Posts
5-26-10
Conservation Futures is a $0.0625/$1000.00 assessed value property tax dedicated to protecting and conserving land in Island County. It is overseen by a Technical Advisory Group (TAG) and a Conservation Futures Advisory Board (CAB). This year the tax brought in around $735,000.00, and there’s another $400k coming in from a previous year. There were 3 applications for Conservation Futures funds this year, and the TAG recommended funding all 3 of them.
Last night, the CAB held its public hearing and also voted to recommend all 3 proposals to the county commissioners. The commissioners have the final say in distribution of the funds, but obviously they rely heavily on the work of their two committees.
The 3 proposals are:
1. $250,000.00 to Whidbey Camano Land Trust to buy conservation easements on a total of 267 acres of farmland within Ebey’s Landing National Historic Reserve. These parcels are, for the most part, surrounded by already protected land, but could, if developed, totally alter the nature of the reserve. One parcel is on the north side of Penn Cove. Think about standing on the waterfront in Coupeville and looking across the cove at the bluffs. Now imagine those bluffs filled with houses. With a conservation easement, that won’t happen. And, WCLT being who they are, the county’s money will be leveraged at 15:1 with federal and state grants.
2. $550,000.00 to Greenbank Farm, to be paid out over 8 years ($100k for each of the first 3 years and $50k for the remaining 5 years). The original request was for $400k, but the CAB felt it was important enough to increase the amount.
This is another complicated situation. When the farm was bought, there were 522 acres involved, and the county bought the whole thing. Parts were sold to various conservation organizations, mostly The Nature Conservancy, which bought the forested part on the hill between the Greenbank Store and Smugglers’ Cove Road, across the highway from the main part of the farm.
Then they sold the core of the farm, 150 acres, which is most of the open ground from the corner of the highway and North Bluff Road all the way to where the forest starts, to the Port of Coupeville. Something that should have happened in that transaction was imposition of a conservation easement. Somehow that did not happen. Now, the farm management group is asking the county to buy that conservation easement. This will guarantee that, no matter what else happens to the place, it will never be developed. The allocated money will not ever actually reach the Port. They owe the county $100k/year until 2017. So the conservation futures cash will simply go from one fund on the county’s books to another. But it will leave the farm free of the burden of raising that money.
Most importantly, a conservation easement will assure that if the Port ever gives up on the farm, it will never be developed.
3. $500,000.00 to Pacific Rim Institute to buy and place a conservation easement on the former game farm which has for the last 10 years been known as AuSable Institute. Two years ago AuSable announced that they could no longer support a Pacific Rim campus and were going to have to sell the land to the highest bidder. The site manager, Robert Pelant, was told he was out of a job. Robert, rather than simply finding another place to work, created Pacific Rim Institute for Environmental Stewardship (PRI) to carry on the prairie restoration work which began under AuSable. After long and painful negotiations, AuSable agreed to sell the land to PRI, and to lease it to them until the funds could be raised and the purchase accomplished.
Meanwhile, the Navy, which operates the Outlying Field right across the highway, is looking to prevent any further development which might generate noise complaints about landing practice activities. It is doing this by buying conservation easements. The tricky part of this entire transaction is that if the Navy buys the conservation rights from AuSable, then the land will have been protected under the county’s rules, and will not be eligible for Conseration Futures funds - which would leave PRI with no money to buy the land from AuSable. But the county can’t give PRI money unless there is a conservation easement at the time of purchase. Chickens and eggs. Luckily Pat Powell, executive director of Whidbey Camano Land Trust, is a past master at juggling chickens and eggs, and she offered a complicated but workable solution in which both the county and the Navy would put funds in escrow and both the purchase and the conservation easement would happen at the same time.
PRI actually requested $400k, figuring to do fundraising for the rest, but the CAB voted to recommend the full $500k because this is such an important site.
The meeting ran the better part of 4 hours, but the result made it all worthwhile.
