Managing Conservation Easements in Perpetuity - Environmental ...

Example
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state. If the best course of action is to allow the buffer to regrow naturally,
the land trust may ask the landowner to widen the buffer and
flag it to prevent further damage, rather than require the landowner to
replant what was cut.
Amendments
Amendments should be used very sparingly to resolve a violation and
must only be used in compliance with your land trust’s amendment
policy.Sometimes,however,amendments best address violations where
approvals and remediation will not be effective and where education
alone is insufficient. Any amendment used to resolve a violation must
result in a better, or at least neutral, overall conservation result. As
discussed in chapter two, you must ensure that the amendment does
not confer impermissible private benefit and that it complies with all
laws, your land trust’s conflict of interest policy and your land trust’s
mission.
Amendment as Violation Resolution
A real-life land trust holds a conservation easement on part of a large farm.
The purpose of the easement is to conserve both valuable agricultural
land and a stream corridor and associated riparian area. When the origi-
nal grantors’ children inherited the land, the land trust met with the new
owners to discuss and review the easement and its restrictions. During an
annual monitoring visit some years later, the land trust discovered that the
new owners placed two large, but necessary and customary, agricultural
structures outside of the building envelope. The easement requires all such
structures to be located within the building envelope. After meeting with
the farmers, the land trust realized that they honestly forgot to consider the
building envelope boundaries when building the new structures. The land-
owners wanted to keep the agricultural buildings, which the land trust deter-
mined do not damage the property’s conservation values. The landowners
offered to protect some of the unprotected land they inherited adjacent to
the farm that includes the same agricultural and ecological values as the
already protected area. After applying its full amendment policy and proce-
dures, the land trust determined that amending the existing easement to
expand the building envelope and thus permit the new agricultural build-
ings to remain while adding additional land of high conservation value
would be an acceptable resolution of this serious violation and not confer
impermissible private benefit.
Managing Conservation Easements in Perpetuity