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The History and Future of Florida Forever

VISIT FLORIDA via Flickr
The Everglades

Since 2001 Florida has protected more than 2.4 million acres of land through the Florida Forever program. And in 2014 75% of voters said they want tax money to go toward land conservation. Yet, lawmakers have zeroed out Florida Forever funding for three years in a row. We’ll take a look at the history, and future, of Florida Forever with the Nature Conservancy's Land Program Manager, Lindsay Stevens, and Will Abberger, director of The Trust for Public Land’s Conservation Finance service.

We're also joined by Cathy Olson, Conservation Lands Manager with Lee County Parks & Recreation to discuss Conservation 20/20, the county's environmentally-sensitive land acquisition and stewardship program. This program, which preserves and protects environmentally critical land in Lee County for the benefit of​​​ present and future generations in Southwest Florida, has acquired 128 properties totalling more than 25,000 acres since 1996.

 

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.