The federal government’s Joint Commission on Taxation is recommending to Congress that they drastically revise the federal laws that allow landowners to donate perpetual conservation easements to qualified organizations or to government agencies, as we reported in last week’s magazine (Feb. 25, p. 42).

The conservation-easement concept is only about 30 years old, but it’s the reason for our nation’s dynamic land trust movement, more than 1,100 of them, in every state. Together, according to the Land Trust Alliance, they’ve prevented more acreage than all the national parks in the lower 48 states–more than 7 million acres–from becoming burgeoning subdivisions and shopping malls. It’s an entirely voluntary program that allows landowners to claim federal income and other tax deductions in exchange for giving up the building rights on their property, forever.

The tax commission’s report argues that easements shouldn’t qualify for tax breaks because the incentive doesn’t change how Americans act, and that’s just plain wrong. Even determined conservationists would be financially foolhardy to donate most easements without tax breaks. For example, if you owned 100 acres worth $25,000 per acre if fully developable (say, 100 houses or 200 condominiums) but wanted to donate an easement limiting the property to no additional residential units beyond your own house, the per-acre value would probably decrease by half. That would mean a potential loss of $1.25 million if you, or your heirs, sold it. See the need for a tax incentive?

I suspect that two issues have motivated this report. First, of course, the government always needs more money, and now that President Bush has run up the biggest budget deficit of all time, his bean counters want to recover every cent they think they’ve lost. Anyone remember that the Clinton Administration, which was dedicated to conservation and not oil futures, eliminated the budget deficit it inherited from President Bush Sr.?

Second, is that a few well-publicized questionable easements were accepted by The Nature Conservancy and others. Two years ago, those easements led the LTA’s leaders to embark on a program to tighten their standards and to accredit its member land trusts, and those earnest efforts are the best reason why the tax commission’s recommendations are unnecessary. Land-trust leaders often have to negotiate with landowners who’d like to restrict their property’s development potential (and thus its value) as little as possible and still get a tax break. As the former president of a land trust that was nearly torn apart by two such thorny negotiations, I can tell you that deciding whether to accept an easement that’s not as restrictive as you’d like is preferable to having no easement at all on a several-hundred-acre piece of land. Giving local leaders the tools to negotiate and to make those decisions is the LTA’s goal.

Easements are a voluntary, public-minded attempt by local, private citizens to hem in the sprawl mushrooming around cities like New York, Washington, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Orlando, Portland, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and San Francisco, and many other smaller cities. And they’re the most cost-efficient method anyone has developed to keep all of America from becoming a homogenous expanse of 3,500-home subdivisions, big-box strip malls, expressways and gas stations.

Now is the time for us to tell our Congressmen to keep their hands off a program that costs them almost nothing to administer and achieves benefits they could never, ever afford.