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A conservation easement is a legal agreement between a landowner and
the land trust to protect the property's natural resources.
The easement is either voluntarily donated or sold by the landowner
and constitutes a legally binding agreement that limits certain
types of uses or limits development on the land in perpetuity while
the land remains in private hands.
Conservation easements protect land for future generations while
allowing owners to retain private property rights and to live on and
use their land, at the same time potentially providing them with tax
benefits.
In a conservation easement, a landowner voluntarily agrees to sell or
donate certain rights associated with his or her property - often
the right to subdivide or develop - and a private organization or
public agency agrees to hold the right to enforce the landowner's
wish to protect certain aspects of the land.
An easement selectively targets only those rights necessary to protect
specific conservation values, such as water quality or migration
routes, productive farmland, productive forestland, critical
habitat, unique ecological features, and is individually tailored to
meet a landowner's needs. Because the land remains in private
ownership, with the remainder of the rights intact, an easement
property continues to provide economic benefits for the area in the
form of jobs, economic activity and property taxes.
Another way to visualize a conservation easement is to think of owning
land as holding a bundle of sticks. Each one of these sticks
represents the landowner's right to do something with their
property. Examples include the right to build a house, extract
minerals, lease the property, pass it on to heirs, hunt, fish,
privacy. A landowner may give up certain development rights, or
sticks from the bundle, associated with their property through a
document called a conservation easement.
The donation of a conservation easement is a donation of some portion
of the development rights and almost always has an associated value.
This donated value can be used as an income tax deduction.
Conservation easements are often used to protect estates, and can
dramatically reduce estate taxes. |
