Public Policy Principles of the Land Trust Alliance

As the national umbrella organization of land trusts, the Land Trust Alliance works for public policies that support land trusts' efforts and promote their land conservation goals. The Land Trust Alliance Board of Directors has adopted the following principles and beliefs to serve as the foundation of the Alliance's public policy initiatives.

I. Maintaining open land is good public policy: open space helps everyone.

Open space enhances our quality of life. People of all beliefs and means value open spaces for recreation, education, and aesthetic and spiritual enrichment.

Open space protects our health and welfare. Green space is essential for recharging our aquifers, preventing pollution of surface and ground waters, filtering sediments, limiting air pollution, and maintaining wildlife habitat and other natural systems whose benefits to health and medicine are just beginning to be understood.

Open space preserves our heritage. When we maintain open land, we sustain the magnificent forests, prairies, mountains, deserts, rivers, lakes, beaches, farmland and community commons that have uniquely shaped the character of our country and its people.

Open space makes economic sense. Open space is good for business. Study after study shows that communities with protected open space enjoy greater economic vitality than communities that fail to provide the productive resource lands, parks, and natural places that make possible economic activity in such industries as agriculture, forestry, and tourism.

Open space helps state and local governments work efficiently. When agricultural land near a city is developed, government must pay for more than the substantial initial costs of roads, sewers, schools and other infrastructure. The long-term demands of sprawling development on government resources can be exceedingly costly. For example, new roads and longer commutes degrade water, air and habitat quality, which the government must restore at great expense. Preserving open space means that government services will be better focused, tax dollars will be saved, and vital productive resources will be saved for the future.

II. Good public policy fosters voluntary land conservation.

Public incentives for conservation of private lands are essential. The vast majority of the nation's open land is in private ownership. While many owners of conservation land would like to keep their land in open space, few can afford to do so by philanthropy alone. Incentives such as income and estate tax benefits, technical assistance grants, matching grants, and programs to purchase partial land interests can encourage private land protection without public ownership or management, reducing cost to the public treasury of ensuring that valuable open space resources are protected.

Permanent conservation is the best public investment. Public investment in perpetual conservation measures are the best for the land, the landowner, and the taxpayer. It rewards landowners for long-term conservation vision while achieving cost-effective conservation goals. Modest expenditures for short-term measures can address appropriately short-term issues. But investment in enduring conservation means that tomorrow's tax dollars can be used for other public purposes, rather than to solve today's problems all over again at likely higher cost.

Public land ownership and management must complement private conservation. While land trusts focus primarily on privately-owned open space, some lands clearly need to be in public ownership in order for the public and the nation to fully benefit from their natural and recreational resources. Publicly-owned parks, wildlife preserves, and forest lands are sound long-term public investments, ensuring the availability of resources for future generations and complementing the conservation of privately-owned lands.

III. Public and private interests in land can and should be balanced.

Public policies should balance open space and land development. Federal policies that encourage open space protection on private lands are no less critical to the public good than are incentives for land development. Yet through infrastructure subsidies, direct financing, and many other programs, government has tipped the scales against private land conservation and in favor of private land development. That imbalance must be corrected through sound incentives for land conservation and careful analysis of the equity and real costs, both financial and environmental, of subsidizing development.

Public land is capital to be preserved, not squandered. Publicly owned open lands and resources are valuable national assets that should never be divested lightly, and then only if careful analysis shows that they contain little value as public conservation or recreational land. If such lands are sold or traded, the proceeds should be reinvested in conservation of land and resources, either directly or through a dedicated fund that yields continuing income streams devoted to land conservation. Ultimately, it is our duty to be good stewards of this inherited capital so that it can benefit future generations.

Respect for property rights is essential to land conservation. Private owners are the backbone of the land trust movement. It is they who decide what they want to do with their land. Land trusts typically work with landowners who choose, voluntarily, to protect their land rather than develop it, and exercise that right by dedicating their land to conservation for the public benefit.

IV. Land trusts make strong conservation partners.

Public policy aimed at stewardship of private lands should include a clear role for land trusts. Because all land is part of a larger ecosystem, watershed or habitat, lasting conservation requires cooperation among landowners, businesses, local, state, or federal agencies, and citizens. Nonprofit community-based land trusts have proven success in forging these partnerships, as well as assisting with such tasks as managing publicly owned land and monitoring and helping to enforce conservation easements. Moreover, when land trusts want to protect a natural area, create a park, or establish a greenway, they work directly with landowners to craft mutually agreeable, flexible, fair strategies for long-term conservation -- often at greatly reduced public cost. The proven methods, experience, and skill of land trusts should be fully encouraged and used in carrying out land conservation programs.

--adopted by the Land Trust Alliance Board of Directors, May 5, 1996