Kaine's land preservation falling short of his goals
Source: Roanoke.com, by Tim Thornton
August 14, 2007
The governor is eyeing Tinker Mountain to help fulfill his plans to preserve acreage.
In April 2006, Gov. Tim Kaine told hundreds of people gathered at the annual Environment Virginia symposium at Virginia Military Institute that his administration plans to preserve an additional 400,000 acres of land throughout the state by 2010.
By preserve, Kaine means protect from development.
Kaine, who pledged during his gubernatorial campaign to be an environmental steward and to find a better way to coordinate the pace of development around the state, will be in the Roanoke Valley today to promote a conservation initiative on Tinker Mountain. More than a year into his four-year term, less than one-quarter of the 400,000-acre goal has been attained.
It's a bold goal. The Virginia Outdoors Foundation, a state agency leading the conservation effort, protected fewer than 330,000 acres between its creation in 1968 and Kaine's announcement. So Kaine set a goal to preserve more land in four years than the foundation had in the previous 38.
According to Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Preston Bryant, the commonwealth put more than 95,000 acres under protection in 2006. That's about 41,000 acres above average, but still off the 100,000 acres-per-year pace needed to meet Kaine's goal.
The path to success is simple, said Bob Lee, executive director of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation: "It's not rocket science. We've just got to get more people involved."
Kaine has said that of all the development Virginia has experienced in the 400 years since Jamestown's founding, more than a quarter of it came in the past 15 years. He also said that at the current rate, Virginia will experience as much development during the next 40 years as it did in the past 400.
"With every passing day, land is becoming more expensive and scarcer," Kaine said. "I will set and meet this preservation goal during my term -- not just because it's the right thing to do. I will do it because if I don't, the opportunity to do it will not be there for future governors and future Virginians."
The Virginia Outdoors Foundation is one of more than 30 organizations, state agencies and local governments that hold conservation easements in Virginia. With the 1966 Open-Space Land Act, the General Assembly authorized public entities -- local governments and state agencies such as the Department of Forestry -- to hold conservation easements. The 1988 Virginia Conservation Easement Act extended that authority to private nonprofit groups such as the Western Virginia Land Trust and the New River Land Trust.
The Virginia Outdoors Foundation holds about 80 percent of the conservation easements in Virginia. It has a $3 million budget and about 40 full- or part-time employees
The foundation's chief conservation tool is the conservation easement, an agreement negotiated between a landowner and an easement holder that limits development rights. In exchange, the landowner gets a package of state and federal tax breaks. On rare occasions, landowners get a direct payment.
Last year, the Virginia Outdoors Foundation put a record 71,227 acres under easement. That brought the agency's total to 2,200 easements -- more than any other land trust in the country -- covering 400,498 acres.
Halfway through 2007, the foundation had recorded easements on just under 1,000 acres. The agency's board approved another 21,000 acres of easements at its June meeting, an early step in the process. Typically, many of those acres won't be under easements by the end of the year.
Two years ago, the foundation was reluctant to consider easements on tracts smaller than 50 acres. Now, with the new push and increasing applications, the trip line is 100 acres.
The foundation has 10 easement specialists. Each of them can write about 40 easements a year. Because it takes about as much time to write a 27-acre easement as a 270-acre easement, the foundation is focusing on larger deals.
"That doesn't mean we won't do properties less than 100 acres," Lee said. "We typically don't say 'never' to an easement project. We might say, 'Not now.' "
If an easement proposal covers 100 acres or more, the staff is automatically cleared to work on it. If the tract is 40 to 99 acres, easement specialists must convince the agency's deputy directors that the land is special enough to justify the effort. For tracts smaller than 40 acres, the deputy directors have to convince Lee.
The governor has said he's leaning heavily on the Virginia Outdoors Foundation to achieve his goal. Lee estimates his agency will provide 300,000 acres of the governor's 400,000-acre goal.
But Bryant said the administration has always known it would need a few big scores, too, so it's approaching the challenge the way a college approaches a capital campaign -- identifying potential donors and asking for their help.
The Department of Forestry has a list of everyone who owns more than 1,000 acres in Virginia, Bryant said. Those people can expect someone to knock on their doors, asking them to contribute acreage toward the governor's goal.
Right now, according to government statistics, Florida spends $25 per capita on land conservation. Maryland spends $21. North Carolina spends $4.35. Virginia spends $1.45.
About 20 percent of the land in New York City is in some kind of preservation covenant, compared with 14 percent in Virginia, according to Roger Holnback, executive director of the Western Virginia Land Trust. Most of that Virginia figure is federally owned land, such as national forests, that are not as strongly protected as land covered by conservation easements.
Even so, some in Virginia worry the state is going too far, spending money to protect land that doesn't need to be protected and putting so much land out of reach of development that we're running out of places to build houses.
David Hurt, a Franklin County supervisor who lives on land under a conservation easement, dismisses both arguments.
State law prohibits easements on land that has no development value and on land that local governments have designated for development.
Whether there is such a thing as land that can't be developed is another issue.
"There are places up Windy Gap Mountain that, when I was a kid, my dad would have said, 'That's billy goat land. Nobody could ever build a house up there,' " Hurt said. "And they've got houses perched on the side of cliffs, almost, that are peering over Roanoke.
"We're not in danger of running out of places for people to sleep. We're more in danger of running out of places to grow food and grow timber and for wildlife to have a place to live, and to have areas to recharge aquifers and just provide all of those natural processes that give us everything from oxygen to breathe to food to eat."
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