Colorado Open Lands
President's Letter
Rally in the Rockies
Dan Pike
President
The Land Trust Alliance, the national association for land trusts, came to Denver in early October for their twentieth national “Rally.” The four-day conference was attended by a record 2,200 land trust practitioners, volunteers and consultants, and pronounced “the best ever” by LTA president Rand Wentworth.
The session opened with two days of field trips and day-long seminars, followed by two days of workshops and general sessions. Colorado Open Lands and Park County hosted a day of hiking, horseback riding and fishing in South Park, and sponsored a field trip to Venetucci Farm south of Colorado Springs. Senator Ken Salazar was the keynote speaker at the opening plenary session.
The conference covered the typical topics – best practices and new advances in how land trusts conduct their business - as well as relatively new issues such as climate change and developing greater ethnic diversity. The hottest topics included the Internal Revenue Service audits of conservation easements, the implementation of land trust accreditation based upon the newly adopted Standards and Practices, condemnation of easements (ala Piñon Canyon) and the impact of state tax credits, such as Colorado’s, for conservation.
My first exposure to LTA was actually with the predecessor organization, the Land Trust Exchange. I attended a regional meeting in 1980 in Des Moines, Iowa, where I struck up a friendship with Mark Ackelson, the Deputy Director of the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation. This year’s Rally was the third time it’s been held in Colorado. The 1999 Rally was held in Snowmass, and the third Rally, in 1988, was held in Estes Park.
The Estes Park affair was attended by 347 people and included a welcome from Governor Roy Romer. Colorado Open Lands was the principle host of the event, along with the Estes Valley Land Trust. Mark Ackelson was LTA’s newly elected Board Chairman. The Estes agenda included presentations by the venerable Boston counsel to the land trust community, Kingsbury Browne, and a relative newcomer, Steven Small.
Obviously, much has changed since the first Colorado Rally. Many of those in attendance this year in Denver were school kids in 1988. Today’s movement is far bigger and better known, and its impact far greater, than in the 1980s.
But, as is often the case, new issues are not always so new. They’re just new to the new people. As early as 1983, the IRS had launched a series of audits of conservation easement donations in the targeted states of Virginia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. As in Colorado today, the Service often concluded that easements held little or no value (the IRS’s position has been almost universally denied in subsequent court cases).
The first effort to establish industry Standards and Practices was announced at the Estes Park Rally. The initial S&Ps were “the beginning of a major program to help land trusts maintain and improve high-quality operations.” As today, LTA developed comprehensive written guidance followed by regional training workshops and a year of feedback and program evaluation.
A real-life case of the condemnation of a conservation easement was discussed at the Estes Rally. At the 1999 Snowmass Rally, implementation of a new set of Standards and Practices was the topic, along with the innovative North Carolina program that created a tax credit for the donation of a conservation easement.
And at this year’s Rally the second annual Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award, for “an outstanding individual whose vision and creativity have resulted in extraordinary accomplishments for land conservation” was presented to Mark Ackelson. Not only are many of the issues constant, so are many of the leaders.