The Independent View
September 1, 2016
Nothing Easy
About Easements
By Campbell Gardett
Independent Candidate for County Commissioner
HERE’S WHAT I KNOW: Conservation easements are coming on strong as a
tool for land management in the West.
HERE’S WHAT I DON’T KNOW: Are conservation easements a good thing or a
bad thing? It depends. They’re all different.
HERE’S WHAT I’D LIKE TO KNOW: What do conservation easements mean
for the future of Custer County?
Conservation easements are voluntary, legal arrangements for restricting
development on private land. The landowner signs away certain rights. Those rights
then belong to a land trust or to government. In return, the landowner gets
payments or tax breaks. And the restrictions last forever, even if the property is
sold.
It’s easy to see why many people see conservation easements as the business
end of the environmental industry. No need to buy the property to prevent
development. Just acquire a few critical rights. And of course, federal tax policy is
there to help.
But that’s not the whole story. There are lots of people who want to preserve
our landscapes and ways of life, not just “environmentalists.” When the landowner
signs away his development rights, it’s because he wants the view or the wildlife or
the watershed kept the way it is.
Conservation easements may also help keep farm and ranch land in the
family. And many easements pay for improvements to the land or watershed.
The fact is, this issue cuts more ways than a saber. “It’s the landowner
exercising his private property rights,” say the environmentalists. “No,” say others,
“it’s one generation dictating to another – one person selling rights that really
belong to a future heir.”
Whatever it is, it’s growing fast. There are more that 1,100 land trusts now in
business. And as of July, there were 116,864 conservation easements in the U.S.,
totaling 24,557,278 acres.
I did a quick survey of conservation easements in Custer County. Here’s what
our three main land trusts reported to me:

Nature Conservancy: 9 properties, 6,700 acres

Wood River Land Trust: 10 properties, 3,500 acres

Lemhi Regional Land Trust: 2 properties, 487 acres.
In addition, the Forest Service holds 92 easements on some 17,000 acres
around the Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA), affecting both Custer and
Blaine Counties. The SNRA law was ground-breaking in its use of conservation
easements.
For Custer, this means somewhere near 10 percent of our private land is
subject to conservation easements. These lands continue to pay property taxes, even
as they preserve viewscapes. But on the other hand, their dollar value has been
decreased, and of course, their future is restricted.
So: Good or bad?
I have one main problem with conservation easements. I’m concerned that
they freeze us into an old and rigid conception of “environment vs. development,”
one that dates to the 1970s. That could shut the door to new approaches, new ways
of thinking, even new ways of living.
In a day when cars are about to drive themselves and national currencies
may go digital, should we really be tying ourselves down this much? Who knows
what unthought-of avenues we may be closing off?
Whatever the pros and cons, I believe we need less fear of the future and
more faith in the generations that follow us.