by Noel Perrin
The luck is that such laws exist. It took more than luck, however, to get my farm protected under them. It took persistence, a good bit of paperwork – and, of course, the willingness to give up the profits I might have made by selling to a developer.
I first began thinking about protecting the farm in the spring of 1980. Two things set me going. One was the particularly brutal fate of a farm a few miles away, a dairy farm that had been in the same family for more than a hundred years. That place wasn’t developed; it was dismembered. It had been my idea of a perfect farm.
The other was that my children were growing up. I have two, both girls. The older, having lived in rural Vermont all her life, was talking longingly about London. The younger was beginning to dream of being an airline flight attendant. It seemed clear to them that they didn’t want to be farmers or farmers’ wives, or country dwellers at all. It seemed clear to me that when I died the natural thing would be for them to sell the place. Having spent twenty years restoring it to a beautiful and moderately productive farm, I didn’t relish the idea of bulldozers leveling my carefully rebuilt stone walls or blacktoppers advancing into the orchard.
The first step was a serious discussion with my daughters. I began with a little lecture on what it means to own a piece of land. Not what it means emotionally (they’ve known all about that since they were little), but what it means legally. To own a piece of land, I explained to two moderately bored teenagers, is to own a bundle of rights, most of which can be separated from each other. For example, you can detach the mineral rights from a piece of land and sell them, while still keeping the land itself. You can also detach the right to develop, and lock it safely away. That was what I wanted to do. If I did, it would mean my daughters would inherit something considerably reduced in value. Reduced $27,800, to be precise, though of course I didn’t have that figure then. It would be even more now.
In some ways Americans are the least materialistic of all people. The girls didn’t hesitate a second. “Dad, we know how you love the place,” my elder daughter said. “We love it, too. We just don’t want to spend our lives looking after cows. You go right ahead.”
Despite their encouragement, I didn’t do anything more for about a year and a half. Partly that was to give the girls a chance to change their minds. Mostly it’s just the way I operate. Slowly. I’m the sort of person who can decide he needs a tractor and then spend several years thinking about it before actually going out and buying one. During the next eighteen months I collected a fat folder of clippings about development rights, but that was all I did.
Then in the fall of 1981 I finally made a move – in fact, a double move. We have a planning commission in our town, and I wrote its chairperson to ask if the town would be interested in a gift of development rights. And I put the same question to what was then the Ottauquechee Regional Land Trust and has since tripled in size and become the Vermont Land Trust. At the time, it was the nearest to me of the many hundreds of land trusts that have sprung up across America in the last ten or fifteen years. (There are also some, mostly in the Northeast, that have been around much longer.) I knew about Ottauquechee from my clipping file.
Not surprisingly, the planning commission replied cautiously, since no one had ever made such an offer to the town before. They said come to a meeting and tell them about it, which I did. Then they deliberated for three months. Then they decided to pass my query on to the selectmen. (For those who don’t follow the minutiæ of New England customs, selectmen are what we have as local government, rather than mayors and councils, county commissioners, and the like. Some towns have five selectmen, some three. This one has three.)
Also not surprisingly, the Ottauquechee Land Trust replied with a good deal more zest. Though only four years old at the time, it had lots of experience with development rights, and at that moment was working on roughly a dozen cases. Richard Carbin, the vigorous young director, first wrote me, then phoned, then came over and walked the farm with me. That was to make sure it really could function agriculturally into the indefinite future. On a small scale, it can. I’ve got two or three nice pastures. Any time I was ready to protect them, he said, the trust was ready to cooperate.
Meanwhile, the selectmen had also been thinking. Their decision was that something like this had better come up at Town Meeting. If the voters approved, they wouldn’t oppose the gift. If the voters turned it down, naturally that ended the matter.
Furthermore, instead of placing my offer on the agenda themselves, the selectmen felt I should do it by petition. That’s work. Such a petition must be signed by 5 percent of the voters in town, which at that time was sixty-five people. (It’s currently seventy-four.) Getting up a petition is not difficult or technical – every year we have two or three articles to discuss at Town Meeting that have been petitioned by individuals rather than warned by the selectmen – but it does take a little time and effort.
By now we were well into 1982. I had a choice to make. I could quickly donate rights to the land trust. Or more slowly, and with some bother, I could give them to the town.
I chose to go the town route, and I had three reasons. One was emotional. I like the direct democracy of Town Meeting, and I liked the idea of the voters’ making the decision. One of the ways we educate ourselves in rural New England is by arguing things out at Town Meeting.
The second reason was practical and involved taxes. The big question for both the planning board and the selectmen had been precisely how much real estate tax the town would lose if my farm ceased to be developable. Towns hate losing revenue. The question was complicated, because my thirty-two acres of pasture, though not the fifty-six acres of woodland, were already enrolled in a state program of current-use taxation. The town taxed part of the place as farmland, the rest as potential development land, and the state made up the difference. All of us assumed the state contribution would cease once I gave away the development rights. Our best guess was that the town would lose about $400 a year if the gift went through.
Of course I could have thumbed my nose at the selectmen and gone straight to the land trust – but only at the cost of enraging some of my neighbors and maybe giving conservation a bad name locally for years to come. If my taxes went down, wouldn’t everybody else’s have to go up, however slightly? Wouldn’t it in fact look like a slick private deal? I preferred to face people at Town Meeting and so get a chance to make the case that in the long run land protection holds down everybody’s taxes.
That’s where the clipping file would come in handy. I thought the story of Suffolk County, Long Island, for example, might catch people’s attention. I had a clipping that said the county authorities there had raised a sum of $60 million to buy development rights on farmland. They figured on protecting twelve thousand acres at a cost of $5,000 an acre. And then they expected to recoup that whole enormous sum “in terms of tax dollars that won’t have to be spent on more schools, roads, and services.” If purchased rights pay for themselves, what a bargain free ones must be.
I had another good clipping, too – this one about a county in Virginia that did a close study of where it got its money and where it then spent it. Turned out that for every tax dollar the county took in from farmland and woodland, it only had to spend about seventy cents. But for every dollar it got from developed land, it spent $1.11. It made sense to me. Cows don’t go to school. And counties don’t have to maintain farm roads.
Finally, I had a personal financial reason for donating my development rights to the town rather than the land trust. Land trusts need revenue just as much as towns do. They’ve got to have offices, phones, files, legal advice, the lot. The older ones have depended on the traditional income sources of nonprofit organizations: membership dues and fund drives. Many also keep their expenses down by hiring no paid staff whatsoever. In Connecticut, a pioneering state in land conservation, there are eighty-two small land trusts, almost double the number in any other state. According to Allan Spader, director of the recently
formed Land Trust Exchange in Boston, all but two or three depend entirely on volunteer staff.
But some of the newer land trusts, with much to do and little time to do it in, are experimenting with a sort of fee-for-service approach. The donor of development rights is asked also to make a cash contribution which will become endowment for the trust. Montana Land Alliance uses that approach and so, as it happens, does the Vermont Land Trust. It asks for 3 percent of the value of the land to be protected.
That seems perfectly reasonable. We who donate the land get tax savings much larger than 3 percent of the value of the land. The trust has an urgent need for money. Fund drives are more difficult to conduct in a poor state like Vermont than in a rich state like Connecticut. All that I see. But I have the misfortune to be a born tightwad. If I could save the 3 percent, I still preferred to. I began to prepare for the 1983 Town Meeting.
Getting the signatures for my petition proved to be extremely easy. I had been dreading it, because I hate going house to house asking for something, even if it’s only signatures. Then the woman who runs the store in our village made a good suggestion. I wrote a brief account of what I wanted to do, stapled it to a sheet of blank paper, and left it on the store counter.
Within a week I had almost fifty signatures. When a second week produced only three more, I made a copy of my statement, and with the owner’s consent left that on the counter of the general store in one of the other villages in town. Quite soon I was up to sixty-seven signatures, two more than needed. When the warning for Town Meeting was posted on January 24, 1983, Article XI read, “To see if the Town wishes to accept a gift of the development rights to Noel Perrin’s farm in Thetford Center.”
Before Town Meeting we have an event called Pre-Town Meeting. It comes a week ahead. All the candidates for office attend; so do people who have a petitioned article, and usually about fifty or so of the more serious voters. There is time to go into issues more deeply than is sometimes possible at Town Meeting itself.
My proposal got a cool reception. No one actually said “slick private deal,” but clearly the people who asked me questions were thinking about the lost $400. Someone mused out loud on what would happen if other landowners began doing the same thing – what would happen to his own taxes, that is. Naturally I had my clipping with me. But he and the other questioners were not much impressed by the news from Suffolk County, Long Island, or even by what was happening much nearer at hand in Massachusetts. That’s them; we’re us, seemed to be the feeling.
I went home depressed. It didn’t cheer me a bit when the chairman of our Board of Selectmen (I’ve known her for twenty years) called me that evening. “I’m going to move to pass over your article,” Ginny said. “You’ll do better to wait a year. It doesn’t stand a chance now.”
People who work for land trusts are generally idealists. I had stayed in touch with Rick Carbin at Ottauquechee all the time. (I had also become a dues-paying member of the trust. Still am.) He wasn’t in the least touchy that I was going the town route; what mattered was protecting another farm.
The next morning I phoned him for advice. Don’t even consider giving up, he said. Instead, quickly get in touch with the town clerk of Pomfret, Vermont. She can tell you something that will interest the voters in your town.
The result was that when I went to Town Meeting, I not only had with me a list of facts and figures, such as that we had lost 153 farms in Orange County, Vermont, in the preceding ten years, I had a brief letter from Hazel Harrington, the town clerk of Pomfret. That was my secret weapon. Only the head selectman knew about it. It had persuaded her not to pass over Article XI, after all.
When it came my turn, I made a brief but passionate speech. Just to warm up, I mentioned Long Island, Massachusetts, and the lost 153 farms in our own county. Then I brought out the secret weapon. I told the meeting there was one precedent for what I proposed to do. In 1981, Henry Bourne of Pomfret had deeded development rights on a piece of land to his town, the first person in the state to make that kind of gift. Then I read Mrs. Harrington’s letter.
Dear Mr. Perrin,
The land on which Mr. Bourne deeded development rights to the Town of Pomfret is listed no different for tax purposes than it was before he took this action. He retained title to the property. However, he as an individual is in the current-use program. Therefore, the Town is getting the same amount of taxes on this property as before.
Thetford Town Meeting took that in. Then it heard me promise to get my woodlot into the current-use program, along with the pastures. Then a couple of people asked perfunctory questions. Then the town voted overwhelmingly to accept my offer, and we went on to Article XII.
And that’s how my farm comes to be safe, if not forever, at least for a long time to come. That’s how I came to have a $27,800 income-tax deduction for doing what I wanted to do anyway. If you are a landowner, you, too, can probably make money by protecting your land. Ecologically, aesthetically, and morally, that seems preferable to the traditional practice of making money by destroying it.
[1984]
Postscript, 1991: It’s now eight years since that town meeting. Thetford is under a lot more development pressure than it was in 1983. It is also much more used to the idea that when developers push one way, it is perfectly all right to push back the other way. We now have a town Conservation Commission, which played a key role in saving Earl LaMountain’s farm last year. That’s a full working farm, as opposed to my half-working farm.
Its members were also busy two years ago, when the old Shyott place got sold to a developer. The sale was not stopped, nor am I sure it should have been. There are three million more Americans every year, all needing a place to live. Lots of them want to live in the country, and Thetford will get its share, as it got me, thirty years ago. The good news is that part of the Shyott place will stay country for them to live in. The big twelve-acre hayfield at the front will stay a hayfield, and the handful of new houses will be up behind, well spread out. Under pressure, the developers themselves put on conservation restrictions.
The Conservation Commission didn’t bring that about all by itself. We also have a new and even closer-to-hand land trust. I belong to that one, too. The Upper Valley Land Trust was the other key player in saving LaMountain’s farm and keeping a rural aspect to Shyott.
What about my own farm? That hasn’t changed a bit, except that I finally ditched the upper meadow, and I’ve put up one new stone wall. My older daughter did get to London but came home after two years. She now lives in Seattle. The younger one is in Boston. Taxes continue to climb, of course. It’s no longer $400 a year that I save by having conservation restrictions on the place; last year it was $817.03. The town got reimbursed by the state, same as always.
What if one day the state gives up its current-use program, and therefore quits reimbursing towns? That would certainly be a blow. A minor blow. The taxes of everyone in town, me included, would go up an average of sixty cents.
On the other hand, suppose I had sold out eight years ago. Suppose there were now thirty-five houses on what used to be my farm. In that case, everybody’s taxes would have gone up somewhere between $100 and $500. I still think the town got a bargain. And so did I.
Uncollected Pieces
A House, a Horse, a Hill, and a Husband
I MET ANNE in the summer of 1988. We were both teaching at a writers’ conference at Manhattanville College, forty miles north of New York City. She had the class in writing for children, I the class in writing nonfiction.
Anne was someone you noticed right away. She was very blond, very blue-eyed, astonishingly young looking for someone who was rumored to have grown children. Rumor also said she was newly single and planned to stay that way. Pity. I, too, was single with grown children – only I’d been single for eight years and was ready for a change. For one thing, I wanted someone to share my beautiful old brick house with me.
You’d think that at a small writers’ conference, where t
here are only five teachers and all five are assigned rooms in the college guesthouse (a building not much bigger than my farmhouse in Vermont), we’d all get to know each other in a hurry. Well, four of us did.
Anne, however, proved inaccessible. During the days of that busy week, we were all fairly inaccessible, except to our students. We taught classes in the morning and held individual conferences in the afternoon. Anne held the most. Or at least she held the most outdoor ones. Often I’d see her blond head under a tree, where she’d be sitting with a would-be children’s author. The afternoon would get late, a different student would be sitting with her, but the conferences went on.
Then, just as free time began, she’d vanish. Of course she had a room in the guesthouse, but she never slept there. I never even saw her drive away. She just disappeared every evening, like a princess in a fairy tale.
Was this part of her stay-single program? Could be. If you avoid meeting people, if on social occasions you are simply not there, you are going to be fairly safe from potential husbands.
Or was she actually slipping off to a glamorous other life, something beyond our ken? This was the view we other four inclined to. We had no proof whatsoever, but we did have some strong clues. We had known all week that Anne’s last name was Lindbergh, and that, yes, she was the daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. It is one of the civilized customs at writers’ conferences to read at least one book by each of your fellow teachers. So we also knew that she was no secondhand celebrity, not merely the beautiful daughter of famous parents. She was a gifted writer. That week I had read her Hunky-Dory Diary and Bailey’s Window and loved them both. Anne gave her characters second chances, which is what life should do, too.