Land preservation

The attention-getter in a draft report on state land acquisition is a proposal for a $45 million bond issue in 1998, but the group that wrote the report properly has looked well beyond this money in trying to find ways to preserve undeveloped land.

Assembled by Gov. Angus King, the Land Acquisition Priorities Advisory Committee has offered a land-acquisition strategy that includes outright purchases, conservation easements and targeted buys along trail corridors and rivers that will ensure continued public access. Though the $45 million is important to the group’s goal of increasing public land holdings by 10 percent in the next three years and doubling them by 2020, it knows Maine will need outside sources of funding to make this happen.

The biggest pot of money is the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, which in its ’98 budget is expected to have $700 million for projects nationwide. The Senate budgeted $100 million of that total for state-level projects. But this pales next to the $450 million in state requests that have built up during the last three years, while Congress allowed the state fund to remain dormant. The House, meanwhile, has again put the entire conservation fund budget on the federal project side, which not only favors the large federal holdings in western states, but removes the option of state matching dollars and fails to use the states’ contact with owners of puarticularly valuable property.

What Congress failed to see, the Maine land-acquisition group covered in its draft. It noted that when the Land For Maine’s Future board got down to its final $5 million of the $35 million bond approved 10 years ago, the board stretched the money by forming partnerships with municipalities and private individuals or groups willing to match state funds to preserve lands. The more creative uses of the funding also put the board in touch with people able to identify environmentally valuable pieces of land that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Some of the land priorities identified this time include urban open space, ecological reserves, land along river systems, large tracts in Northern Maine, additions to current public holdings and islands. All of these potential purchases, according to the draft, will “fully respect the rights of private landowners and ensure that all acquisitions occur on a willing-seller-willing-buyer basis.” That is important both for private property owners and for municipalities, which could lose land from their tax rolls.

The final report from the group is due this fall and is likely to carry a half-dozen tax plans for raising money to buy land. That should have the Legislature and the governor plenty exercised this winter. But in wrestling over the taxation proposals, lawmakers should make sure that they do not lose sight of the fact that the acquisition report offers creative and effective ways of preserving important lands in Maine.