In Land We Trust
By Barbara Tufty
How many times have you looked out your front door at your
piece of
You can make your wish come true, with the help of a
What is a Land Trust? A Land Trust is a nonprofit conservation
organization that is involved in preserving natural land resources---protecting family lands from being divided---historic places
from being destroyed---woodlands from being bulldozed---natural water sources and wildlife places from being paved over---agricultural
land from being plowed and turned into developments of hundreds of houses that need roads, water, sewage, schools and stores.
A Land Trust is a way to control NOW how your land will be used in the future, when you may be gone. It's a legal way to provide
you landowners with flexible and creative methods to keep your land in its natural beauty, just as you want it---forever.
Several strategies are used to preserve natural areas of various sizes and uses. A Trust may acquire the land through direct
donation, as a gift. Or outright buy it. A Trust also can provide funding to assist like-minded private or government buyers to purchase
and protect the land forever in its natural state. The most common and popular method is by preparing a conservation easement
agreement between the Trust and a landowner that the property will remain in private hands and be protected forever from unwelcome
activities such as logging, drilling or development.
A conservation easement
is a land use legal agreement between you, the landowner, and a Trust that permanently protects the scenic and natural qualities of
your property while allowing you to retain the title and use of your land---your trees that line the river, the fields and rolling
hills. Easements can be specifically and minutely tailored to meet your wishes regarding the future use of your land. The Trust sees
that those wishes are carried out in perpetuity.
An easement restricts land
development only to the degree that the donor wishes, so long as the conservation values are preserved. The owner sets down specific
rules to restrict any development to meet his or her desires. Perpetual easements become part of the deed and bind all future owners.
Typically, easements with a Trust can prevent development in floodplains, subdivision of family land into sales, logging of forests,
and other practices that you, the owner, wish to restrict. You can put as much land as you wish into a Trust—in the West, people
have put as many as 1500 acres into a Land Trust. The minimum size you can sign into a Trust is 20 acres, unless it contains unusual
valuable assets like a habitat of rare plants or animals. This issue of size, like many other personal issues, can be discussed and
agreed upon when you talk to Trust representative.
An easement on your property can give you
potential income and estate tax benefits. Your property tax can be reduced. Even though a conservation easement on your land
decreases the value of the land for property tax purposes, you get a reduction of the property tax liability. Property is assessed
at its true and actual value, i.e. the price for which such property would sell if voluntarily offered for sale. (
The grant of a
conservation easement to a qualified charitable organization will incur no federal gift taxes, or federal or State estate taxes, as
long as it is a qualified conservation contribution.
A bit of history. The idea for protecting land and its natural resources is not new. In the mid 1800s, many "village improvement societies" were
formed in
The
But beginning in the
early 1980s, the federal government lost interest in conservation. Leadership weakened, and efforts lagged in protecting the environment.
Clean Air and Clean Water laws passed in the 1970s continued to be ignored and broken; roads and malls and suburban developments sprawled
farther over the natural open spaces and agricultural lands. Private citizens and organizations began to undertake more conservation
action by themselves. Scientists had been writing and talking for years about the destruction of forests, wetlands, open spaces and
the warming of the earth. People paid more attention to the environment and the idea of protecting private land continued to grow,
especially with privately owned Land Trusts. Local governments can use a Land Trust to set aside woods or riversides for recreation
activities such as hiking or birding. By 1980 more than 400 Land Trusts were established, up from some 50 in the 1950s. By 1990 there
were nearly 900 Trusts, and today some 2,000 Trusts exist in every state throughout the
Many of these Trusts have been founded and run by volunteers and have been attached to what is now called the Land Trust Alliance which acts as a clearing house and umbrella organization promoting and protecting voluntary private land conservation. The Farmland Protection Act, founded in 2000 under the Department of Agriculture, acts in much the same way, as an umbrella, allowing landowners to voluntarily protect their farmland with easements that can be held or co-held with Land Trusts, thereby ensuring that their easement agreement will be passed on to authoritative groups, either private, or county, state or federal. The main difference between Land Trusts and the Farmland Protection Act is that Land Trusts are private and the Farmland Act is federal, and its local Boards are subject to change as political positions change.