It was standing room only at Tuesday’s Volusia County Council meeting, where a detailed presentation on the county’s voter-approved conservation land program was slated to be heard. But the highly-anticipated discussion on Volusia Forever never happened, with council members deciding instead to table the discussion for a future workshop.
“I don’t feel like we won anything, and I don't feel like we lost anything,” said Suzanne Scheiber of Dream Green Volusia, a local environmental group. Scheiber helped organize some of the concerned residents who showed up to Tuesday’s meeting in support of Volusia Forever.
Concerns about the future of Volusia Forever have been proliferating over the course of the last six months or so, following statements made by some council members reflecting their own concerns with certain aspects of the program.
Among council members, the most vocal critic of Volusia Forever has been District 1 council member Don Dempsey, according to environmental advocates.
“What really scares me about this is … ‘in perpetuity,’” Dempsey, an attorney, said at a council meeting in December, referencing language typically found in conservation easements. “That is a long time.”
Conservation easements are one of the primary mechanisms used to protect land through Volusia Forever, which has existed in name since 2000 and basically even longer under a different label. It was 1986 when Volusia County voters first approved the first-of-its-kind program for acquiring environmentally endangered lands.
Conservation easements are voluntary, legally binding agreements which protect a parcel of land’s natural resources by restricting how that land is used. Of the more than 61,000 total acres protected through Volusia Forever to date, nearly 8,000 are protected by conservation easements, according to the county’s public transparency dashboard.
Just over 37,000 acres of the land protected through Volusia Forever is owned by the county outright, through what’s called fee simple acquisition. Another roughly 15,500 acres are protected by a combination of methods, and the remaining roughly 1,000 acres are working forest and farmland.
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County voters have repeatedly supported Volusia Forever. Most recently, in 2020, nearly 76% of voters approved renewing the program for another 20 years. Since then, an additional 6,700 acres have been conserved through the program.
Conservation easement concerns
County staff had prepared a comprehensive presentation on Volusia Forever as the council's first new item of business Tuesday. But just as council members were about to approve the agenda, District 3 council member Danny Robins made a motion to remove the presentation.
Robins began by thanking residents for sending in “hundreds of emails” in support of the program and staff members for preparing the presentation.
“But in my opinion, any further discussion in terms of modifications to (Volusia Forever) goes against the will of the people,” Robins said, to resounding applause from the packed chambers.
Dempsey did not hide his chagrin. At several points, he chuckled in disbelief, saying: “This is surreal.”
“You guys don't even want to talk about it?” Dempsey said. “Are you really doing your constituents a favor by not even wanting to sit down and read through the contract and talk about it together?”
Like other council members, Dempsey insisted he does support Volusia Forever on the whole.
But Dempsey has some concerns. He said one of the main ones stems from his reading of conservation easement agreements from the perspective of an attorney.
“I love it. It's a great program,” Dempsey said. “But how many of you guys have actually read the whole 100-page easement? Because the devil is in the details.”
Dempsey said he’s worried that language in the conservation easement agreements typically used by the program could limit the county’s ability to use the land for necessary purposes in the future — including flooding prevention.
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Dempsey also said he’s worried about limiting the county’s ability to access “the conserved water underneath these easements," in a hypothetical future scenario in which the freshwater aquifer relied upon by most Floridians for drinking water is compromised.
“Are we saving this water for the turtles or for our great-great-great grandchildren?” Dempsey said.
Dempsey ultimately voted at the end of Tuesday’s meeting in favor of a workshop to discuss Volusia Forever, with a focus on conservation easements.
A 'can of worms'
Some residents at Tuesday’s meeting carried campaign signs, commissioned by Scheiber, in support of maintaining Volusia Forever in its current form.
Scheiber is a member of both the county’s charter review commission and the Volusia Forever committee. But on Tuesday she said she was speaking for herself and the organization she runs. She said the council’s move to table the discussion “came out of nowhere.”
“I'm really glad that the chamber was full. And I'm perplexed, but happy, in some ways, about what they just did,” Scheiber said.
On the other hand, Scheiber said, “the public showed up and they didn't get to speak.” She doesn’t anticipate the future workshop on Volusia Forever will include a chance for public comment.
A Volusia County spokesman said workshops are more flexible than official council meetings and may or may not have public comment periods built in, depending on how council members decide they want to craft the agenda.
In recent weeks, Scheiber has been making the rounds to Volusia municipalities, seeking letters of support for Volusia Forever as it currently functions and as voters approved it to be.
So far, nine municipalities have sent in such letters to the county or promised to do so: Daytona Beach, Daytona Beach Shores, DeLand, Deltona, Edgewater, Lake Helen, Oak Hill, Orange City and Ormond Beach.
District 5 council member David Santiago insisted Volusia Forever was “never, ever, ever under any threat.” But he said he welcomed opportunities to examine the program.
“I think any contract that we vote for, as a body — any of us can question any of the details of it,” Santiago said.
Council Chair Jeff Brower said he was voting for the workshop “against (his) better judgment.”
“I think this vote does open up the can of worms again, with the public,” Brower said. “We just told the public we're not going to touch (the program), we're going to leave it alone, and now we're bringing it back again.”
The final vote setting the workshop didn’t include a date, but the council had talked earlier about setting it for the next scheduled council meeting, which is April 7.
