Letters to the Editor, Washington Post
April 15, 2005

Dear Editor:

I wrote the income tax regulations on conservation easements while at IRS from 1978-1982 and I have been actively involved in this field since 1978. Something is terribly wrong these days in Washington with the thinking about conservation easements. The problem is not with the conservation easement field itself. The problem is the perception, primarily in Washington, of what conservation easements are all about. Some people just don't get it.

Through the 1980s and most of the 1990s, the only people who knew anything about conservation easements were the people who were doing land conservation work - landowners and land trusts, good people, decent people, honest people, concerned people, love of the land, not a hint of venality or criminality or intent to abuse the tax code.

Over these past few decades, landowners who love their land have been quietly tying it up and protecting its conservation values with conservation easements - a perpetual deed restriction that gives a tax-exempt publicly-supported charitable organization the right and the obligation to enforce the restriction and be certain the property stays protected. Over these past few decades, landowners have used conservation easements to protect hundreds of thousands of acres of productive farmland, forestland, ranchland, wildlife habitat, scenic property, and open space that gives a community its character and preserves a quality of life that once gone is irreplaceable.

Now, really only within the past few years, there have been reports of bad deals, bad appraisals, bad judgment, and all of a sudden a mushroom cloud of misinformed criticism about conservation easements has appeared over Washington. Most of the criticism seems to come from people who are new to the subject, who do not see the whole picture, who have latched onto theoretical and academic concerns, and who simply do not understand how well conservation easements have been working in fact. They simply have not been watching for twenty years so they do not know that, with the exception of some noteworthy problems that can be fixed with a scalpel, this is an enormously important, successful, abuse-free, and fraud-free field.

Congress and the IRS should shut down the bad guys with targeted audits and tighter appraisal rules and let the good guys go back to work.

Sincerely,
Stephen J. Small
Boston, Massachusetts