Budget update: Lawmakers may cut funding for the Florida Wildlife Corridor to pay for a small park in the Panhandle

An example of the kind of unnecessary cannibalization forced in a state whose elected leaders refuse to close corporate tax loopholes.

Graphic credit: Get the Coast

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Florida lawmakers may take money that was supposed to be spent assembling a vast conservation corridor allowing animals to roam across the state and use the funds instead buying an isolated piece of waterfront property in the Panhandle.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature did the exact same thing last year — in a fiasco that ended with Florida taxpayers paying more than $80 million to buy four acres of little ecological value from a prominent real-estate developer and Republican Party donor.

This latest proposal — which surfaced Thursday in Tallahassee, where lawmakers are meeting in a special session to finalize a new state budget — orders state officials to acquire a 1.78-acre plot at the foot of a bridge crossing a Gulf of Mexico inlet that separates the communities of Shalimar and Fort Walton Beach.

The proposed budget instructions don’t spell out a sales price. But commissioners in Okaloosa County recently agreed to buy the land from for roughly $3 million, pending an appropriation from the state, according to reporting by Get the Coast, a local news outlet. And state Sen. Jay Trumbull — an influential Republican from Panama City who represents the area in Tallahassee — recently submitted a request for $1 million in state funds to help finance the purchase

The instructions that would be added to the state’s 2026-27 budget ordering the purchase of a small property in Shalimar.

At least on the surface, this does not appear to be nearly as odious as last year’s legislatively-mandated land buy, which was also orchestrated by Trumbull and which one longtime conservation leader called “a sham.”

The sales price seems to be much smaller, for one thing. The town of Shalimar and Okaloosa County plan to turn the property into a public park named after the father of the seller, who was a longtime county attorney.

And most importantly, the proposal clearly identifies the exact parcel to be purchased and does not enable Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Cabinet to bypass regular appraisal rules. That’s far different than last year, when the Legislature hid the ball on the property it wanted to buy and enabled the governor and Cabinet to set the sales price using an appraisal commissioned by the seller.

The instructions in the 2025-26 state budget that led to last year’s controversial land buy in Destin.

The problem is that lawmakers would once again raid the “Florida Wildlife Corridor” to pay for it. The funding would come from an $850 million pot of money the Legislature set aside three years ago for the bipartisan program — an ambitious effort to stitch together a continuous stretch undeveloped land nearly the length of the peninsula that can be used by migrating panthers, black bears and other animals.

There is, of course, more than enough money to pay for one without cutting funding for the other.

But this is the kind of cannibalization forced in a state that, for example, levies one of the easiest-to-avoid corporate income taxes in the country — a tax that is ridden with absurd loopholes that Florida’s elected leaders are well aware of and yet refuse to close amid lobbying by some of the biggest corporations in the world.