Conservation Easements

by Herb Schwartz
January 30, 2001


Conservation Easements:
An International Movement
by Herb Schwartz
This column has focused primarily on mechanics: the creation, costs, uses, and estate planning elements of conservation easements. Let's get a new perspective. Let's climb up to a local ridgetop and look out at the rest of the U.S. and Latin America? what's happening?
On October 14, 2000, several members of the board of Sanctuary Forest, Inc. (a Mattole River watershed land trust) joined more than 1,400 people at the National Land Trust Alliance Rally in Portland, Oregon. The rally, initiated in 1985, is both a networking conference and an educational forum, with more than one hundred seminars and workshops on land conservation. These included "Conserving Working Forests in the Pacific Northwest" and "Biodiversity Conservation at the Suburban-Rural Frontier: New Opportunities for Land Trusts." Currently, local and regional land trusts have protected 4.7 million acres, up from 2 million acres as of 1988, with more than 1,200 local and regional land trusts developed in the 1990s. (The Land Trust Alliance has good information at www.lta.org.)
Other states have developed creative state tax incentives for land conservation. In 1983, North Carolina designed a program that gives 25 percent of the value of donated property to a government agency or a private nonprofit land trust as a tax credit against state income tax liability. In 1999, Virginia passed a law to provide tax credits for conservation easement donations, allowing $50,000 in tax credits for donations made in 2000, $75,000 for donations in 2001, and $100,000 for donations in 2002 and every year thereafter. Martha's Vineyard, an island off the Massachusetts coast, has a property transfer fee to buy conservation easements and open space. In November 1999, the Maine legislature submitted a $50 million bond issue, passed by the voters, to buy land and conservation easements that protect access to rivers, lakes, trails, ecological reserves, and so on. In December 1999, the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict donated twenty-six acres near their convent to a conservation easement held by the Minnesota Land Trust, protecting natural wetlands and 100-year-old oak trees.
During the last seven years, fifteen conservation easements were created in Monteverde, Costa Rica, the habitat of the quetzal bird. The private land conservation movement in Costa Rica began in 1992, when the Costa Rican Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center, with the assistance of The Nature Conservancy, created the first conservation easement in Latin America. In 1998, Mexico's first conservation easement protected 741 acres of the last cloud forest in the state of Veracruz. In July 1999, Ecuador's first conservation easement created a private reserve in the Amazon lowland rainforest. In Paraguay, two conservation easements near San Rafael have limited the use of 60,000 acres.
The Vermont Land Trust instructs us on a timely California issue. In May 2000, the VLT was granted a conservation easement on 15,736 acres of forestland surrounding hydroelectric facilities. This deal was a condition of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's relicensing the generating facilities. Given California's power generation crisis, this should be our model when PG&E starts building new power plants in backyards.
The Bush term may be a wonderful time for land conservation efforts. George's voters say they want greater private participation in governmental concerns. The U.S. Supreme Court is not unfriendly to George, giving the election to him. Land trusts are not government agencies, which is lucky, because the Supreme Court has not been supporting agencies. For example, the U.S. Corps of Engineers recently refused the conversion of an inland seasonal wetland, habitat for migratory birds, into a solid waste dumpsite. The Corps won the trial and intermediate appeals but lost before the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2001.
But land trusts are private citizen organizations approaching local problems through the marketplace. A new power plant should mean a 15,000-acre conservation easement buffer zone. Hey, George; support private citizen land conservation! Give states money to fund land conservation. It really is the Republican thing to do.



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