Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Land Trust/Conservation Easement

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

Dec 14, 2002:  Check out new URL at end of this (and every list message) for 
Cohousing-L info page.  Season's Greetings.  Fred, list manager.
- -

Yes we are doing this now. We placed our forest into a forest easement with
our County under a program they have, which reduced our  taxes  to very
little, but this is revocable by either the county  or us.  We are currently
working to draw up an conservation agreement with a land trust organization
to hold our easement. Unfortunately, the land trust organization most likely
to survive in our area is quite adamant that we pay considerable money for
their organization to hold the easement and this is holding us up. For
perpetuity to be a meaningful term, the organization that holds the easement
has to last hundreds of years. Most tiny land trusts seem to fail. You can
put non-development restrictions to run with the land, but in practice,
without an organization to monitor and hold future owners to these
agreements, title restrictions have not been binding over time, not are they
upheld in court. In our case, we want to protect the land from clear cut
logging and this can not be done without monitoring, since  logging permits
are issued without regard to title check, so even if we put logging on the
title, it would not matter if future owners wanted to log it, they could do
so.

We are currently working on an easement agreement which divides our land
into two parcels, called zones. In one zone, which covers about 3/4 of our
land, the restrictions are designed to keep the land in its natural forested
state for perpetuity. The other zone only restricts clear  cut logging and
subdivision. This gives us the opportunity to do almost anything else that
the future community members  want to do.  We  divided the land this way in
order to appease those that were concerned that we would be locking
ourselves out of something we may need in the future.



Rob Sandelin
Sky Valley Environments  <http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm>
Field skills training for student naturalists
Floriferous [at] msn.com


-----Original Message-----
From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
[mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of Bren Smith
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2002 9:13 AM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: [C-L]_Land Trust/Conservation Easement


Dec 14, 2002:  Check out new URL at end of this (and every list message) for
Cohousing-L info page.  Season's Greetings.  Fred, list manager.
- -

I'm wondering if any of the cohousing groups out there have looked into
locking up their land with a conservation easement. As I understand
this, it would prevent the cohousing group as well as any future owners
from ever subdividing, building on, or developing their land other than
what already exists on it.

The intent is to preserve a particular piece of land in perpetuity. I
know this probably doesn't make sense for smaller urban developments,
but I'm wondering if any larger cohousing properties have done so.

Bren
--
Bren Smith
bren [at] lene.com
http://www.lene.com
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