Impact of M-CORES Highway Project on our Refuge

photo from Fox 51 Gainesville

Multi-Use Corridors of Regional Economic Significance (M-CORES) is a massive, landscape-scale development across the remaining rural areas of Florida, including refuge lands in Levy and Dixie counties. If implemented, it represents the greatest challenge to Florida conservation in 40 years. It may go through Levy and Dixie counties just north of the Refuge boundary.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law in May 2019. He says it “is intended to re-vitalize rural communities, encourage job creation and provide regional connectivity while leveraging technology, enhancing the quality of life and public safety, and protecting the environment and natural resources.”

Friends of the Lower Suwannee & Cedar Keys NWRs is concerned about the overall degradation that this project will cause to the ecosystem of the Refuge and the surrounding region. Since the late 1970s, when such a project was last proposed and when the Refuge was established, in part, to counter that proposal, the Lower Suwannee Refuge has been a buffer preserving the quality of water in the Suwannee River and the Gulf, protecting and preserving the flora and fauna of this last stand of undeveloped coastline in the country. A byproduct of the Refuge’s protection of the wildlife is that it also protects the fishing- and tourism-based economies that are the core of our way of life.

If this highway project proceeds, the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge is not large enough or strong enough to protect the wildlife, or us, against the direct and indirect degradation that M-CORES would bring to the environment and natural resources that the Governor says he wants to enhance.