| 4/13/2009 12:09:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article | Conservation Easements: bad policy for city land
 | John Nephew
Maplewood City Councilmember
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On March 23rd, the Maplewood City Council voted 4-1 to proceed with a conservation easement on the Priory Preserve. I was the only dissenting vote.
Some people believe a conservation easement will stop the Priory from ever being sold. This is not true. In fact, most people put conservation easements on land because they expect it to be sold, and they want the easement to restrict future owners.
Conservation easements could be the first step towards privatizing the city's parks and preserves. Once an easement is in place, it'll be easy for politicians to argue that the easement protects the environment, so it's no longer important for the land to be actually owned by the public.
A conservation easement takes a certain set of property rights and puts them in the hands of a third party. For example, a conservation easement might prohibit anyone from cutting down trees in my yard. I grant this easement to a third party (such as a land trust). Then they can use the easement to take legal action if I or a future landowner violates the terms of the easement. It doesn't stop me from selling my land to a new owner, it just means the new owner is subject to the same restrictions.
If some private party can find a use that still complies with the terms of the easement, a future politician might argue, why not sell it to them, and save the public the costs of ownership?
And there are many other problems with conservation easements on public land. For example, we're paying the trust to take an easement on the Priory (fees total nearly $24,000), and we also agree to reimburse their legal bills for any successful easement-enforcement lawsuits they bring against us. Above all, I'm concerned with the basic principle: We're effectively giving significant control over the land -- both enforcement of the easement terms, and determination about whether our staff naturalists' management strategies comply with it -- to a non-profit corporation, forever.
After my recent experience with Mayor Longrie's actions related to the Fish Creek Greenway, I believe it's entirely plausible that her true agenda is to enable the sale of city parks and open space, after putting easements in place for political cover. Consider, for example, that in recent City Council meetings she appeared to support buying land for conservation around Fish Creek, but she was in fact working behind the scenes to sabotage our legislators' effort to obtain Legacy Amendment funding for Maplewood.
Last week, parks director Dewey Konewko, parks commission chair Peter Fischer, and I testified at the legislature in favor of a bill introduced by Rep. Nora Slawik (H.F. 2055) which would provide funds to Maplewood from the state's Legacy Amendment to purchase land for conservation in the Fish Creek Greenway.
After we testified, an e-mail from Mayor Longrie was sent to the House Minority Leader and circulated to other legislators. In it, the mayor argued that using the Legacy funds would take money away from other state "priorities." Actually, Legacy funding is dedicated monies; it's set aside for exactly this purpose, and if it doesn't come to Maplewood it will go to other communities. Further, the mayor outlined a complex scenario in which it's apparently a higher priority to her to try to force the landowner, CoPar, into bankruptcy than it is to take this opportunity to preserve the Fish Creek Greenway.
Efforts to get a piece of the Legacy funding are very competitive, and this may have killed our chance to get Maplewood its share of these constitutionally dedicated revenues. Residents who've been working toward public ownership of this land since the 1980s are stunned, since it had seemed that the mayor supported this effort. Certainly it seemed that way from our discussions at our last two City Council meetings.
On March 9, the Council directed city staff to work on this. The mayor even asked staff to get a written agreement from CoPar to extend the time we have to purchase land from them. At our March 23 meeting, the mayor herself requested that staff post information on the progress of the Fish Creek Greenway bill on the city website. Both these actions can be seen in video records of the meetings.
Considering all this, I have to wonder if the mayor has a hidden agenda with conservation easements, too, as she apparently does in the case of Fish Creek.
The final easement agreement has not yet been approved. For the sake of our natural areas and future generations, please contact your City Councilmembers and ask them to reconsider their support of the mayor's plan to place control over our public open spaces in the hands of a private corporation.
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