Volume 2, Issue 2
May, 2003

BRRLT to Acquire Conservation Easement
on the Old John Schell Farm in Bethel

In early 2000 BRRLT Board member and lifetime conservation activist Leo Mast expressed interest in donating to BRRLT an agricultural conservation easement on his small farm in Bethel, known as the “Old John Schell Farm”, in far western Watauga County. According to Leo Mast, “It has been one of my most satisfying and significant accomplishments to make arrangements for keeping the Bethel farm of my maternal grandparents in the family and for helping to preserve its rural character by donating an agricultural conservation easement to BRRLT.”

Leo Mast has fond memories of visits to his grandparent’s house from age two onward. “I am glad I had the opportunity tot get to know my self-reliant grandparents and to get a sense of living life in a remote part of the county during the Great Depression, before the REA had delivered electric power to the community. If it was a hard life, I never heard a complaint. The always had a positive outlook.”

In an effort to assist Mast, who expressed doubts that he could cover all of the costs involved himself, BRRLT began searching for transactional costs funding for this project. This would cover the needed survey, legal, staff time and overhead, environmental site assessment, and stewardship costs of establishing such an easement. These costs were included in a proposal sent to Clean Water Management Trust Fund in the fall of 2001, which was recently funded.

The “Old John Schell Farm”, consisting of about 37 acres, has a very well maintained older frame farmhouse dating to about 1930 and several small outbuildings. It is about half open pasture and orchard and half wooded. It has excellent water quality values and is excellent wildlife habitat. The agricultural conservation easement projected for this tract will provide for continued agriculture, forestry, hunting, and other traditional uses of the land, but will preclude extensive development.

LTA Lauds Senate Action
Senate Approves Conservation
Tax Incentives for Landowners
April 9, 2003, Washington, DC

The U.S. Senate passed conservation tax incentives today as part of a bill to aid charities. The CARE bill (S 476) includes four such incentives - one for landowners who donate conservation easements on their lands, one for landowners who sell their land to a conservation organization, one allowing nonprofits to use tax-exempt bonds for conservation of forests, and one exempting conservation grants from the U.S. Department of Interior's Partners in Wildlife Program from taxation. The bill will need to be approved by the House of Representatives before it becomes law.

" These incentives will help farmers, ranchers, and other landowners who want to protect their land from development," noted Land Trust Alliance (LTA) President Rand Wentworth. "The Senate recognizes that private, voluntary land conservation offers the best hope for protecting the American landscape. These new tax benefits will dramatically increase the number of landowners who will choose to conserve their land."

The Land Trust Alliance gave special recognition to Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Max Baucus (D-MT), who co-sponsored the legislation, and to President George W. Bush, who made a campaign promise to support conservation tax incentives and has included it in each of his budgets. "Senators Grassley and Baucus, and President Bush, have led the way for a new generation of conservation incentives for private landowners," noted Mr. Wentworth.
Section 106 of the CARE package allows landowners who donate a conservation easement to a nonprofit organization or government agency ( permanently limiting the amount of development ( to deduct the value of their gift over 16 years rather than the six years previously permitted. The bill also increases the amount that can be deducted in any one year from the current 30 percent of the donor's income to 50 percent, with provisions allowing farmers and ranchers to deduct all of their income under certain circumstances. In no case can the deduction exceed the appraised value of the gift.

Under present law, landowners who donated a conservation easement were limited to deducting just 30 percent of their adjusted gross income in any year, for a maximum of six years. That meant if a landowner earned $50,000 annually - rather typical for America's farmers and ranchers - and donated an easement worth $1 million, the landowner could only deduct $15,000 in any year, up to a maximum of $90,000.
" The law needed to be changed to give a fair incentive to people giving extraordinary donations that were worth many times their annual income," stressed LTA Public Policy Director Russ Shay. "It only makes sense to allow ranchers, farmers and other middle income landowners to get an incentive in proportion to the value of their gift, rather than to the size of their income."

Conservation easements are contracts that retire development rights from a piece of land to serve a public conservation purpose. The landowner continues to own the land, and can continue to farm or ranch the property.
Section 107 of the CARE bill would cut capital gains tax by 25 percent on sales of land or of conservation easements to a conservation charity or government agency. It is modeled on the 50 percent exclusion proposed by President Bush in his budget.

Section 108 of the CARE bill would exclude from taxation grants to landowners from the Department of Interior's Partners for Fish and Wildlife program, which shares in the cost of improving wildlife habitat on private lands.
The managers' amendment to the bill also included a provision setting up a pilot program under which up to $2 billion in tax-exempt bonds could be issued by nonprofit organizations to purchase land for conservation, with the bonds repaid by renewable resource use on the land.
" In making a decision to protect their lands, landowners can give their communities a never-ending gift," said Mr. Wentworth. "Congress is making it possible for more landowners to do this, and it is a wonderful contribution to conservation of the American landscape."

The Land Trust Alliance, founded in 1982, is the nation's leading authority on private, voluntary land conservation. It represents more than 1,250 nonprofit land trusts that have protected more than 6.2 million acres of open space across the country. Headquartered in Washington, DC, LTA has regional offices in Portage, MI (Midwest Program), Saratoga Springs, NY (Northeast Program), Seattle, WA (Northeast Program), Durham, NC (Southeast Program) and Grand Junction, CO (Southwest Program). For more information about LTA, go to www.lta.org.

• • • • •

Two other Clean Water Management Trust Fund grant awards, totaling $50,000, will provide limited transactional cost funding for negotiating agricultural conservation easements on up to six additional farms in Alleghany County. These two projects, called respectively the Brush Creek Project and the Waterfalls Creek Project, when completed will provide for protection of significant streams in the New River watershed and two areas of quite unusual wildlife habitat, but also for several excellent productive farms. Both projects will also serve to protect and buffer existing farmland tracts which are already under agricultural conservation easements. Thus, by building on existing nodes of protected farmland in each case, BRRLT hopes to eventually be able to protect much larger blocks of adjacent, or nearly adjacent, farmland, possibly totaling about 1800 acres.

The 2003 General Assembly returns to Raleigh facing a projected $2 billion budget deficit, which threatens funding for land protection in North Carolina. The Conservation Trust for North Carolina is working in partnership with the North Carolina Land Trust Council (see insert) to address the state’s land and water conservation needs amidst this fiscal crisis. The land trust community hopes to protect and expand the state’s resources and incentives for land conservation by pursuing the following:

• Securing full funding for the Clean Water Management Trust Fund and increasing funding for the Farmland Preservation Trust Fund. Funding of the state’s natural resource trust funds enables land trusts and other conservation organizations to leverage additional private and public dollars for land protection.
  
• Establishing a dedicated revenue source for the Clean Water Management Trust Fund and Farmland Preservation Trust Fund while expanding existing dedicated funding for the Natural Heritage Trust Fund and Parks and Recreation Trust Fund.
  

• Supporting the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ land protection initiative, “One North Carolina Naturally.”

As president of the Land Trust Steering Committee, I would like to take this opportunity to give a brief summary of the strategic planning process members of the Land Trust Council are participating in to increase our capacity for land protection.

The Conservation Trust, in partnership with the North Carolina Land Trust Council and the national Land Trust Alliance, has been facilitating the strategic planning process with support from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. This new strategic approach will enable us to advance to a new level of efficiency, professionalism and stewardship in protection of the state’s land and water resources. Over 100 land trust staff and board members attended and participated in three regional forums in January: Mountain Forum, Asheville, January 28; Piedmont Forum, Greensboro, January 30; Coastal Forum, Wilmington, January 31. The Forums provided an opportunity for land trust staff and board members to discuss critical statewide and regional issues such as:

• Facilitation and improved communication among land trusts
• Opportunities for region wide land protection priorities
• Clarification of organizational niches for those land trusts that overlap in mission and geographic focus
• Development of a land trust community map of land protection priorities
• Importance of a statewide public awareness campaign
• Speaking as a stronger collective voice to state and federal decision makers
• Greater collaboration with other conservation organizations
• Greater collaboration among land trusts in seeking land protection funding sources

There was growing recognition among individual land trusts at the forums that each land trust’s goals can be greatly enhanced by acting as a unified land trust community. At the statewide Land Trust Assembly in March, the land trusts will come together again to evaluate progress to-date and to review the new statewide land protection priority map.
On another note, The Conservation Trust also created a new board position for a Land Trust Council representative to serve as a liaison between the two organizations. I am currently serving in that capacity, and feel that our time spent together is essential.

In closing, I am very excited about the unparalleled opportunities for land trusts to create a new foundation for saving the places we so passionately love. Together, we are forging forward in the right direction.

Jeff Fisher
Land Trust Council Steering
Committee Head

• • • • •

The Blue Ridge Rural Land Trust Board of Directors and Staff is currently working on a number of very interesting and/or promising projects that should develop over the next two years. These include:

BRRLT is working to protect the largest
remaining apple orchard in Wilkes County.

E.  The ongoing effort to acquire sufficient funding from Clean Water Management Trust Fund to establish agricultural conservation easements on two Christmas tree farms in the French Broad River watershed. The funding aspect of this project looks near certain at this time, however the negotiations needed to develop guidelines acceptable to both the Christmas tree growers and CWMTF may be protracted. We are extremely fortunate to have two Christmas tree growers who desire to go through this process and protect their farms through conservation easements. Given the amount of land controlled by the Christmas tree industry in our area, BRRLT considers this effort to be of extreme importance. (300 acres initially, potentially thousands if a successful model is established)

Thus the rest of 2003, as well as 2004 and 2005, promises to be a quite busy, eventful, and, hopefully, productive period for Blue Ridge Rural Land Trust.

• • • • •