Equine Quarantine at Ossian Ventures

Let this soak in for a minute. Florida is one on the largest agricultural states in the country. Number one in lots of categories. Palm Beach County is the number one agricultural county in the State.

Look at you bill. That $1250 is a State of Florida fee. That extra $100 is because the State can’t work weekends.

Not telling you who to vote for. I’m asking you to call someone. Anyone that you may know and directly to the Commissioner if you don’t know anyone. It’s truly embarrassing.

Long read, but a breakdown on how our very own FDACS works. No wonder they have no time for us. Make your own conclusions.

The FDACS Great Conservation Money Shell Game

How hundreds of millions in conservation dollars became a Department of Agriculture program that pays large private landowners to restrict land they keep, with the Commissioner setting the criteria, picking the committee that ranks the deals, and voting to approve them.

In 2014, the conservation groups of Florida united behind Amendment 1. They prepared commercials and ads, manatees and springs, the Everglades, bears and panthers, truly inspiring scenes of Florida’s most precious natural resources. They even brought in Jim Fowler, the beloved host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, whom Floridians had trusted on television for decades, to make the case on camera. Standing with a red-tailed hawk, he told voters the amendment would “preserve water quality, fishing and wildlife habitats without any new taxes,” and urged them to act now to ensure “clean water and abundant wildlife … for people to enjoy.”1 Watch it here: https://www.facebook.com/FCVoters/videos/267851906671866/

The people of Florida were sold a genuinely inspiring story. And they bought it: 3 out of 4 Florida voters approved Amendment 1, the most popular item on the entire 2014 statewide ballot, with every major conservation group in the state behind it.2

The promise was simple, and the mandate was overwhelming: dedicate a third of the state’s real-estate documentary-stamp taxes, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, to acquiring, restoring, and managing Florida’s conservation lands and waters, Springs, Wildlife habitats, Ranches, forests and rivers. Protected before they were gone.

That is not the program Florida has today.

And the story of how it changed is the story of a mandate redefined after the fact, in two stages, both of which the public has been left almost no way to see.

Stage one: the money was diverted, and the citizens and conservation groups that created the program, and who fought it lost on a technicality

The sums involved are large by any standard. Amendment 1 dedicates hundreds of millions of dollars per year, the official estimate ran from roughly $648 million in the first year toward well over a billion annually, to conservation.3

That is the scale of money this story is about: not a line item on the state budget, but one of the largest dedicated funding streams in state government.

And within months of the passage of Amendment 1, the Florida Legislature began spending that dedicated money on things voters never approved, agency salaries, operating expenses, overhead. So the conservation groups who had championed the amendment went to court to stop it.

Florida Defenders of the Environment filed first, in 2015. Their suit was joined by the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, the St. Johns Riverkeeper, and the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida, represented by Earthjustice, and the cases were consolidated in January 2017.4 Their claim was straightforward: the Constitution says this money is for acquiring and managing conservation land, and the Legislature was instead using it as a general-purpose slush fund.

They won. In June 2018, Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dodson ruled that the meaning of Amendment 1 was clear and the money had to go to land conservation. It was a landmark decision, a court telling the Legislature that a constitutional amendment is an order from the people, not a suggestion.

Then the state ran out the clock. Legislative leaders appealed. In 2019 the appellate court narrowed the ruling, and the case was sent back. By the time it was decided again, a new judge dismissed it as moot, not because the conservationists were wrong, but because so much time had passed and the money had already been spent that there was, the court said, no live controversy left to resolve.5 The appeals court affirmed that in 2024; the Florida Supreme Court declined to look at it in October 2024. The meaning of Amendment 1 remains, to this day, judicially unresolved.

Read that sequence once more. The citizens were right, a judge said so, and they lost anyway, because “already spent” became the state’s defense. You cannot claw the money back after the fact. Which means the only protection that ever works is being able to see the spending before it goes out the door. That is the lesson the whole rest of this series turns on.

Stage two: “conservation” itself was redefined
Losing the lawsuit settled the money question in the state’s favor. What happened next settled the meaning question, quietly, and without a vote. The state simply redefined the meaning of the word "Conservation"

Voters had pictured one thing: the state buying land, opening parks, protecting springs, guaranteeing public access. What the program increasingly became was something else, a system for paying private landowners to place easements, or deed restrictions, on land they continue to own and use.

The distinction is not a technicality; it is the whole game. When the state buys land outright, the public owns it, can visit it, and the protection is permanent. When the state buys an easement, the landowner keeps the title, keeps farming or ranching or hunting it, the public generally cannot set foot on it, and, as documented reporting has shown, the “permanent” restriction can later be released. The state’s own environmental agency says as much: easement lands restrict public access, and title stays in private hands.6

Now watch where the money went. The transparent, public-access program, Florida Forever, was starved: it received just $18 million last year, and for 2026-27 the House proposed to defund it entirely while the Senate offered $35 million, directed only to easements, with traditional public-land acquisition eliminated. The private-easement program, the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program, run by the Department of Agriculture, moved the other way, drawing about $250 million and then a record $425 million, including $225 million earmarked specifically for very large tracts over 6,000 acres.7 The state did not stop spending on “conservation.” It redirected conservation toward private land that the public paid to restrict but will never be allowed to use.

What it has become: a deed-restriction program run out of the Department of Agriculture

Strip away the language and here is the machine as it actually runs. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year, now a record $425 million, flow through the Department of Agriculture to buy development rights from private landowners, disproportionately large ones, who keep their land and their use of it.7

The deals are recorded by ranch and project name, scattered across Cabinet agendas, with no central, searchable registry of who is actually being paid.

And here is the part that should trouble anyone, whatever they think of any individual landowner: because the records list projects, not people, there is no public way to tell whether a single owner is receiving multiple payments through multiple entities, how much any one beneficial owner has collected in total, or whether the recipients overlap with the donors to the officials who approve the deals. I am not asserting that any particular landowner has done anything improper. I am stating something narrower and, in its way, worse: the system is built so that you cannot find out. That is not an oversight. As of 2026 the Legislature even raised the price threshold that triggers a mandatory second appraisal, from $1 million to $5 million, loosening scrutiny at the exact moment the spending hit a record.8

Ask the simple questions and you hit the wall. How much has this program paid out since Wilton Simpson became Commissioner? To whom? How many recipients got multiple deals? How many acres are open to the public, and how many were already protected by wetlands or floodplain rules before taxpayers paid to restrict them again? The Department’s answer is that the records are “public.” In practice, a citizen who asked merely for her own loan file was quoted about $400 to see it; the cost of assembling the whole picture is, by design, beyond what any ordinary person will pay.9

How the awards are made, and who controls every step

To see why this matters, follow how a deal actually gets done. The Department describes the process plainly, and so does its own rule.10

A landowner applies during a posted cycle. A Technical Review Team inside the Department analyzes the property, its habitat, hydrology, agricultural operation, and risk of conversion. Then a Selection Committee evaluates and ranks the projects and, by majority vote at a public meeting, sets the priority list. Finally the Governor and Cabinet, sitting as the Board of Trustees, approve it.

Stated that way, it sounds like a neutral, competitive process. Now look at who controls each lever, in the Department’s own words. The criteria applicants are judged against are, per FDACS, “the objective criteria set forth by Commissioner Simpson.” The committee that does the ranking is, per the binding rule, one the “Commissioner will designate”, “no fewer than five members drawn from divisions and offices within the Department.” And the final approval comes from the Cabinet, on which that same Commissioner sits and casts a vote.10

So one official sets the criteria, hand-picks every member of the ranking committee from within his own department, and then helps cast the final vote to approve the result.

Every person ranking these applications is a departmental designee who answers, through the chain of command, to the very official who set the criteria and will vote on the outcome. Whatever any individual member’s integrity, there is no independent decision-maker anywhere between the application and the award. The structure concentrates evaluation, ranking, and a share of final approval in a single office.

And the biggest money often skips even this. The 2026-27 budget set aside $225 million specifically for very large tracts over 6,000 acres “not previously funded”, a legislative earmark that routes money toward a category of projects rather than up through the ranked list.7 The Destin purchase didn’t come through the ranking process at all; it arrived as a single legislator’s budget proviso. The competitive process, such as it is, governs the ordinary deals. The largest dollars increasingly travel around it.

Then, at the end, the public gets exactly one thing: a press release. The Department announces that it has protected so many thousand acres at such-and-such ranch, the Commissioner is quoted on food security and Florida’s heritage, and the headline number is celebrated.11 What the announcement never contains is the part that would let a citizen judge the deal, who actually owns the ranch behind its name, what the land was independently appraised at versus what the state paid, whether that owner had received prior easement payments, what development rights and private uses they kept, or whether they appear among the donors to the officials who approved it. The announcement is the transparency. Everything a watchdog would actually need stays behind the records-fee wall. You are shown the ribbon. You are not shown the receipt.

The poster child: what happened in Destin Florida.

The transaction that finally made Floridians pay attention happened on the harbor in Destin.

On September 30, 2025, the Governor and Cabinet approved $83.3 million for roughly four acres of developed waterfront, more than twenty million dollars an acre. The figure was something close to ten times what the seller had paid for the property only a few years earlier, and it rested on a valuation prepared on the seller’s behalf rather than one the state independently commissioned.12 The seller was a Louisiana businessman whose name carried a decades-old federal bribery conviction. And the deal did not climb the program’s competitive ranking to reach the Cabinet; it arrived as a single legislator’s budget proviso, bundled with other parcels and approved together in one afternoon.

Not everyone went along quietly. The state’s own Chief Financial Officer objected to the price. Former state conservation officials questioned what taxpayers were actually getting, noting that a meaningful share of the “land” was state-owned submerged bottom and that millions were attributable to docks. The objections were noted, and the purchase went through anyway.12

Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson voted in favor, and defended it afterward: that without the purchase, the site might have become a wall of condominiums, and now no one would have to imagine that. (The full account is in the companion essay, “The Buy-Back.”)12

Destin was not the problem. Destin is the poster child.
Take that transaction and hold it up against everything in this essay. A price far above any independent appraisal. A valuation supplied by the party being paid. A seller most taxpayers would never have chosen. A path to approval that went around the competitive process entirely. A documented internal objection, overridden. And a public left to learn the details from reporters, weeks later, rather than from any transparent record at the time.12

That is why Destin is not an aberration. It is the poster child for the inherent problems of a program that spends enormous sums with weak appraisal discipline, routes its largest deals around its own ranking process, and offers the public almost no visibility into who benefits until the money is gone. Everything that makes Destin alarming is a feature of the system, not a one-time lapse.

And it exposed something specific about the man at the center of this series. Of every official who voted for Destin, Wilton Simpson is the one whose own department is supposed to be the state’s expert conservation buyer. The due diligence, the appraisal scrutiny, the protection of the public’s money in land deals, that is, more than anyone’s, his job. On the most-scrutinized conservation purchase in recent Florida history, he did not exercise it. That is, in my judgment, a fundamental failure by the state’s lead conservation purchaser, and a fair reason to ask whether this responsibility belongs in his department at all.

The valuation problem is not hypothetical, and not partisan

If this were only about Destin, one might call it an outlier. It is not. The concern that the state systematically overpays for this conservation land has been raised, on the record, by the state’s own Republican Chief Financial Officers, not once, but twice in a row.

In March 2024, CFO Jimmy Patronis cast the lone dissenting vote against three conservation-land purchases totaling about $193 million; DeSantis, Simpson, and the Attorney General voted yes. His objection was about price: the appraisals, he argued, were inflated, because a recent federal wetlands-permitting ruling had thrown the land’s development potential into question even as the state kept paying values that assumed it.13 In other words, the state was paying developable-land prices for land whose development had just become far less certain. A year and a half later, at Destin, his successor as CFO, Blaise Ingoglia, objected to the price again.

Two Republican CFOs, in succession, flagging the same thing: that the state keeps paying top-of-market, developable-land prices for conservation land, sometimes for land already constrained by wetlands or floodplain rules, land that could not easily have been developed in the first place. And Destin carried that problem to its logical extreme. There, taxpayers did not merely overpay; they paid for rights the state already owned, roughly a tenth of the parcel was sovereignty submerged land Florida already held, with millions more attributed to docks the paperwork gives no sign the state even meant to keep.12 The state bought back, at a premium, a slice of what it already owned.

Why one deal indicts the whole process

Step back and total it up. The state spent $83.3 million of the public’s money on a developed harbor parcel that the state’s own environmental experts judged to have little conservation value, with no independent state appraisal, on a valuation supplied by the party being paid, through a path that bypassed the competitive ranking, over a documented internal objection from the CFO, partly for rights the state already held, with the appearance of an expedited purchase benefiting a private seller.12

If a transaction carrying all of those features can move through the state’s conservation-purchase process to completion, then the process itself, not any single deal, is the problem. Destin is not the exception the system caught. It is the example the system produced.

And here is the part that should unsettle every taxpayer, whatever they conclude about Destin specifically. It became visible only because its size and its seller drew scrutiny. The same process, the same concentration of authority, the same seller-friendly valuations, the same absence of transparency, governs hundreds of millions of dollars in conservation spending every single year, almost none of which ever draws that kind of attention. Destin is simply the one deal the public got to see. Whether donor relationships ever play a role in who gets paid is exactly the kind of question an open record would answer and a closed one cannot. That casts a cloud not over four acres in Destin, but over every dollar spent the same way, in the dark.

What this series asks for

Three things, in order.

First, a full forensic audit of every conservation acquisition and easement funded with public money since Amendment 1 took effect, every recipient and beneficial owner, every appraisal versus price, every prior payment, every retained right, every release. If the spending is clean, the audit vindicates it. If it is not, the public finally learns what it paid for.

Second, real-time transparency going forward, a single, public, searchable database that posts every transaction, with beneficial owners and recent political-donation disclosures, before the vote, so the next Destin can be seen coming instead of reconstructed by reporters months later.

Third, structural reform. Article X, § 28 dedicates this money to conservation; it does not assign control of it to the Department of Agriculture. That was a later statutory choice, and it can be unmade.14 The companion proposal, the Florida Conservation Authority Act, would move Amendment 1 dollars out of FDACS and into an independent, transparent authority, prioritizing public access and measurable restoration over permanent payments to large private landowners, without changing one word of the constitutional purpose the voters approved.

Florida did not stop believing in conservation. It allowed conservation to be redefined, after the fact, into something its voters never approved, and built the books so that almost no one could watch it happen. Before the state spends another billion dollars, the people who dedicated that money are owed the one thing they have never fully been given: the ability to see exactly where it goes.

A note on sourcing. The litigation history is sourced to primary and contemporaneous accounts, Ballotpedia, the Florida Wildlife Federation’s “Amendment 1 at a Crossroads” timeline, Sierra Club Florida’s statements, Florida Defenders of the Environment, and the Earthjustice filing announcement, and the plaintiffs are named exactly as those sources record them. The funding figures (RFLPP’s record $425M, Florida Forever’s proposed cuts, the HB 1279 appraisal-threshold change) are footnoted to dated reporting and flagged for confirmation against the enrolled FY2026-27 budget and bill. The characterization of the easement program’s structure, private title, restricted public access, releasable restrictions, follows the Department of Environmental Protection’s own description. Where this essay reaches a judgment, that Destin reflects a fundamental failure by the state’s lead conservation purchaser, or that the program has been redefined away from voter intent, that is stated as the author’s opinion drawn from those documented facts, not as a finding of misconduct. No claim is made that any particular landowner is a donor or that any specific recipient acted improperly; the point is that the public record does not permit
anyone to know.

— Will Pitts

Sources & Notes
1. Jim Fowler, longtime host of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” appeared in a 2014 “Vote Yes on 1” television advertisement for the Florida Water and Land Legacy campaign supporting Amendment 1; the spot credits wildlife footage to Elam Stoltzfus and thanks the Tallahassee Museum. Quotations are drawn from the advertisement. Campaign advertisement, 2014 (copy on file).

2. Florida Amendment 1, the Water and Land Conservation Amendment, passed Nov. 4, 2014 with 74.96% of the vote (4,238,739 to 1,415,924), adding Art. X, § 28 to the state constitution and dedicating 33% of net documentary-stamp revenue to the Land Acquisition Trust Fund for 20 years. The ballot summary told voters the funds would be used “to acquire, restore, improve, and manage conservation lands.” It was the most popular item on the entire 2014 statewide ballot. Ballotpedia, citing the Florida Secretary of State and the Office of Economic & Demographic Research; Sierra Club Florida; Earthjustice.

3. The amendment was backed by a broad coalition, the Florida Water and Land Legacy Coalition, including the state’s leading conservation organizations. The official fiscal note estimated the dedicated revenue at $648 million in FY2015–16, rising toward roughly $1.268 billion by the twentieth year; advocates projected over $1 billion annually on average. Ballotpedia (fiscal note); Sierra Club Florida; Florida Wildlife Federation.

4. Litigation summary: Florida Defenders of the Environment sued in 2015; separate suits by the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, the St. Johns Riverkeeper, and the Environmental Confederation of Southwest Florida were consolidated into one case on Jan. 10, 2017 (Earthjustice counsel). The plaintiffs alleged the Legislature unconstitutionally spent Land Acquisition Trust Fund money on agency salaries and operating expenses rather than on acquiring and managing conservation land. June 2018: Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dodson ruled for the plaintiffs, holding the funds must be used for land acquisition, restoration, and management. House Speaker Richard Corcoran and Senate President Joe Negron appealed. Sept. 9, 2019: the First DCA reversed the trial court’s post-2015 limitation. The case was then dismissed as moot (Judge Layne Smith) on the ground that the money had already been spent; Feb. 2024 the First DCA affirmed the mootness ruling; Oct. 14, 2024 the Florida Supreme Court declined review, leaving the amendment’s meaning judicially unresolved. Sources: Ballotpedia; Florida Wildlife Federation, “Amendment 1 at a Crossroads”; Sierra Club Florida; Florida Defenders of the Environment; Earthjustice.

5. Sierra Club Florida characterized the mootness dismissal pointedly: the conservationists won at trial in 2018, the win was reversed in 2019, and the case was hardly languishing, the dismissal order was the 633rd document filed. The dismissal turned on delay and the fact that the money was already spent, not on a finding that the plaintiffs’ reading of the constitution was wrong. Sierra Club Florida, Jan. 2022.

6. The Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services administers the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program (RFLPP), which buys permanent agricultural conservation easements; the Department of Environmental Protection administers the Florida Forever and Florida Wildlife Corridor acquisition programs. Under DEP’s own description, conservation easements leave title with the private landowner, who continues to use the land, and, unlike fee-simple public lands, easement lands restrict public access except as specified in the document. FDACS and DEP program materials; DEP Conservation Easements FAQ.

7. Funding contrast: Florida Forever received $18 million in the prior year; for FY2026-27 the House proposed to defund it entirely and the Senate proposed $35 million directed only to easements on private agricultural land, eliminating traditional public-land acquisition. Over the same period the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program drew about $250 million (FY2025-26) and then a record $425 million in FY2026-27 ($200M standard; $225M earmarked for large-scale projects over 6,000 acres not previously funded). The trend is not perfectly one-directional: in 2025 Gov. DeSantis vetoed a legislative attempt to pull roughly $200 million out of Florida Wildlife Corridor land acquisition, restoring it to the acquisition pool, and proposed $115M for Florida Forever in his FY2026-27 budget. Note that the Florida Wildlife Corridor is not funded by a single program: there is no acquisition program dedicated to the Corridor, and Corridor lands are acquired through both DEP’s Florida Forever program and FDACS’s Rural and Family Lands Protection Program, plus separate appropriations (e.g., Ocala-to-Osceola general-revenue and gaming-revenue carve-outs). Since RFLPP’s 2001 inception it has preserved over 234,000 acres, more than 168,000 of them during Commissioner Simpson’s administration. Florida Phoenix / The Invading Sea, Feb. 23–24, 2026; WUSF / WFSU, July 2, 2025; Florida Conservation Group (FY25-26 figures); FL House staff analysis of HB 1417 (2024); FDACS data. [VERIFY the final enacted Florida Forever and RFLPP appropriations against the enrolled FY2026-27 budget.]

8. In 2025–2026 the Legislature raised the value threshold that triggers a mandatory second appraisal for a conservation-easement acquisition from $1 million to $5 million, described officially as “a more streamlined process for the program” (FDACS legislative summary; HB 1279).

9. The records exist but are not centrally searchable, and Florida’s public-records law (ch. 119.07(4), Fla. Stat.) authorizes “special service charges” for extensive staff time. In one documented instance, a citizen who requested her own state disaster-loan file and related emails was quoted approximately $400 to produce them (FDACS request P048463-091925, Sept. 19, 2025; quote in the author’s possession). See the companion essay, “The Farmer and the Sandbar.”

10. Process and authority: Per FDACS’s own program materials, applicants’ “evaluations will be based primarily on the objective criteria set forth by Commissioner Simpson,” and “The Rural and Family Lands Protection Program Selection Committee, appointed by the Commissioner of Agriculture, prioritizes applications after reviewing projects.” The binding rule confirms the structure: Rule 5I-7.007(1), F.A.C., provides that “The Commissioner will designate a Rural and Family Lands Selection Committee of no fewer than five (5) members drawn from divisions and offices within the Department.” The committee evaluates projects (5I-7.007(2)) and, at a public meeting under § 120.525, F.S., approves a ranked list by majority vote (5I-7.007(3)); the Governor and Cabinet, sitting as the Board of Trustees, give final approval. A Technical Review Team within the Department conducts the underlying analysis (Rules 5I-7.005–.006). Sources: FDACS Rural and Family Lands Protection Program website and FAQ; Fla. Admin. Code R. 5I-7.005–.007 (eff. 6/12/2023).

11. The pattern of disclosure is visible in the Department’s own announcements: e.g., the Dec. 17, 2024 release touting approval of roughly 62,665 acres of easements for about $206 million, named by ranch/project and headline dollar total, with the Commissioner quoted on food security and heritage, but without per-deal appraisal-versus-price detail, beneficial-owner identity, prior-payment history, or retained-rights disclosure. WUSF, Dec. 17, 2024; Audubon Florida, Mar. 2025; FDACS releases.

12. On Sept. 30, 2025, the Governor and Cabinet approved the $83.3 million purchase of approximately four acres of developed harbor property in Destin, over $20 million per acre, roughly ten times the seller’s reported ~$7.9 million purchase a few years earlier and far above the county’s appraisal (~$10.5 million). The property was owned by entities tied to Louisiana businessman Robert “Bobby” Guidry, who pleaded guilty in the 1990s to bribery in the Louisiana riverboat-casino case. The price relied on a valuation prepared on the seller’s behalf rather than one independently commissioned by the Department of Environmental Protection, and the item reached the Cabinet through a single-legislator budget proviso, bundled with other parcels (~11 parcels, ~30,478 acres, ~$278 million total). CFO Blaise Ingoglia objected to the price; former Florida Audubon official Clay Henderson noted that roughly a tenth of the acreage was state-owned sovereignty submerged land and that about $13 million was attributable to docks. Commissioner Simpson voted for the purchase and defended it: “I wonder what it would look like with 250 condos on it. Now, we will never have to imagine that.” See the companion essay, “The Buy-Back,” for full sourcing. Tampa Bay Times, Oct. 10, 2025; Craig Pittman, Florida Phoenix, Oct. 2, 2025; mypanhandle.com, Sept. 30, 2025.

13. In March 2024, CFO Jimmy Patronis cast the lone dissenting vote against three conservation-land purchases totaling about $193 million (DeSantis, Simpson, and AG Moody voted yes). Patronis argued the appraised values were inflated, noting that a recent federal wetlands-permitting ruling (the Moss decision) had affected the development potential, and thus the valuations, of the agricultural land, and that the state underfunds management of resources it already owns. The Destin objection a year and a half later came from his successor, CFO Blaise Ingoglia. WGCU / WUSF, Mar. 26, 2024; on Ingoglia, see the companion essay “The Buy-Back.” The broader concern that the program pays for easements on land already constrained by wetlands or floodplain regulation is documented in Craig Pittman’s reporting, Florida Phoenix, Mar. 7, 2024.

14. Article X, § 28 dedicates the documentary-stamp revenue to the Land Acquisition Trust Fund for conservation purposes; it does not assign administrative control of that spending to the Department of Agriculture. That authority was granted later by statute and appropriation (see, e.g., § 570.71, Fla. Stat., the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program) and can be reassigned by law. The reform proposed in the companion “Florida Conservation Authority Act” would move administration to an independent authority without altering the constitutional purpose of the funds.