Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Attorney calls easements a 'government land grab'

In recent years, conservation easements—agreements between landowners and nonprofit organizations—have gained popularity as a way to protect wildlife, provide various kinds of tax exemptions as well as prevent land and mineral development with an eye toward permanent preservation. At the same time, there has been concerns these easements have caused erosion of local tax bases and property devaluations, along with imposed management restrictions, arbitrary contractual language and fears of close relationships between multinational environmental groups, federal agencies and land trusts. Hageman, as keynote speaker, said there needs to be more public discussion about the value of conservation easements and the implications they bring to counties in terms of taxation and long-term property management issues. Those issues include partial ownership of the land by the grantor of the easement while relinquishing the right to use the land for development. “It often limits all development,” Hageman said. “That includes mineral development and that sort of thing.” Easements are contracts, and the language that is used, Hageman said, will dictate how the contract is enforced. Often, the easement can be transferrable by the grantee, and sometimes, the permission of the landowner-grantee is not needed. “That means you may very well find yourself as the landowner being a partner with someone you never entered into that contract with. That can be the federal government, it can be another land trust, all different things,” Hageman said. If the land is sold, the easement remains in perpetuity. “It doesn’t matter who the land is sold to. It runs with the land,” Hageman said. “It is held in perpetuity. In Wyoming, we interpret that to be 999 years. All future landowners are bound by the terms of that deed.” There are tax incentives associated with easements and disasters, too, Hageman said. Hageman said easements devalue the largest single holding farmers and ranchers have. “The reason there is a tax consequence is that there is a difference between the value of the before the easement is granted as compared with the value after it’s granted,” Hageman said. “Easements are intentionally designed to devalue your property.”...more

Some 10 million acres are now held in easements by 1,700 different land trust organizations around the nation.

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