complete agenda - Florida Department of Environmental Protection

ARC Summary August 13, 2010
[Note: Staff has since more thoroughly analyzed the logistical timing of ranking and work plan
development, relative to Legislative sessions and fiscal budgets, and has determined that a
ranking of the entire list in June followed by work plan adoption at the August ARC meeting
would be preferable. ARC would develop an interim list in December by inserting new projects
into the list and removing completed projects; otherwise, the December list essentially would
remain unaltered. The June list and August work plan would be submitted to the Board of
Trustees in September, while the December list would be submitted to the Board in February.]
Public Comments on Ranking
Dr. Richard Hilsenbeck,
TNC, said his organization strongly supported once-a-year ranking just
as Mr. Farr described.
Mr. Jim Muller,
Muller and Associates, said he supported the full ranking once a year and the
insertion at the half way mark would be fine too. He didn’t feel too strongly about that, but did
feel the full ranking should be once a year.
End of Public Comments on Ranking
Mr. Ballard asked whether there was any objection from the Council. It was asked whether a
motion was needed. Mr. Ballard said that staff would bring a whole package and he would
imagine ARC could wrap it up in October.
Mr. Farr said that this part of the meeting was to discuss anything related to ranking not just the
spreadsheet and how often ARC ranks and invited other comments.
Ms. Ball said that Dr. Frederick brought it up earlier, but she agreed that this could be the time
to tweak the Climate Change formula. She also felt a little uncomfortable with the way it now is.
Dr. Brock responded that Ms. Larson, unfortunately, couldn’t make it to this meeting. He
understood that she was planning to give ARC some ideas on this. He said he thought she was
still working on those but that staff would try and contact her independently to talk to her about
her ideas. Dr. Brock said at the last meeting that one could reverse the existing formulations so
that those projects least inundated by sea level rise are the most important than those
maximally inundated. If that’s the consensus of the group, he said he would be more than
happy to re-calculate that formula. It does have some attribute of that in it, but in the weighting
of the scoring, it does the opposite. It basically says if a project is going to be inundated, then it
will have a higher climate change score than if it will not.
Dr. Frederick responded that he didn’t think there was any real way to manipulate the score as it
is that would be very useful. His vision of the formula is that one would like to rank a property
high if it is likely to be inundated and it is connected to another property that is uphill that has or
will have appropriate habitat for those species and ecological functions to move into. We have
some of the data, but haven’t been able to put it together yet. We need a study that would
actually do that. Dr. Brock said that there is one column that addresses adjacent lands but it
wasn’t factored as highly. It gives you the lowest score at the tail end if a project is not going to
be inundated. He could try and reverse and tweak that to accomplish that a little bit. Dr.
Frederick said what is really needed is an evaluation of whether adjacent land would really be
appropriate because it might be a historical site that wouldn’t be terribly appropriate. He said he
felt as though ARC needed a bit more study and data.
He said that he knew that TNC had been involved in doing this – a study to do exactly the same
thing. He talked with Doria Gordon after the last meeting and there was some reason that ARC
couldn’t use it off the shelf but it seemed as though they had made a lot of progress and maybe
ARC could talk about how to use that. Mr. Farr responded that with any luck our Governor’s
Fellow will be able to help with this too. Her work won’t be done in time for the ranking this year,
but hopefully, ARC and staff can come up with some preliminary tweaking in October in the
general item that will be done. Certainly, though, by the following December’s ranking, ARC
will, hopefully, have something much more concrete to work on. Staff has talked about this
subject in-house, but the data is scattered, not concentrated and not real certain.
Dr. Brock added that staff will get with Doria Gordon to see if she has some ideas staff can
employ with the existing data systems. The biggest problem now is that funds are so tight, he
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