low on this one i didn't put anything yeah killer i don't have any observations close to the same here uh so this one already had a conservation easement on it i had a 10 for development potential and potential funding partners i had a 20. they were fairly low most of my others though were in that 80 range um i'm ranking waterways protection i guess slightly higher for me anything whether it's just pasture land anything that's not cement that we are keeping in perpetuity as pervious natural lands is waterways and shoreline protection in my mind now i'm ranking that but that in and of itself keeping it green in some state um from the one point being ag land on up to pristine natural condition is aquifer recharge and waterways protection so almost all of these that we're looking at i give them a baseline of 50 or 60 to start with just from being undeveloped and stopping them from being pavement or one house per 20 acres um is how i'm looking at waterways protection thank you i have a big agreement with merit and a big disagreement with merit on this on the agreement i absolutely the waterways and shoreline protection i absolutely agree with you merit if it's preserving any any way we can hold water i think it's that's what that's protecting my disagreement issue on development rights if it already has a conservation easement that's it we can't make it be anything more by purchasing it if i am i do i have the right property here so it should be zero i have it at zero i have it at 10 i mean because the conservation easement is is not over the entire property i believe on this one it is oh it's over the entire property but it it was there's a couple of carve outs mitigation yeah and i think that mitigation that was it i'm having trouble going back to after 15 properties south florida water management district that was why the 10 was there they were they were going to argue that they were going to remove we can argue it one way or the other it should be zero or i gave it 10 out of 100 i did the same yeah i i had a 10 percent on development potential as well because you know boards change and philosophies change and now they can change their mind um everything else was pretty consistently with what um everyone else had i think i had a 30 percent on potential funding partners and that's it or 30 i guess not percent but i can't i can't think of anything different from zero to 100 as anything other than percentage no i just spoke about it okay david yeah i just would be echoing what uh tom and marit had said about any land we preserve is to me the same waterways and shorelines preservation so i'm going to give it a score for sure at some point okay let's hand these in can i just run up and get some for you by the way thank you for the hard work for the gun so looking at at least jay uh dan do you want to take it off or are you okay will you go around the horn like this or do you prefer i'd rather start with mary i'm sorry so i'd rather start with her oh because it's well we did that last time but i got some pushback on immediately going to the best so i just want to be sure everybody has a chance to i'm good vicky sure i can go ahead okay so this is elise jay elise jay correct um for the irl i i put it under the irl designation 80 greenway 90 funding possible south florida water management florida forever 40 habitat quality 85 um management considerations 80 and rare or listed species habitats 85 and recreational i gave it a 60 because it's hiking hunting fishing adjacent to connection to harmony and then development um that one's low 20 25 yeah and then following merits train of thought of 50 on the waterways for some reason i was just a little higher on all all these uh all your numbers i don't know why but i got a bunch of hundreds here and uh but close to the same up and down you know what the overall scores a number nine though um the developmental potential it is listed on different realtor sites so i don't know if that escalates the potential for development i i had development at 80 i i guess i think all these properties these sharp developers are going to get around whatever restrictions and legislation are and all these properties have a little higher development potential and i think what we sit here and think i just think it's going to happen good point this is true mary yeah i'm in the 80s and 90s i just something beth said earlier about this property and the jr steward as far as waterways protection the two being almost the dividing point for the locks of lucy as far as where waterways flows probably helped me rank a lot of these numbers as higher this one being water i think if i'm correct flowing down south of the locks of hatchie the property we just talked about jr stewart water flowing or drop a rain would hit that and flow north to the south fork of the st lucie river reverse yes sorry but that these two properties encompass a lot of what the locks of lucy initiative was all about is preserve i mean the best way to preserve a water body is to start at headwaters and project from there preserve going down so both these after beth made that comment kind of raised all my numbers on the properties i just have high numbers like john on this property so yeah i have high numbers i gave it a hundred for relationships with serp since it's actually in the footprint and this is the one time where i broke with my consistency and did rank it for waterways protection because it is in the serp plan and it is intended to help protect the st lucy thank you david i went high on this one as well i'm sure a lot of it's because it's between two you know conserved areas already so just to connect those two thank you yeah that's it okay going on to ss farms uh are we are is everybody okay if i just go around the horn like this or do you prefer some other form just get you out mix it up david too so i'm probably going to change it as you guys talk because you guys give me some good things i know good thoughts so here's where i'm at right now um so i put it relation to serp at 100 this was also before i understood that we were supposed to be going up to 100 uh so i've gone back and re-scored these and i probably said will again but i put serp at 100 uh greenway at 100 um potential funding partners at 100 habitat at 80 um management at 100 uh the species at 80 um i i didn't put recreation um and i i think it would probably be low because that's going to be potentially a rural family land so that would be really low uh development potential i also did not fill that in then 25 for waterways and shorelines i'm sure those are going to shift as you guys talk um yeah i'm really different so i didn't give it any relation to serp uh greenway corridor at 50 because kind of just adjacent um i gave a 90 on potential funding partners uh 30 on habitat quality uh five to ten on management considerations because we weren't really sure how or who was going to manage it and i yeah so i could change i could be convinced to change that uh 30 on rare habitat rare or listed habitat on and i did give it i gave it an 80 on recreational because of the indiantown road component um and the fact that mike said that they wouldn't they wouldn't execute this without having some language related to that am i right there okay uh 30 on development and again nothing on waterways protection i'm in david's categories so no i said say the same thing again pretty much same here apparently similar to beth 40 uh relationship to serp uh management potential was a 40 as well and recreational i had it at a zero but hearing beth's comments and remembering that i'm at a 50 those are the others are fairly similar i'm almost identical a year 100 on serp and so forth you use the same hundreds and 80s that i do so i'm right on with him i am higher on uh recreation and development but basically the same vicky i'm good yeah good hope we get passive in folks okay turnpike dairy this time okay if i start off with uh vicky on this one i'm glad to i have relationship to serp 90 greenway 100 potential funding partners 80 habitat quality 80 management consideration 80 rare listed species 80 recreational opportunities 40 development potential 80 waterways 90. come back to me uh recreational opportunities for this one was zero yeah zero yes um it's a farm we can't use it that's management potential kind of prior discussions if it's i'm more at that 50 percent mark if it's yeah you know the the split between martin county managing it strictly for waterways and shorelines protection and trying to get it as natural as possible would be 100 but then we also have it's there's no funds from martin county being spent to management if it's under a conservation easement so i'm that's where i'm at that 50 percent for management everything else is it's fairly close there but again if the public can't access it there's no recreational opportunities well i've already we had this disagree with so there's no sense going over again i don't think we should even be considering this property it doesn't mean i don't love you anymore no i think this is i think this is a realtor trying to take advantage of this committee and the funds it has yeah my rankings are fairly low i mean it is serp adjacent so i gave it a 50 and greenway corridor adjacent so 55 and 60 for fun for funding partners but habitat quality and rare endangered or rare enlisted species habitats and are in the 10 to 25 percent so evid um this one was higher score high scores for me um um you know i i put development high because i do know that that's a pretty hot area it's only a matter of time for that you know the amount of traffic that goes through there um and with it being so close to allapata and uh bull hammock it's it's in a good spot to continue that that corridor there so um you know the recreation i i definitely there's not going to be any recreation if this happens because it's it is a a working ranch um probably chase you off with a gun i'm just kidding i don't know but um i would but um i i put this at a at a high score because you know it is preserving that that agricultural land so thank you okay looking at whitworth farms do you want to take the lead on this one sure uh relationship to serp i had an 80 greenway corridor i had a 90 potential funding partners i believe i had a hundred habitat quality was an 80 considerations was an 80 and same with rare and endangered species or rare enlisted species was an 80 recreational opportunities was a 75 development potential was an 80 and waterway shoreline protection was a 90. only when i for some reason i'm only a 10 on serp otherwise i'm and i can't defend myself i don't know where i got that from otherwise i'm very similar i think you forgot a zero i may change my vote i gave it high marks all the way down yeah yeah and with the waterways i i gave it a 90 just because the south fork runs right through the middle of the property great point i'm pretty much in line with merit on on change i'm in line with merit i i am also in line with merit and i did rank this one for waterways because the river runs through it yeah yeah quotable quote okay i didn't make it up i will admit i was writing him zero through ten at the beginning so a lot of these have just had zero i don't like them how was i married so changing them as we're going right now in my defense there's been a lot that have been like 85s and 65 so it sounded like we needed a little bit more than one through 10 to rank them yes okay ponciana gardens um okay yeah i did a serp adjacent so 75 greenway corridor 100 potential funding partners 50 water habitat quality 60 management consider i don't remember this yeah management considerations 25 just because of the lots um listed um listed or rare species 70 recreational opportunities 50 development potential 90 um and again i didn't rank it for um although yeah i didn't rank it for um waterways or shoreline i was i'm pretty much in line with beth except that i uh gave it a low score for recreational too and i gave it a high yeah i gave it a high score for development because i did too of the individual rights yeah uh same as tomics but i also put a low potential for funding partners yes yeah i was at 100 for development potential just because it's already plotted that way uh most of the others were were fairly similar 30 for potential funding partners and 30 for recreational opportunities keller i'm i'm low on this one for potential funding partners who's the potential funding partners on this one i've forgotten rural family and lands wasn't it no there isn't because there's such a small lots i'm sorry i'm looking i'm looking at the wrong one that was 10. me too yes i could have probably got lower than 30. i think i got 30. okay well i feel better than i'll leave it at 10. it's good to have some variety next one vicki how about you i gave the funding partners a 10 as well just because of it being in so many different parcels pretty much and how about you i gave them low marks i give i management considerations 25 and habitat quality was 50 potential funding partners was 30 and recreational was 25. yeah i gave that a 20. okay that's the halfway mark yeah we were at the halfway mark celebrate ring a bell that's good okay leonard who wants to take the lead on this one uh thank you about mr keller all right i'm glad to leonard parcels right okay i got serp 10 greenway 40 potential funding 100 habitat quality 40 management consideration 100 rare listed species 80 recreational opportunity 50 development potential 100 waterways 80 i'm down the list top to bottom i've got 50 80 80 70 40 0 70 and 70. vicki i'm pretty much in line with merit dan how about you i'm good i'm good all right why did you rate it so uh high in development potential me yeah merit 70 it was one house per 20 acres proximity to bridge road okay bumped it up in my mind and i'm looking at my notes and i have fee simple or conservation easement is this just fee simple this was the one no this was a there was the owner wanted 30 million dollars for 250 acres so he wants he wants it into in a conservation yes so that is why i had it at zero because it was clear for his price that he only is really wanting a conservation easement so i have zero for recreational opportunity yeah yeah i agree with you it was the proximity i think to bridge road okay yeah for the just the potential in that area i'm pretty much like married in other and all the other i ranked it the same way where and well and it says agricultural conservation easement not a conservation conservation easement right so i did zero for recreational as well and and 75 for development potential because of the access to bridge road yeah we're on there too same okay okay rogers atlantic ridge uh david are you okay leading this sure um i put going down the line i got 20 90 20 80 70 50 90 10 and 25 i'm not sure i tied better if you indicate what your i i lost columns there oh sure say which column it is so um serp 20 greenway 90 uh funding partners 20 habitat 80 uh management consideration 70 uh rare species 50 recreation 90 development potential 10 and waterways 25 the the uh the development potential what was the thinking there david in terms of it being that low it was poor because i think it was because of the size and the amount of wetlands it's with being so three acre parcel yeah okay i'm i i'm sorry go ahead no i'm identical so almost identical to david except for the uh wetlands the waterways protection rather and so i got that at 70 because i i i think it's all i think it's an important buffer it's a wetland dominated property so i i gave that a much higher score but all the up all my other scores are about similar to david to i'm i'm pretty close i'm a little higher on development potential i guess at 50 um but otherwise at well and i'm lower on habitat and and uh habitat quality and rare rare or listed species um in uh 40 and 30 respectively and i'm good i'm good good i'm close to them i had a 20 for um potential funding partners i don't remember why but no i believe it was the size of the parcel and i don't believe that was an option other than that i'm fairly close 90 for waterways and shoreline protection on this one okay next is julian rogers should ask charles to do this one no uh dan are you okay doing this one leading off yeah i can do it um i i'm going on serp i got zero uh greenway i got 90 uh 75 on potential uh 20 on habitat 90 on management considerations 40 on rare or listed species uh 50 on recreational opportunities development potential 20 and waterways 50. and beth this is not real this is not in the serp no it wasn't even close i have it kind of nominally serp adjacent so i gave it a 25. got it okay david do you want to jump in yeah i mean that's pretty much where i was as well um yeah this isn't it might be hang on make sure i have the right property yeah it's hard to keep track rare species this is not the julian rogers parcel right or yes it is the julian rogers parcel yeah the conservation fund um management considerations i've got a 50 but i had a i had a zero for rare listed species and a 20 for habitat quality um but a 25 to 50 for recreational opportunities opportunities and um i guess i broke my consistency again i gave it a 60 for waterways protection just because it has the potential to feed um kitchen creek i believe so i i just gave this low scores throughout uh nothing over a 60 and i you know i i think it's one of those properties that it's already being conserved and i think we should use our money on properties that may not be conserved in the future um and i understand that the conservation fund will take that money and use it to buy more properties but i think working in partnership we could we could work with them and take our money and buy properties that the conservation fund would do and it would save a lot of closing costs and stuff just make it a lot simpler going forward the attorneys will not be happy well our attorneys get paid no matter what and i'm sure the conservation attorneys get paid anybody else before we move on uh i was similar and fairly low rankings except for pretty high on management potential because i know if the county's trolling it there are a lot of opportunities they could do with the land that we probably won't see happen with the conservation um as an increased management opportunity and recreational opportunities there for restoration but again development potential 20 it's already in conservation for keller i'm i'm fine on all that one i'm good okay okay petway project property uh let's see tom can't penny you want to lead off sure um i gave it a 40 with relationship to serp an 80 for the greenway 60 for potential funding partners habitat 70 management considerations of 60 rare habitat 50 recreational opportunities at 20 recreational opportunities at 20 development potential at 20 and waterway and shoreline protections in 80. what was your last one tom waterway and shoreline 80. sorry um a little variable on that 25 for serp 40 for greenway um 80 for potential partners 50 for habitat quality 50 for management considerations 30 for rare or listed habitat 70 for recreational opportunities and 50 for development potential just because of its proximity to other areas and then again uh flowway um waterways or um because it would offer protection again for kitchen creek at 75 sorry david um i went uh for serp 20 greenway 90 uh partners 80 habitat 20 management 10 i'm not sure why i went so low um species 30 um recreation 40 um development 50 and waterways 75 plus i've noticed i'm consistent consistency is within ourselves it's probably more important than consistency within the committee um tom is consistently lower than i am on development and recreation and actually so is merit but i'm consistent from one piece of land to the other just being slightly higher than they are so like that observation i'm at 80 for recreational opportunities with this one just like the one prior the county's you know these are both in areas where the county could have a lot of potential in increasing the recreational opportunities uh 50 for relationship to syrup 90 for the greenway corridor and fairly similar for most of the others just for the record i'm pretty much in john keller's camp so i'm usually 10 to 15 higher than most so but any other i'm a hard grader that's what i was told when i graded okay jane wild who would like to take the lead on this one do you want to combine the yeah the next three i did all the same right okay then with that in mind i'm thinking isn't this the is this jane well what happened to the presser parcel it's there it's next it's oh i i got it mixed up a little bit okay i got mine mixed up too i had to change the headings i do that all the time so beth do you want to take the lead on these um okay um relation to serp i may change somebody can convince me to change this i put a zero because it's not in the serp project um although the st lucie river i mean the whole intent of the serp project is to improve the st lucie river so i could be convinced to raise that score um not in the greenway corridor so zero uh potential funding partners i say so i said 75 percent or 75 habitat quality 75 to 80 management considerations um i put 25 but also made a comment little need for management um 90 to 100 on listed species uh 50 to 75 for recreational opportunities simply because it's accessible mostly by boat um there are some land access but probably hard to gather um and then a 25 on development potential and 100 on shoreway um waterways or shoreline protection you know i agree i agree it's hard you want to give i gave both uh greenway and uh serp zeros right but you want to give them something right but according to our criteria they don't fall within that right so i'm really torn so unless we're going to put off put our finger on on it and fudge it i think that we have to leave it at zero to be consistent i thought we added blue ways to that right under greenway greenway or blue way well yeah we may have added it but you know that's not in the criteria in the book and i doesn't that what counts i mean how do we how does the commission know what we're talking about if we say oh we're going to add blue ways but blue ways wasn't part of the criteria that was given to us so mike in council what would you suggest um that's tricky i mean overall the uh the board is gonna look at your overall scores but how do you make me factor in access you know to our see to me mike that if if you point out to the board in terms of a greenway it does include so criteria number two lands that are near other conservation lands that are protected for conservation provide connectivity for wildlife and are of higher value than isolated inaccessible and fragmented natural areas so yeah that's actually a part of it that's the definition of a greenway yeah we're not doing the florida greenway corridor is this a greenway is it connecting or a part of furthering a greenway have to be just the state so if i were to make a request that i'm picking up on tom's point so please edit this but basically when you're talking with the county commissioners that you say that we have amended this which we hope is okay to include blueways greenways and blueways as we discussed before but it'd be really important to point that out i don't think you're going to get any pushback from them okay so council you're okay with that too i'm okay with that and if you if all of you are in agreement you can vote on that yeah why don't we why don't you okay so i would have a motion that we amend that verbiage greenway court actually why don't you make the motion you're so good at this okay so i i i motion that we also include on the greenway corridor blueways as to uh connectivity connectivity to other natural areas or yes okay as to that mo that's fine that's fine with me motion maker says yes i would second it you can't second you're the chair oh wait a minute i did second second all those in favor aye aye opposed good job camp penny but so have you got that for you hold that map up right do you have the map that was further zoomed out because all up and down the south fork there are i mean there are greenways that we're connecting anything in uh green oh it is on the river the purple is pamps but anything that is green is conservation so you can see this is uh kiplinger preserve these are audubon parcels right exactly this is a county sta this is del plain preserve right here uh this is oxbow even though it shows up in blue so that's right sorry this map is annoyingly thing uh done and then if you continue on you have how patiokey and atlantic ridge on the south fork so and mike to expand our pam is preserve area management plan similar to a conservation easement is what we're talking yeah it's a conservation exactly essentially a conservation easement with the county and again if we look at criteria number one relationship to serp comprehensive everglades restoration plan the south fork of the saint lucie river is part of the northern everglades so this isn't a serp project this is literally just preserving the land in the northern everglades it we don't have to follow serp this is doing the goal of it so for me i rank that as i give it an 80 but it right up there it achieves serp without needing any funding partners or following all the bureaucratic red tape that's part of the goal um yeah you know you don't want marriage you're right i mean that that's it and we're we're kind of splitting hairs between i look at it i don't need to follow the definition of florida's mapped out greenway a greenway corridor is a natural undeveloped connection of land that animals can traverse or you know we're stretching it into the blue ways so imagine a turtle or man being able to graze along seagrass along the shoreline all the yellow and undeveloped shoreline is where it can go and graze that's the blue ways corridor or i generally would consider a greenway corridor whether it's uplands or aquatic to follow the same criteria and then management of a mangrove swamp really the most that we can do besides just improving water quality flowing through that mangrove swamp is trash pickup and less pollution we're not getting in there i don't believe in and restoring these active partials but they really require almost no management um so i i ranked all of these really fairly high um you know 80s 90s and 95s well i did now too yeah i mean so i did pretty much the same as merit well now we haven't we we have a reason to do it without yeah and i i agree with those reasons except for the consideration of criteria number one um because the the guidance is fairly specific that says acquiring land for these cert projects will help improve it doesn't it doesn't necessarily talk about the goals i agree with your explanation but i still don't think i can change my score as a result of it i understand so mike maybe you just point out that some folks felt specifically it should refer to the cert project others felt that on a macro basis it contributed to the overall improvement of the ecosystem that confuses things but okay so anybody else want to weigh in on just a question so merit you're saying you did give a score to column number one yes i i put it as an 80 as far i mean martin and what about number two you and then you also rated number two two was an 80 as well because that's that's also waterway the blue ways yes it's it's we're enhancing or continuing a corridor granted most of it is aquatic right but it's a natural untouched corridor um you know that shoreline is natural that's what we're continuing on yeah that can be contribute to me a greenway can be a blue way so you know it can be like well we motioned it now so so it is i think we're good we're done on that so it's an explanation that we've all agreed on turn all three in at the same time yes please make sure you sign them we're doing all three at one don't pick up all three i put your name on all these all done hold it hold it last but not least okay oh this is going to be fun yeah i can still count at this hour uh mr chairman you do this one i haven't done one you lead one you know in truth i haven't totally this is the one i hadn't finished in truth uh well that's not my problem that's my problem somebody else exactly but i'm going to ask you to go ahead since you volunteered well then you give me a minute okay we did the same thing i did no i got a transfer he's my younger brother just so you know so this is the we're also both from new york so no no i'm from new york you're from a place where the rich live no that's that well i'm not going to comment on that oh you can't but somebody i know has an apartment in greenwich connecticut so that's called the pot calling the kettle black okay okay i'm ready okay let her rip in in consideration of our newest merit induced i gave relationship to serp 80 percent even though because of the indian river lagoon on one side the greenway corridor 80 percent potential funding partners 70 percent habitat quality 80 percent management considerations 100 rare or listed species 90 development potential 90 waterway or shoreline protection 80. um i was putting with the best beth please i'm a little higher on some and a little lower on others um i gave a zero um 100 on greenway 50 on funding partners 85 habitat quality 85 management considerations 90 on rare listed species 100 for recreational activities 100 for development potential and 100 for waterways or shoreline protection um i was pretty much with tom except and i wanted to go with merit's explanation but i did put that zero for serp but i really wanted to give more than that i was within five to ten of everything tom said on that one and keller please i have a perfect score card here for serp zero it's the furthest thing from from uh the everglades so i gave it a zero everything else i gave a hundred it's the perfect score card i was in line with tom okay i did zero on serp i was going to say in spite of yourself camp penny our leader i was following my recommended biologist friend great pass these in now we can take a five minute break or let me ask uh what else we gotta do i'm gonna ask colleen how long it will take to compile these results did you start started yes okay okay so maybe reconvene at four o'clock is that that what you're thinking what else what other business do we have why don't we well no we have to we have to go through the scores and show the ranks i understand that but besides that what other so here's a question for you we can go out of order as it relates to the agenda and jump ahead to our next meeting if everybody's okay with that lord if do you want to take a break for five or ten minutes no i just assume us go proceed is everybody okay with that i'd keep going okay next meeting yeah so let's well let's we're going to jump around are you okay with this mr camp penny or are you going to beat up me again no you're jumping around on the agenda that's already printed you can take it out of water you just can't make one up as you go along i will i will mention that our minute taker is busy okay we can't get into like big discussion let's take a break well let's take a five minute bathroom break and yeah let's do you know okay take a break see where we are let's come back at let's let's make it 20 minutes of four okay oh shucks well one hour works how we operate and how we extend the one conservation dollar there's been comments about how easements and partner funding etc can advance the dollar of this committee and i think those are all very fair and when i look at a property or when the conservation fund looks at a property when i take it to our real estate committee we go over the same sorts of questions i would like to send more detailed materials that will provide more insight um but i think it as a brief overview and i'll take some of the lux lucie properties as an example we those are kind of outside tcf's normal mo and that they were acquired not with our revolving fund dollars but rather were fundraised for privately that means that we fundraise for the properties anticipating a deal then had cash in hand to give that property owner on the occasion that we move those properties into the hands of people that manage them long term so in this case we are engaged in exotic invasive treatment under our ownership but we probably would not engage in a full restoration or water treatment project like the kitchen creek preserve because that's not our specialty our specialty is putting acreage into conservation when we sell on those properties it would be contingent upon an easement which we do not we don't hold any easements our ownership represent i mean we're not gonna be putting any strip malls on there but our ownership represents that property being logistically moved into conservation but the sale price when we move it on will be our acquisition price plus a our cost of capital which you can look at as an interest rate plus covering the incremental costs of fees due diligence etc just looking at bridge road what two miles of road frontage on bridge road cost in 2020 21 compared to what that same property would cost in 24 5 6 is a huge difference so i think it's fair to bring up the point to where a sale of locks lucy acquired properties to the county would compared to whitworth for example or some of the currently listed items would still be you can look at it as a 20 cents on the dollar versus the full dollar i would like to submit materials or give a more detailed presentation outlining some of the numbers um because i don't i don't want to speak on them just off the top of my head um and perhaps that could be at the next meeting or alternatively i could submit materials that could be emailed to you all um to read your convenience through mike please so would it be appropriate to say or is this totally inappropriate that you're you provide a bridge loan effectively we have a conservation loan program um that's not my end of the business we most of the time we are contracted by a county or we are approached by our partners those being federal state county etc because we can move quicker than other entities to acquire properties for the same reason they're just outlined where property and prices property prices increase um the property might go to someone else who does not have the same intentions and this basically locks that property on a shorter time frame into conservation if there's any other questions happy to answer them what's your cost of capital roughly uh i would i think i can say five percent right now so if you finance a deal is would it be prime plus 20 basis i'll be 200 basis points 300 basis points how does that work it's difficult to say because it really is on a deal-by-deal basis but i'm comfortable saying five percent annual cost of capital um plus the for example appraisal fees due diligence cost mr campani you are correct that tcf we do have a legal team they are going to get paid no matter what but um the sort of other incidental costs as part of the deal are included into the sale price to the end buyer you're close to cost yeah yes so dan from a real estate real estate broker's perspective what's your take i mean go ahead dan you go ahead i think it's attractive five percent it's interesting the way you put the program together where it seems to be affordable to the buyer i think i'm also currently under contract the tcf is with brevard county and that's another project i'm working on and in that case a property owner would approach our team we handle the willing seller letters get those details together and then we bring it to a similar committee that exists there we negotiate the deal go through that process they don't have in in the loxalusi case that was basically forward thinking and was put forward as an impetus from concerned citizens in the surrounding area who said i think we can fundraise towards some of this now and that started in 2020 um how do you pick the people that you you sell the property to to manage it once you acquire it it will always it almost always is federal state or county so that it ensures the property will be conserved law in perpetuity and you're a 501 c3 you're a non-profit and they can it can be attractive for an agency to work with the with these land trusts they can be more flexible they can be quicker than we we can be in terms of like getting things you know if you have one that's for sale and it's a hot property you know it takes us time because we've got to go we've got to you know get the e-lock together we got to take it to the board just to get in the game and so they can move a lot quicker than we can and there are some instances where landowners won't talk to a government uh so they can get involved and help to bridge that gap and do the deal with the landowner and then pass it along to the government agency and there are john and mike do you mind if i talk about some of our past conversations and we were also involved with martin county forever and handled some of the donations for that we've been talking with the county for months maybe even coming on a year now about this process i understand where the county is coming from when they talked about hiring a contractor was not put forward in the ordinance and therefore might go against it and so as a result decision was partially made though no loi exists necessarily that we could go out and pre-acquire properties at the request of the county and move forward on from there this was with county attorneys as well present at the meeting but of the properties that you all have gone through today there are more than just the loxalusi properties that i have gone out to see engaged with the landowner in fact whitworth is the only property within loxalusi that i haven't engaged the landowner also at the request of the county because they thought they had a deal on the table and didn't want to muddy the water which is fully understanding we're fully understanding of that um but thal is one at least j um jr reserve petway leonard both rogers the other rogers piece that we don't own um the crescer properties and a number of others um you know i'm aware of and have dealings with the landowners on so question for the purpose of the minutes do we need to capture council and mike what charles has just noted or should i ask him for a summary for the minutes for this meeting or what would you guys like uh we can have uh sarah cornelius uh who's our administrative assistant she typically goes back listens to the uh to the meeting and looks through the minutes to make sure that they're accurate so she can she can go ahead and capture this since uh our minutes taker is busy right now making sure that all this gets in incorporated into the minutes okay now charles this information you'd be passing out it should go through mike uh could you uh i think seems to me that if would the committee like that before or after the january meeting well anything we're going to discuss at the meeting we should have before you'd have it before but do you want to have it well in advance of that or how do you feel enough to allow some time to review it yes okay so at least two weeks in advance okay so i would say charles at least you know probably end of december ideally okay and again you know i might be misunderstanding this but this is really their department who they want to partner with we really don't care uh so it's nice that he's a nice fellow and all but it's it's still at the end of the day john mail and mike and anybody else at the county and how they decide they want to move forward with acquiring lands but the end of the day it's the border county commission well but you know what i mean yeah it's you know we don't need to get in the middle of who you want to use as an agent correct at the same time though they've played a critical role for example in martin county forever uh they do a number of things i think just for everybody's i go back to the fiduciary duty that we all have and to the extent that there's a material relationship with an entity such as the conservation fund even though to your point tom it's definitely not legally binding on us to know about it i do think that it's part of maybe put it in the golden rule category uh and understanding how the pieces of the puzzle fit together that's the way i look at it so and i would just like to add we have been engaged on this for a long time i think there is um agreement understanding as it stands now i am a martin county resident i did make a vote on this referendum i completely understand the considerations towards where are the tax dollars going um and i'm not necessarily asking to be contracted um more the more of the reason why i'm up here at this point is to comment on the property properties already in conservation um why would we have to spend the money on it understand and i think also quite frankly if any of us are at a cocktail party or something and somebody says who's this conservation fund uh we want to be able to give them a reasonable answer to that question uh and so i think within that context that's the way i that's the way i see it and when i said i was born in new york and he was born with the rich people you get the dichotomy now we're the curtains pulling back i usually say i'm a simple country boy from brooklyn but he he doesn't agree to that but in any case sure you want the minutes put out no i think it's really walking in the other person's shoes and i think that uh all of us will be talking with someone at some point in time and they're going to ask us a question and to the extent that we can answer it i think it's it's in the best interest of everybody uh so that's the way i see it so i agree with you let's see how are we doing with the in the ballpark okay and i need a proofread things before we throw it up here and say this is our list i need to proofread everything before we throw it up there as our list and then actually put the ranks in so actually when we do the list uh we had originally discussed and you'll see in the item that was passed out that we were going to do each parcel individually as to whether or not we suit we uh suggest to the bocc that they approve it uh could i have some discussion please on doing them all at once so that mike's going to present the findings the original plant was that we would do each individually i'm proposing now that we do them consent we do it we do one motion for the whole the whole batch yeah yeah dan are you you want a motion to that effect or you well we don't even know we'll need a motion when we approve the list but i'm staying i'm changing the agenda and i know that you'll pick on me we'll do it all at once okay so for the record camp penny will not pick on me for changing the sequence okay we are now ready michael tell us that joke you don't like can i have uh five minutes to look through that list over and i'll convene back yep that's good so in front of you is the ranked scores for all of our properties uh so you can see the total scores are in the l column right here and then it's broken down by rank from one to 16th so the top uh ranked project is the whitworth farms property the second is elise j the third is the thal partnership the fourth is perry beach addition the fifth is palm beach heights the sixth is the cresser seventh the berstein and eight the jane wild the ss farms property is ranked ninth the lennar park property is ranked 10th jr stuart land is ranked 11th turnpike dairy is ranked 12th rod the rogers atlantic ridge property is ranked 13th point santa gardens 14th petway 15th and the rogers uh the conservation fund property is ranked 16th does anyone have any questions about that or comments do you have the ability to print that out that we could take home and study it um yeah or email it i can print it from here why don't you how about i email it to you email it would be great i'm gonna save this in a place where i can find it so is there any other questions or comments yes when you look at that list does any of it stand out or surprise you um i you know that's not my job so more to answer so as the county moves through the process and starts making offers on these or presenting them to the board can you we're going to make a motion to that effect oh are we okay so what we're going to do is further discussion on the questions on the properties going around the horn dan john keller so what we're going to do is we're going to have discussion on the properties and then i'm going to ask for a motion that we recommend to the board of county commissioners that they move forward to negotiate a purchase or conservation easement on all of these properties so but before i get to that is there any discussion as it relates to these properties tom no david no john keller merit no i'll i'll move that we recommend to the to the county commission this list of properties in that order for parts of possible purchase or ease or conservation or agricultural easement second all in favor aye all opposed okay motions carried so at this point uh we've set up the meeting so i'm jumping ahead a little bit on on the list of items to do uh at this point uh the meeting is adjourned unless you've got something else no oh john you want to say something i'd love to never miss an opportunity to say something publicly um i i just hate to lose the significance of the moment um it's it i know you guys this is just another thing you do for your community but i i don't think it's a small thing that eight of you would step away from your jobs your families your commitments to come spend your tvs um to spend an entire day in the minutia of working through this but um you are truly the manifestation of of our citizenry interest in preserving martin county as it is and they've entrusted you to come and and facilitate that and i think that's incredibly meaningful and i think this is one of those moments we'll look back on 10 15 years from now and say this was a defining moment in making a a permanent difference for martin county so i just on behalf of the county staff um my friends and neighbors thank you for what you did today and um it means a lot i also want to introduce um a guest i don't know how many of you got to meet him um patrick connelly uh joined us all day today from the water management district patrick's patrick's role is the park or the program manager or the the project manager for serp irl south so he and his team oversee all of the things all the infrastructure projects that are going to help to clean up the river and they have been incredibly helpful engaging with us to make sure that we're giving good guidance to you and the board on what qualifies as serp projects and on a myriad of other efforts to clean up the water and so i just it means a lot to me that patrick would spend his whole day here hearing about our program and and all that he's invested in it and i wanted to make sure to acknowledge him that's all thank you well thank you john thank you patrick charles and michael staff one more thing yes sir so before we yeah i did want to you know you asked surprises one thing to note is that really the top four projects on this list are pretty far separated from the remaining properties in terms of points so these were all within 30 points of each other 620 to 592 and the next one down is going to be 518 so there's some pretty you know you you could definitely say that there is a is a high a top tier a priority uh to make a recommendation with going forward to the the committee may correct me on this one but i think the belief of the committee is that we proceed with all of them uh and that uh that's conveyed to the board of county commissioners does anybody well we i think the motion was we proceed with all of them in the order yeah that we rank them exactly but i'm not going to rush ahead to number 16 correct but we're not going to split hairs one point on it yeah no but it was just you know to me this is a clear delineation and something that will mention to the board of county commissioners uh that that these four were were definitely uh much higher ranked than the other properties on the list that's not going to exclude us from going after number 16 or number 10 but but that's an important point to make with our board of county commissioners that's really your and john's call i would if my were i doing it i would simply say here's the ranking but we here's what the vote of the committee was but that's just me uh great meetings adjourned you okay mr parliamentarian great