THE TRUTH FOR PUBLIC LAND
This conservation organization helps property owners reduce taxes while protecting land and wildlife, including TPL offices list.
This conservation organization helps
property owners reduce taxes while protecting land and
wildlife.
RELATED CONTENT
High in the Colorado Rockies, near the little town of
Pagosa Springs, sits the Moore Ranch-a paradise of
mountains and meadows filigreed with sparkling snowmelt
streams. Owners Joe and Beth Moore love it. So do their
cattle. And so do the herds of deer and elk that wander
down each fall from the mountains, crossing the ranch en
route to their traditional wintering grounds in the
sheltered valleys below...only to turn around a few months
later and follow the spring green-up back across the ranch
to their high-country summering meadows. For as long as the
Moores can remember or imagine, this annual circular
migration has been a part of the land.
In recent years, however, the people have come. Herds and
droves of people. And with the people came subdivisions
looking like prairie dog towns, condominiums like anthills,
and a blight of summer ranchettes along either side of the
twisting two-lane blacktop that divides high country from
low. Before much longer, the Moores knew, most wildlife
migration routes would be sealed off by this onslaught of
development, leaving hundreds of deer and elk stranded in
the high country each winter to starve and freeze.
Something had to be done, and the Moores were of a mind to
do it.
What Joe and Beth did—with encouragement and guidance
from a San Francisco-based land-conservation organization
called the Trust for Public Land (TPL) and a Pagosa Springs
citizens' group called Upper San Juan Land
Protection—was to designate a permanent conservation
easement across the 363-acre portion of their ranch that
serves as a wildlife migration corridor.
Land ownership encompasses a bundle of separate
rights-mineral, water, agricultural, development, and
others-with a landowner having the power to sell or give
away some rights while retaining the rest. A conservation
easement is a legal instrument with which the landowner
separates and retires the right to subdivide and develop
the land. Under the terms of the Moores' easement
—which was legally attached to the property's deed
and thus is binding on all future owners-Joe and Beth can
ranch their land as always, continue to control public
access, and pass the property on to their heirs or sell it
as they desire. But the 363 acres dedicated to the
conservation easement can never be subdivided, developed,
or used in any way that would interfere with its
suitability as wildlife habitat. The Colorado Division of
Wildlife-to whom the easement was granted for
guardianship-will inspect the land annually to assure that
the terms of the easement are being met.
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