The U.S. Forest Service and Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands announced the preservation of 18,000 acres of private forest across two properties in northern Utah on July 26 to the tune of $14.4 million.
The parcels will be part of Utah’s Forest Legacy Program and conservation easements will be placed there. That means ownership of the land is not changing, but the uses allowed there in the future are.
“What we're doing is buying the right to develop from the landowner,” said program coordinator Natalie Conlin. “They still own the land and they're welcome to sell the land, but that easement always stays with that parcel.”
According to the division, the funding for these easements comes from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act. Traditionally, funding for the program comes from the Land and Water Conservation Fund through a small percentage of federal offshore drilling fees.
The federal Forest Legacy Program was started in 1990. Since being established in Utah in 1999, the program has secured 31 conservation easements and preserved nearly 84,000 acres.
Once the conservation easements are in place and under the purview of the Forest Legacy Program, the relationship between the state and landowner becomes a symbiotic one.
“Our division holds the actual easement and we meet with the landowner every year and monitor the property,” said Conlin. “But in regards to getting forestry work done or wildlife work done, we'll work with either local fire and forestry folks or the Division of Wildlife, things like that, to get projects done.”
State officials identified the two properties as “highly developable.”
The process of preserving private land is purely voluntary for landowners. Land use advocates say it can involve years of relationship building to get to a point where an owner would consider placing an easement on their property.
“We're trying to find landowners who are interested in protecting their properties and have properties that provide a public benefit through open space and wildlife habitat that may be greater than developing those properties for other uses,” said Matt Coombs, conservation coordinator for the Bear River Land Conservancy.
According to Coombs, the landowners in northern Utah had relationships with the Bear River Land Conservancy for years before funding for easements was secured. Even with the long runup, the process could still be a year or more away from being finalized.
“It's not like selling a property that can happen in a week or two weeks or three weeks,” he said. “The boxes that we check and the work that we do takes quite a bit longer than that… We have to make sure we’re getting a sound transaction and are protecting what’s intended to be protected … it could easily take a couple of years.”
That lengthy process is commonplace in the world of land preservation, particularly in a state like Utah that often has families owning land for generations.
“Conservation is what usually does not happen,” said CEO of the Summit Land Conservancy Cheryl Fox. “So many stars have to align. You have to have a landowner whose family is willing to walk away from a certain amount of equity that they've built up in that property over many generations … it’s delicate and we really have to find win-win solutions.”
According to the state, the conservation easements on the two properties will preserve wildlife habitat and allow for continued use in the agricultural and logging industries.
