Land Trust Alliance | After years of hard work and persistence by the Land Trust Alliance, our land trust members and our allies on Capitol Hill — and in the face of well-resourced opposition — Congress finally passed the Charitable Conservation Easement Program Integrity Act as part of its year-end “omnibus” spending bill.
The Alliance thanks a bipartisan group of congressional leaders, including Senators Steve Daines, Chuck Grassley, Debbie Stabenow and Ron Wyden, and Representatives Mike Thompson and Mike Kelly, for leading the effort to halt this abuse and ensuring that the legislation was part of the appropriations bill.
A conservation easement, on its face, is a simple concept: A voluntary legal agreement between a landowner and a government agency or land trust that permanently limits future development of the land in order to protect its conservation values. But the significance of this tool goes well beyond its status as a straightforward legal instrument: Conservation easements are at the heart of private land conservation, allowing landowners to protect their land into the future on their own terms, while still retaining the ability to own, use and control their land, sell it, or pass it on to heirs.
In 2015, Congress made permanent — due to the steadfast advocacy of the Alliance and the land trust community — a measure intended to encourage conservation easements: the enhanced federal tax incentive for conservation easement donations, which has helped thousands of Americans voluntarily conserve millions of acres of their own land for the benefit of their families, their communities and the nation. For those that own land with important natural, agricultural or historic resources, donating a conservation easement can be a practical way to both save the land they love forever while realizing significant federal tax savings.
Unfortunately, while the vast majority of these donations are indeed good-faith charitable endeavors, a few bad actors sought to game the system in pursuit of quick — and often staggeringly outsized — profits.
