County's Top Conservation Target Sold to a Homebuilder for $12 Million. Now All New Land Buys Are Frozen.

The 50 acres of Matanzas River marsh that St. Johns County ranked as its single most important piece of land to preserve sold to a homebuilder on July 30 for $12 million, and the county's conservation program has since been told to stop buying anything new while officials wait to see what Florida's property tax overhaul does to the budget. The tract, in the southeastern part of the county, was the top-ranked target on the Land Acquisition and Management Program's 2025 list. Ashley Homes bought it.

The county did make an offer. Its appraisal came in around $6.8 million, and staff assembled roughly $7 million using grant money. The seller said no and took the better number. LAMP is a willing-seller program, which means the county can rank a property first, fund it, and still lose it at the closing table.

What was lost is specific. Ryan Mauch, the county's staff liaison to the LAMP board, described the parcel as the most northerly mile of marsh coast left in that part of the county, and said buying it would have stitched together a conservation corridor running south to the Moses Creek Conservation Area. That corridor is now interrupted by private property with a homebuilder's name on the deed.

Then came the freeze

Earlier this year, as commissioners started work on the fiscal year 2027 budget, LAMP was directed to hold off on new acquisitions entirely. Mauch said the program was asked to have a hiatus on any new purchases for now, and that everything is otherwise status quo: staff keep taking in and scoring applications from landowners, they just cannot move to buy.

The reason is Tallahassee. State lawmakers passed a proposed constitutional amendment in June that would raise the homestead exemption on non-school property taxes from $50,000 to $150,000 starting January 1, 2027, with a further increase in 2028. School taxes are untouched. County taxes are not. Voters decide in November, and it needs 60 percent to pass. Until then, no county in Florida knows what its 2027 general fund actually looks like, and St. Johns County has responded by parking the checkbook that buys conservation land.

LAMP has about $5 million on hand. For scale, the parcel it just lost went for $12 million.

What is still on the list

With the Matanzas tract gone, the program's priority properties are these:

Property	Where	Size
Bailey family ranch	Bishop Estates Road	~70 acres
Adams property	CR 13, Elkton area	~94 acres
McCullough Creek tract	CR 13 South	~18 acres
Christina Drive / Shores Blvd.	St. Augustine Shores	~2.8 acres
Glidden property	CR 13 N., Picatata area	~2.8 acres

The Bailey ranch on Bishop Estates Road is a working ranch in the fast-growing northwest corner of the county, the Julington Creek and Fruit Cove side. The CR 13 properties sit along the St. Johns River corridor, where the county has been trying to link parcels to existing state conservation land.

Why the math keeps losing

LAMP started around 1999 and 2000, went dormant during the 2008-09 crash, and was restarted in 2021. It now owns 13 properties, used for the kind of low-impact recreation that does not require a parking garage: hiking trails, kayak launches, paddling routes.

Funding has never kept pace with what waterfront acreage costs here. For the current fiscal year, commissioners put $500,000 from the general fund into the program and moved $1.5 million out of the Tree Bank Fund, a total of $2 million. In March, Commissioner Ann Taylor, the board's LAMP liaison, said flatly that $500,000 does not make a dent in properties of this caliber and that the county does not have enough funding for the program. In December, commissioners discussed reworking impact fees so that development itself would help pay for conservation land.

Meanwhile the private market moves in weeks, not budget cycles. A grant application takes months. A homebuilder's offer does not.

Two things will determine whether LAMP buys anything in the next year. The first is the November ballot, which sets the revenue picture the county is currently guessing at. The second is the fiscal 2027 budget itself, which commissioners will work through this fall and which decides whether the program gets new money or keeps living off the $5 million already in the account. Landowners can still nominate property in the meantime through the county's LAMP page, and the conservation board's meetings remain open to the public.

More local coverage is always at St. Johns Community Website, and we post updates as they break on Facebook. Got a view on whether the county should be pausing land buys right now? Join the conversation in our Community Forum. You can read more government and growth stories on our government & politics page, or browse recent news from around the county.

Header photo: Ebyabe / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)