Donating Conservation Easements Helps Ensure Preservation

By Justin Vellucci

Nine years ago, Ken Gfroerer traded in a home in Green Tree for the natural wonders of the Laurel Highlands, moving an hour east to a 51-acre farm where he and his wife, Lisa, could ski, hike and maintain a large organic garden.

They wanted to preserve the land as well as live on it. So, they donated what’s called a conservation easement.

“If you really have a bond with your land and you really care about it, it’s a way to permanently protect it,” said Gfroerer, 43, of Stahlstown in Westmoreland County. “Everything’s the same. The only thing that’s different is you can’t develop it. You can’t break it into parcels and sell it (but) really, you can continue to use it the same.”

The trend of donating conservation easements — essentially giving away a property’s development rights to a group that pledges to preserve the land — is growing in Pennsylvania, conservationists say. About 10 percent of the 50,000 acres the Nature Conservancy protects in Pennsylvania fall under those types of easements, a tool landowners have used to protect 4 million acres nationwide. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has added 30,474 acres to that growing total, many of them in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties.

“The great benefit of conservation easements is that they effectively conserve land in perpetuity, while also keeping property in private hands,” said Stephanie Kraynick, a Western Pennsylvania Conservancy spokeswoman. “They provide tax benefits, protect land from subdivision and fragmentation, and still allow the land to contribute to the local economy.”

Those tax benefits soon could become the subject of congressional debate. House members have introduced a bill to make permanent tax incentives for those donating conservation easements. The measure, which has been jointly introduced in the Senate, could be debated early next year.

The tax incentives would allow residents to deduct up to 50 percent of their income for 16 years, depending on the size of the easement donation, conservationists said. If most of their income comes from agriculture or forestry, they could deduct all of it. Previously, donors could deduct up to 30 percent of their income for six years.

Making permanent those incentives would provide private residents — whether they own farms or forested areas frequented by hunters and fishermen — with time, as well as money.

“We need a stable tax abatement so families making a pretty complicated decision know … they have the time to make that decision carefully,” said Russell Shay, director of public policy for the Land Trust Alliance in Washington, D.C.

Easements aren’t for everyone. The Westmoreland Conservancy, which owns six nature reserves in the region, shies away from them.

“We like to acquire land and own it,” said Douglas Bauman, a member of the all-volunteer group’s board.

But easements — and tax breaks for them — have supporters in Washington. The House bill has 176 co-sponsors, while the Senate version counts 27.

“Conservation easements are a unique approach to land preservation,” said U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, an Upper St. Clair Republican. “Whether to simply maintain land in private ownership, or protect habitat, or preserve family property for future generations, this incentive has become an important tool for landowners seeking alternatives to selling their land for development.”

For people like Gfroerer, who donated his easement to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the tool works, and so do the incentives that come along with it.

“We were planning to do it anyway, but that (tax break) really made it a lot more attractive to get off a dime and do it now,” he said.

(c) 2008 Tribune-Review/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.