|
The USA has come up with a novel method of preventing development while still providing returns for landowners. The State of Florida plans to buy the 'development rights' to land it wants to protect.
The Florida Times reports that Governor Charlie Crist and the state cabinet could vote this month on a package of land preservation deals that would let state forestry officials begin negotiating for those rights. One farmer who stands to gain state cash from the deal told the newspaper: "This is not the ideal way to go. … I hate to give up rights to anything". But he added that trading building rights for cash "may be a way to save the farm from being lost, no matter what." The State of Florida has already gone some way down this route. Its Rural and Family Lands Protection Program, designed to buy easements from farmers who applied to make a deal, was created in 2001 to help stem a loss of farmland to expanding suburbs. Among its greatest successes, last year it headed off a 3,200-home development. A state planning agency opposed it, but the developer was planning a legal fight, then dropped the matter. The legislature allotted US$10.5 million for it last year through Florida Forever, a large land conservation project. The government axed that money this year because of the state’s budget crisis, but Crist vetoed the decision and restored it. A panel in the state Division of Forestry examined 35 applications and created a first shortlist of 11, covering nearly 35,000 acres. Under the current budget, it can't protect all of this land, unless farmers accept US$300 an acre for permanent loss of development rights. Land protection trusts are something of an industry in the USA. The Tecumseh Land Trust has preserved nearly 15,000 acres in Clark and Greene counties. The argument that some of them use is that the recession makes land rights cheap. Protection advocates say it is an ideal time to buy development rights. One farmer, Vince Uetrecht has sold the rights to develop 429 acres to the state Department of Agriculture for US$500,000, thereby ensuring it remains in agriculture forever. He told the Dayton Daily News that he put the money towards buying another 165 acres. He farms the Miami Valley where, in at least one county, a quarter of the farmland has sold to developers in the last ten years.
|
Innovations 
