What
is the Georgia Land Trust?
By
Robin Ford Wallace
One of the matters
addressed by Katherine Eddins, executive director of the Georgia Land Trust, at
the June 4 meeting she conducted at and about the former Preserve at Rising
Fawn was what the land trust is and what it is trying to accomplish. Since ambiguity on that point may well be at
the root of some of the confusion swirling around the trust’s intention to sell
the Preserve land to developer Royce Cornelison (see related article), the
Planet here outlines what Ms. Eddins said on the subject.
“We are not a
government,” she repeated at the Thursday meeting. Rather, she said, GLT is a private nonprofit 501(c)(3)
organization with a staff of 15 employees and a 12-member board of
directors. The land trust derives its
income from soliciting checks from its donor pool, doing contractual work for
other land trusts, and applying for grants, she said.
As for what GLT
does: “Our mission is to protect land
for present and future generations,” said Ms. Eddins. The object, she explained, is to preserve land in a rural
condition to safeguard water quality, wildlife and other environmental
concerns. To quote from the trust’s
website, galandtrust.org: “Our focus on
forests and farm land and rivers and streams is to create green corridors
with clean water and air and fertile farmland.”
The Georgia Land
Trust recently announced it now has a quarter-million acres under such protection
and has been proclaimed an accredited land trust by the Land Trust
Accreditation Commission, which at the meeting Ms. Eddins clarified was “a real
prestigious thing.”
Ms. Eddins said
that of the 250,000 acres the trust protects, the greatest concentration, or
about 75 percent of the land, lies in this area, much of it in Dade, Walker and
Catoosa counties.
But the way the
land trust protects the land is not by owning it. Rather, explained Ms. Eddins, the organization’s main tool is the
conservation easement, a legal arrangement whereby a private landowner may keep,
use and pass his land on to his heirs.
The easement spells out restrictions on what he may do with the land,
with the object of protecting its conservation value; but by signing it the
landowner may save money on estate, income and property taxes. The land trust proposes to sell the Crook
land to Cornelison subject to such an easement.
Presently, the
land trust has in effect over 700 of these conservation easements, said Ms.
Eddins. Working farms account for a lot
of the land, she said, though the trust has also concentrated on areas along
streams to protect water supplies.
Protecting
water quality was one element in the trust’s decision to buy the Johnson’s
Crook land out of bankruptcy, said Ms. Eddins.
The Crook is a “recharge area” for the local drinking water supply, she
said, as well as rich in caves, natural beauty, and rare or endangered plants
and probably also animals.
So the trust
exists to protect land “for present and future generations”; but in the case of
Johnson’s Crook the proposed sale would seem to limit that naturally to present
and future generations of Cornelisons. When
the trust acquired the Crook land, there was talk of public foot trails that
would connect it to Cloudland Canyon and even Chattanooga. At the Thursday meeting, however, whereas Ms.
Eddins was not ruling it out, her only reference to any such public access was “probably,
maybe, a trail option.”
In any case, the
Planet asked Ms. Eddins after the meeting for whom or what the Georgia Land
Trust was ultimately protecting the land.
Her answer: “For the bats. For the nature. For the habitat,” she said.
“There are other things other than humans. They need a place, too.”
As far as public
benefit, she said, there is the consideration that protecting the Crook helps
ensure clean drinking water for Dade County.
But otherwise, she concluded: “There
are endangered plants, there are endangered animals, there are caves. They don’t need the public to be as they
are. They have an innate worth that is
not about money. It’s about nature and
beauty and honoring that.”
robinfordwallace@tvn.net
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