Easement to Protect Land Along New River: The Forest Service Will Buy Easements on 960 Grayson County Acres Along the New River.
By Tim Thornton, The Roanoke Times, Va.
Mar. 17–Vaughn Arey seemed surprised anyone would ask why he’s putting a conservation easement on 375 acres of land on the New River’s edge in Grayson County.
“It’s just the right thing to do,” he said. “I think it’s important the land along the New River not be cut up in 40-foot lots and sold.”
With a conservation easement, a landowner trades development rights for some benefit, usually tax breaks. In this case, the trade is for direct payments.
A federal conservation program called Forest Legacy will spend up to $2.1 million for the easement on Arey’s place and two other Grayson County tracts that touch the New River. Altogether, they cover about 960 acres.
Nationally, 31 projects were considered. A dozen were approved.
Funded by the USDA Forest Service, the program is designed to identify and protect ecologically important forest land that’s under development pressure. With the New River tracts, landowners are essentially selling some development rights for about 75 percent of their worth.
“It’s all voluntary,” said Larry Mikkelson, Forest Legacy project manager for the Virginia Department of Forestry, “This is not eminent domain or anything like that.”
Mikkelson said land can be judged ecologically important for a number of reasons — being host to endangered or threatened species or some limited resource, for instance. The land along the New River is important, Mikkelson said, because it contributes to the river’s water quality,
Beth Obenshain, executive director of the New River Land Trust, agrees. But she thinks it’s important for another reason, too. It preserves the scenery on Virginia’s only American Heritage River, a river that Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina are promoting to canoeists and kayakers as a scenic blueway. Upscale development is encroaching on some sections of the waterfront. Other stretches of the riverbank are covered in small lots filled with semi-permanent camping trailers. That’s not enhancing the experience people are looking for when they canoe on the New, Obenshain said.
“If the whole New River looks like that, no one’s going to come to canoe,” Obenshain said. “No one’s going to come fish. No one’s going to come recreate.”
Recreation is just one of the areas that benefits from the program.
“The idea is to preserve the land from development,” Mikkelson said. “The forests are preserved for traditional forest purposes.”
Landowners must develop a stewardship plan, he said, with those purposes in mind. That can mean timbering, hunting or creating a haven for wildlife. It can’t mean intense development.
It takes a while to get into the Forest Legacy program. The first meeting about this land happened nearly three years ago. The nominations were made in June. The funding has been approved, but the money won’t be available until October. Mikkelson said he expects the easements will be recorded by the following October, but it could take longer.
The program funded a conservation easement on about 500 acres along the New River last year. The year before that, it provided money to buy 4,500 acres in King and Queen County.
Neither of those deals have been completed yet.
The largest of the three tracts coming into the program belongs to James and Mary Lily Nuckolls. Their 428 acres lie near the beginning of New River Trail State Park.
Arey fished a pond on his property as he talked about the important role the land he and his wife, Jo Ann, have owned since the early 1980s plays in the local ecology. He reeled in a big bass before saying that if a plan in the early 1970s to dam the New River had gone through, part of his place would be under a lake now.
Stephen Lowder’s property is the smallest of the three tracts, just over 160 acres. It has a mile of river frontage.
“You don’t have to lock up everything,” Obenshain said, “but you do want to preserve places that define an area. And there’s no place that defines our region more than the New River.”
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Roanoke Times, Va.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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