Cutting Preservation Funding

I don’t often write about contentious things on this blog, but this week I was flabbergasted when I learned the story of what happened to historic preservation funding in Florida. I think it’s important to share because it was something that appears to be so startling and unprecedented that I felt it needed the light of day shined upon on it immediately.

For us in Florida there isn’t much we can do for this year, but hopefully preservationists in other states will learn from this and be aware. To be clear, I’m a very free market guy. While I appreciate government funding of my industry I think that my company and many others will still be able to produce quality work in historic restoration with or without the government’s money.

So then what’s this really about? Let’s dig in.

Preservation Funding Done For?

In florida we have a great program for historic preservation projects across the state. We don’t have a tax credit program like a lot of states and so this is one way the state of Florida can promote the preservation and restoration of historically significant projects in our home state.

The main vehicle for this is called the Special Category Grants run by the Division of Historical Resources. Each year applicants submit their projects for consideration by a Historic Commission. The commission is a made up of preservation professionals who volunteer their time and efforts. Folks like architects, contractors, professional planners, and others with extensive experience in multiple facts of historic preservation.

This commission does a ton of work to examine the grant submittals and rank them according to their opinions of how well organized the projects are, how meaningful the historic properties are, and how closely the projects plan to follow the Secretary of Interior’s Standards. Their ranking are then submitted to the Secretary of State and the legislature.

Here’s where things went off the rails.

Dishonest Appropriations

Each year the legislature has appropriated whatever money they felt was appropriate to be spent on the grants projects. Some years there was a lot of money and every project got funded. Some years the budget was tight and only a few projects got funded. And some years the legislature decided there just wasn’t enough money in the budget to fund any of these projects and they appropriated $0.

Those years were tough for preservationists, but hey that’s how the cookie crumbles. But in June of 2025 something different happened. Something more sinister. The legislature decided there was no money to be had for the Special Categories Grants which is their discretion, but instead they added 11 pet projects that had not been reviewed by the Historic Commission and have less stringent oversight.

Millions of dollars in projects all across the state for little projects that appear to be designed to grab votes. Rather than listening to the Historic Commission’s exert advice, a commission that was setup by the state to help them determine where funding should go, they just cherry picked random projects that were completely unvetted giving the appearance that they are being fiscally responsible by “cutting the budget” when they simply just took the same money and spread it out amongst their friends or communities to buy votes.

I encourage anyone who reads this to pay close attention to your representatives. Cutting budgets is fine and probably something we need to do a better job of in American government. But what we really need is transparency so we can keep our representatives accountable.

So, pay attention to what is happening to your preservation dollars. Are they being cut or are they being moved to benefit something other than preservation?