Mt. Piscgah Community Conservation Area Management Plan

The 94-acre Mt. Pisgah Community Conservation Area was established in 2003 when the Maine Forest Service granted a conservation easement to the Kennebec Land Trust and then sold the property to the Town of Winthrop. The successful protection of the Mt Pisgah tower property culminated a community-wide effort to conserve the area for outdoor recreation, water quality protection, and continued access to the lookout tower

Promoting Land Conservation in the Coastal Watershed through Local Faces, Special Places

The Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership provided nearly $3,300.00 to support the Southeast Land Trust of New Hampshire’s (SELTNH) promotion of donated conservation easements in the coastal watershed of Rockingham County. The Southeast Land Trust produced three short web-friendly videos, explaining land conservation from the perspective of a tree farmer, vineyard owner, and a community leader. In addition, the Land Trust hosted two workshops in Kingston and Epping for landowners interested in learning more about the tax and financial benefits of land conservation. Workshop invitations were mailed to more than 1,200 current use landowners within the region. Twenty-two landowners attended the two workshops. From these workshops, the Land Trust generated one donated and one bargain sale conservation easement in 2011 and one potential bargain sale conservation easement in 2012. While originally intended to be part of the grant funded project, the Land Trust was unable to complete a mobile tabletop display or a brochure on the enhanced federal tax incentive for donated conservation easements

Foreword

The land trust community and governments at all levels have become married to conservation easements as their land conservation tool of choice. The numbers speak for themselves: as of the date of this writing, there were reportedly 1,700 land trusts that have protected twelve million acres of land by use of conservation easements. The bulk of this growth both in conservation easements and the land trusts that deploy them has occurred since the 1980s when federal income tax incentives became more fully utilized by conservation easement donors. But the parties to this marriage have become complacent and inattentive in the face of a rapidly changing world resulting from global ecological catastrophes such as climate change and accelerated species extinction

Foreword

The land trust community and governments at all levels have become married to conservation easements as their land conservation tool of choice. The numbers speak for themselves: as of the date of this writing, there were reportedly 1,700 land trusts that have protected twelve million acres of land by use of conservation easements. The bulk of this growth both in conservation easements and the land trusts that deploy them has occurred since the 1980s when federal income tax incentives became more fully utilized by conservation easement donors. But the parties to this marriage have become complacent and inattentive in the face of a rapidly changing world resulting from global ecological catastrophes such as climate change and accelerated species extinction

Saving Special Places: Community Funding for Land Conservation

In New Hampshire communities, there is a groundswell of interest and activity in conserving land. New Hampshire currently has more than forty-five land trusts. There are conservation commissions in all but a handful of towns. Many of them are engaged in conserving their special natural lands. Over half of the towns in the state have conservation funds fueled by the Land Use Change Tax. There have been 62 applications for land conservation projects to the Land and Community Heritage Investment Program since its inception in 2000. New Hampshire voters are appropriating significant taxpayer funds to conserve undeveloped land. Twelve communities, mostly in the south central and southeastern tier of the state, including Amherst, Brookline, Newfields, and Stratham, approved bonds and appropriations totaling nearly $20.2 million in 2002 alone. New Hampshire is losing 12,000 to 15,000 acres of open space a year to development. That is equivalent to building houses, roads and shopping areas in an area half the size of an average New Hampshire town. It is open space that gives our towns their traditional character and appearance. Unless towns protect open space strategically and intentionally, it will be consumed by development. The goal of this guidebook is to help you, as a concerned citizen, elected official, or conservation commission member, achieve your town’s land conservation goals by securing local funding for land conservation in your community

Applying the Private Benefit Doctrine to Farmland Conservation Easements

Farmland or working-land conservation easements serve two purposes. One is charitable, to protect open space from development; the other is practical, to preserve the land in productive agricultural use. These purposes, however, create a tension in the easement itself that can force the land trust that holds the easement to choose between the two purposes when the easement, meant in part to protect the farm, threatens the farm\u27s continued viability. Neutral-impact amendments are amendments to working-land easements that allow farmers to improve farm production or viability without harming the conservation value of the easements. Such amendments seem beneficial: a land trust can advance one of its goals of keeping agricultural land productive–without sacrificing the other goal of preserving the conservation value of the land. By approving such an amendment, however, a land trust likely violates the private benefit doctrine and risks losing its tax-exempt status. This Note argues that the IRS should explicitly decide not to apply the private benefit doctrine to neutral-impact amendments of farmland and working-land conservation easements

Community Conservation Assistance

The Community Conservation Assistance Project had the following goal and objectives: Goal: Sustain and protect open space lands identified by communities and land trusts as critical to water quality and biodiversity through voluntary land conservation. Objectives: 1. With the SPNHF and other partners, establish a seacoast office for the Center for Land Conservation Assistance. 2. Provide education to various audiences in the seacoast region. 3. Create a library of relevant materials 4. Develop and compile publications 5. Establish with the SPNHF and other partners and participate in the first annual NH Land Conservation Conference 6. Evaluate program effectiveness 7. Coordinate town projects associated with the Natural Outreach Coalition

Zoning for Conservation Easements

Richardson and Bernard talk about zoning for conservation easements. Most conservation easements are perpetual and may have a huge impact on the land use in a community. With few exceptions, however, conservation easements have not been incorporated in any meaningful way into local land-use planning

Conservation Payments under Risk: A Stochastic Dominance Approach

Conservation payments can be used to preserve forest and agroforest systems in developing countries. To explain landowners’ land-use decisions and determine the appropriate conservation payments, it is necessary to focus on risk associated with agricultural price and yield volatility. A theoretical framework is provided for assessing land-use allocation problems under risk and setting risk-efficient conservation payments when returns are not necessary normally distributed. Stochastic dominance rules are used to derive conditions for determining the conservation payments required to guarantee that the environmentally-preferred land use dominates, even when land uses are not considered to be mutually exclusive. An empirical application to shaded-coffee protection in the biologically important El Chocó region of West Ecuador shows that conservation payments required for preserving shaded-coffee areas are much higher than those calculated under the assumption of risk-neutrality. Further, the extant distribution of land has a strong impact on the required conservation payments.risk, conservation payments, land allocation, stochastic dominance, agroforest systems, portfolio diversification

Municipal Conservation Outreach and Technical Assistance, Taylor, J

The New Hampshire Estuaries project awarded a grant of $24,700 to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests in May of 2002 for municipal conservation outreach and technical assistance in the area of municipal funds for permanent land conservation. SPNHF, working in close partnership with the Center for Land Conservation Assistance, conducted research into available mechanisms and funding sources for municipal conservation efforts. A publication summarizing the available options and providing information and case studies from a variety of New Hampshire towns was produced. Saving Special Places – Community Funding for Land Conservation, was distributed in December of 2002, just in time to assist towns seeking new municipal funding sources at the 2003 town meeting season. SPNHF/CLCA also provided a series of educational workshops on the topic of municipal fund raising for permanent land conservation. Eight workshops were held in the New Hampshire estuaries area, and seven were presented to at statewide events. Over 400 people attended the workshops. SPNHF/CLCA also provided technical assistance to twenty-four of the communities in the estuaries area over the period of the grant. Elements of the project were publicized in a wide range of print media in both statewide and estuary-area outlets.The education and outreach effort was quite successful. The number of towns applying land use change land monies to their conservation funds increased, as did the percent of the fund applied. The towns in the estuaries area that had the advantage of the new publication just as they were going into town meeting season with bond proposals in 2003 passed their bonds at a rate of 76$18,660,000 of new money available for conservation projects in those towns. Past the term of the grant, additional towns will be voting on increasing the amount of money from the Land Use Change Tax going to their conservation funds in 2004. Eight more towns in the estuaries area are considering open space bond proposals for the 2004 town meeting season, for a possible total of $19,600,000 in new funds for permanent land conservation. The coming challenge for the New Hampshire land conservation community will be to encourage the towns with these new sources of money to invest it wisely. Properties need to be selected according to guidelines that reflect a mix of natural resource values and local interests. Projects need to be conducted in a professional manner to insure long-term viability and excellent stewardship