northwest land trust conference

Schweitzer on Preserving the “Most Magnificent Place”

By Matthew Frank, 5-18-07

In the heyday of Montana’s old economy, “Montana was the Treasure State because of the minerals in the mountains; today, the treasure is the mountains,” Governor Brian Schweitzer said Friday, speaking at the 12th annual Northwest Land Trust Conference in Missoula.

“We have a responsibility,” Schweitzer said, “to help find a way for private landowners to pass on open lands and vistas to the next generation.”

These lands and vistas amount to “the most magnificent place left on the planet,” he said. Schweitzer’s boldness brought chuckles from the audience of roughly 200 in the DoubleTree Hotel. He didn’t laugh, however. He even said it twice.

How best to preserve these places amid growth and development pressure is the focus of the Land Trust Conference, a three-day event (Thursday through Saturday, click here for the schedule) bringing together land trust practitioners from around the Northwest. Land trusts typically acquire and manage conservation easements, one of the most effective tools for preserving private land for perpetuity.

Landowners’ options for how they can use their land can be likened to a bundle of sticks, to use a common analogy. Each stick represents a different use. A conservation easement effectively takes away the development stick—and provides generous federal tax incentives.

The incentives were made even more attractive by Congress last summer, but they’re scheduled to expire at the end of the year unless Congress acts to extend or make them permanent. (Click here for a Wall Street Journal story that shows how profitable easements can be.) While easements are generally seen as an excellent mechanism for encouraging conservation, abuses of the process have in recent years led to greater scrutiny of the tax incentives by the IRS and Congress.

To put the importance of land trusts’ work in perspective, Schweitzer evoked the image of Glacial Lake Missoula, the waters that used to fill the valleys of western Montana behind an ice dam near the mouth of the Clark Fork River at the end of the last ice age. Now the valleys are instead “running the risk of filling up with houses and knapweed,” he said.

Not that the economic growth all those houses represent is necessarily bad. “We’re on a roll in western Montana,” Schweitzer said. He reported that western Montana has the fastest growing economy in the country; that Montana has the country’s lowest unemployment rate; and that the state’s wages are rising at the third-fastest rate in the nation.

Schweitzer left the particulars of private land preservation for the conference’s other speakers and panelists, instead broadening the scope to talk about “the greatest challenge in the history of our country:” weaning the nation off foreign oil and producing its energy on its own soil. “As long as you’re using oil, you’re committing a generation to war,” he said, then pointing out that each and every one of the attendees is complicit.

Farms used to be entirely self-sufficient, Schweitzer said, producing their “horse-power” by themselves. Lamenting the loss of that localized, carbon-neutral model, he said, “We ought to just put our grandparents in charge.”

In that vein, Schweitzer made his familiar pitch for pursuing clean coal technology here in Montana.

Schweitzer said he’s often asked, What are you going to do to preserve Montana’s heritage and open space? His reply: “I am just the governor. I am not the county commissioners or land-use planners....” It’s the local level, he said, that has the leverage to protect Montana’s most special places.

“God help us,” Schweitzer said, “if we make the same mistakes that were made in California and Colorado....”

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