Votomatic - National Museum of American History/Wikipedia Commons

Twice each month TPL’s Conservation Finance service publishes links to state and local conservation finance stories from around the nation. In addition to helping states and communities organize and pass conservation finance measures, the service operates TPL’s LandVote^TM database of all such measures since 1988.

California
Voting yes on Prop. 21 is an investment in state parks, our families
Prop. 21 is just another sneaky car tax
Analysis of parks in Sacramento County

Colorado
Snowmass Village voters to see open space tax on November ballot to purchase property

Massachusetts
More towns place Community Preservation Act on the ballot
Marlborough CPA Committee President Barbara Earley says now is the right time to act
Boston Globe: Belmont to Vote on Preservation Act
Belmont Patch (local news): Community Preservation Act On Nov. Ballot

Michigan
Meridian Township looks to extend open space levy in November

Utah
Voters to Decide on Open Space Bond
West Valley City sends open space bond to voters
WVC open-space bond headed for voters

Washington
Seattle park levy spending questioned

Frederic Remington: The Coming and Going of the Pony Express, 1900

Between 1860 and 1861, before it was put out of business by the transcontinental telegraph, the Pony Express bragged that it could carry the mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, in ten days. It took somewhat longer than that for TPL to help protect a section of the route east of Lake Tahoe in Nevada—but it is great to hear that the project is now complete.

The Record-Courier, a local Carson Valley newspaper, carried a short story on the project yesterday.

A 123-acre site near the top of Kingsbury Grade has been purchased for $750,000 and added to the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, according to the Trust for Public Land.

The Daggett Pass property connects Carson Valley with the Lake Tahoe Basin along the old Vansickle Toll Road, which includes a section of the Pony Express trail.

During the years that I roamed California and northern Nevada writing about the outdoors and the environment for the San Francisco Chronicle, one of my favorite story techniques was to trace a historic trail.  I have traveled quite a bit of the Pony Express route in the Silver State.

This was often hot and dusty work. One requirement of the original Pony Express riders was that they be “skinny fellows”—probably to spare the horses, but this must have also been an advantage to the riders themselves in crossing baking expanses of the West. How relieved they must have been to climb this section of the trail, out of the desert and into Lake Tahoe’s sparkling realm, with only 90 miles left to Sacramento.

Money for the purchase came from the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act, which permits money from lands sold by the BLM to be used to acquire private lands within national parks, national forests, and BLM conservation areas.

The land will be managed by Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in conjunction with Douglas County, which is turning part of the route into a formal segment of the Pony Express National Historic Trail.

Photo: Alexa Garbine

Some students at the Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey, called it “The Lost City.” The moss-covered, carved marble columns had reposed in a forest on the school’s grounds at St. Mary’s Abbey as long as anyone could remember, and no one really knew where they had come from.

In 2008, TPL began the process of acquiring the forestland from the Order of St. Benedict for addition to the adjacent Lewis Morris County Park. In preparation for the sale, the 74 fluted column shafts, 14 Corinthian capitals, and associated marble bits were hauled from the woods to a school parking lot, their origin still unidentified.

You can read the rest of the story on NJ.com in a piece written for The Star-Ledger by Thomas Diges.

Now, the debates can stop. The decades-old mystery of the columns has been revealed, thanks to a set of chance encounters involving an architecture historian, a Benedictine monk and a Chatham master gardener.

It is a fascinating story touching on John Jacob Astor and Philadelphia department-store magnate John Wanamaker. You have to wonder if the mystery would have ever been solved if the columns had remained in the forest, visited only by students in search of solace or a place to sneak a smoke.

“It was a wonderfully mysterious place,” said Brian Regan, of the class of 1973. “It looked like some great temple that had been taken down, or torn down.”

You can read TPL press releases on the original protection effort here and here.

Vermont town selectman voting, 1940 - Photo: Marion Post Wolcott

Twice each month TPL’s Conservation Finance service publishes links to state and local conservation finance stories from around the nation. In addition to helping states and communities organize and pass conservation finance measures, the service operates TPL’s LandVote^TM database of all such measures since 1988.

Arizona
Prop 301 would raid open space funds to balance budget

California
Statewide water bond moved to 2012

Colorado
Boulder County’s decision to place open space tax on November ballot faces criticism.

Another on the same topic

Florida
Hernando County Commissioners vote against raiding voter-approved open space fund

Another on the same topic

Michigan
Washtenaw County places open space millage on November ballot

Missouri
Columbia residents express support for more open space funding in November measure

Another on the same topic

New Jersey
Despite development pressures, land in the Highlands is still being preserved

New Mexico
State adopts rules for new Natural Heritage Conservation Act

New York
Town of Bedford places open space tax renewal on November ballot

East Hampton dealing with new wave of open space skeptics

Utah
Supportive editorial for full LWCF funding.

Near the Appalachian Trail, ME - Photo: Jerry and Marcy Monkman

Outdoor retailers met in Salt Lake City last week, and Paul Foy of the Associated Press was there. His piece on how the outdoor industry is thriving during the recession was picked up by The New York Times and other newspapers nationwide. (I stopped counting at a dozen citations.)

The industry was spooked last year when the economy tanked, but it held its own and is rebounding fast. The recession hardly nicked it — sales were down 2 percent in 2009 but are rising at a rate of 6 percent, said Frank Hugelmeyer, president and CEO of the Outdoor Industry Association.

It helps that buyers of nearly $50 billion worth of outdoor gear are, by and large, discriminating, and that many brands like The North Face or Mountain Hardwear have moved into the fashion mainstream.

People are looking to outdoor recreation because it’s cheap, executives said. But there’s money in the business. It supports 6.5 million U.S. jobs. Together with $243 billion in recreational services and money changing hands, the industry has taken to calling itself a $730 billion enterprise — the better to sell politicians on things like the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Even in Washington, $730 billion is a respectable number, especially compared with $900 million, the Congressionally authorized funding level for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).  In most years, the authorization is an empty promise, with only a small fraction of that amount actually appropriated.

For months, a coalition of conservation groups, with TPL is a leading role, has been working to make the $900-million-per-year authorization a guaranteed yearly appropriation. The House included the guarantee in the recently passed oil spill legislation. The Senate will take up the bill when it returns from recess.

“The industry regards the Land and Water Conservation Fund as its salvation, helping keep people interested in the outdoors,” Foy writes.

Some folks remain hard to convince that conservation is an investment and not a cost—that it can pour money into communities and industries. A conservation funding bill is also a jobs bill and an economic stimulus bill. If you have any influence in Washington—and all of us do to some extent—you might mention that to someone who gets a vote on the measure.

You will find more information on the economic benefits of parks and open space and the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund on TPL’s website.

Barn swallows - Photo: Mila Zinkova / Wikipedia Commons

I do not tweet on Twitter, but I do know something about our feathered tweeting friends. My first piece of published writing was a slim and self-conscious essay about birdwatching, and the day after it appeared in a San Francisco newspaper, a publisher phoned me to ask if I wanted to contribute to a book about birds. So while I don’t spend a lot of time afield with binoculars these days, I understand this particular urge to touch nature.

Still it came as a surprise to discover that The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes a weekly column on birding in northeast Ohio. Its author, James F. McCarty, covers the local port authority and general news, and once a week he writes about the birds. It tickles me that a major metro newspaper would devote space to birding.

His topic last Tuesday: good birding at former golf courses, specifically the recently closed Oakwood Club in Cleveland Heights—the focus of a TPL conservation effort.

The club is combining memberships with the Mayfield Sand Ridge Club, and the property is for sale. Area residents have banded together in an attempt to preserve the 144-acre golf course as an oasis in a sea of suburban development for generations to enjoy.

The Oakwood property possesses unlimited potential as a park . . . . The place is teeming with birds. . . . The first things you notice at Oakwood are the barn swallows — hundreds of them coursing over the tees and down the fairways. So many, in fact, that they left me wondering how golfers at the club could have played 18 holes without winging a few during the round.

The swallows were joined in their flycatching pursuits by Eastern wood-pewees, Eastern phoebes and chimney swifts.

Before closing the column, McCarty also endorses the birding at Liberty Park in nearby Twinsburg, to which TPL recently added 52 acres.

My son Bret and I hiked the park’s Meadow Trail on Sunday, and found fields bursting with birdlife. At least three Henslow’s sparrows were singing from goldenrod perches. About 20 bobolinks in their fall yellow-and-brown plumages were flocking in preparation for departure to South America for the winter. Also there: Eastern meadowlarks, song sparrows, indigo buntings, house wrens, and a colorful array of butterflies and dragonflies.

The more I read from and about northeast Ohio, the more I think that it must be a great place to live. You can read more about TPL’s work there in the Ohio pages of our website.

First step in using a voting machine - from a State of Delaware tutorial

Twice each month TPL’s Conservation Finance service publishes links to state and local conservation finance stories from around the nation. In addition to helping states and communities organize and pass conservation finance measures, the service operates TPL’s LandVote^TM database of all such measures since 1988.

Alabama
Baldwin County looking at fee for mitigation

Colorado
Aspen preparing for open space purchases
Boulder County places open space tax on November ballot
Another on this topic

Florida
Tavares places parks bond on November ballot
Another on this topic

Hawaii
State to begin mapping important agricultural lands

Maryland
Erlich touts Chesapeake Bay accomplishments
Guberbatorial campaigns clash over environment

New Jersey
Vernon deciding how open space funds should be spent
Sprawl spreading in NJ according to new report

New York
Bedford may look to renew open space tax

Oregon
Tigard places open space bond on November ballot
Lottery measure makes November ballot

Rhode Island
$2M open space bond planned in Narragansett

Wisconsin
Dane County may hold advisory referendum on $25M open space bond

Pleasure House Point, Viginia Beach, VA - Photo: Tim Solanic

Every morning I read press from around the nation about conservation projects. Most often, these are written from press releases and relate little beyond a brief description of the land that is or wil be protected, where the money comes from, and what the local senator, mayor, or conservation leader has to say about the project.

It isn’t often that a writer attempts to construct a real narrative around a conservation project or describe how it came to be. But Deirdre Fernandes of The Virginian-Pilot has done exactly this in writing about TPL’s work with Wells Fargo Bank and conservation and government leaders in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to protect 122 acres of wetlands, forests, and beaches once slated to become a community of 1,000 homes.

Over lunch at Chick’s Oyster Bar on a rainy Tuesday in May, conservationists and officials from Wells Fargo bank hammered out the fate of the largest piece of undeveloped waterfront property on the Lynnhaven River.

“A rainy Tuesday in May”—I love this detail, because it means that the writer probably had to ask someone what day of the week it was and what the weather was like, understanding that the information would allow readers to picture the scene. You can almost hear the source thinking, “what earthly difference does it make?” But with an opening like that, you know you are in for a “story” and not simply an “article.”

The piece goes on to describe how the developers who owned the land got into money trouble (yet the latest example of the “green lining” to the nation’s financial storm clouds) and how conservationists got to make their case to the bank.

Kent Whitehead, the Chesapeake project director for The Trust for Public Land, flew in from Washington to pitch a proposal to the bankers who had taken control of the property. The trust, working with the city and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, could buy the land quickly, Whitehead told them.

Modern conservation can be complicated, and this deal is not yet complete. But in 730 words, this newspaper piece not only describes the details of a very complex transaction, but suggests some of the drama involved in putting the opportunity together. Worth the read.

Monach butterflies at Ellwood Mesa - Photo: Rich Reid

According to a story last week in the Santa Barbara Independent the more than 1,600 local land trusts in this country will soon be reduced by one with the wholly expected demise of the Goleta Valley Land Trust.  Located just north of Santa Barbara, Goleta is the home of the University of California at Santa Barbara and the southern entrance to a particularly wild, scenic, and undeveloped stretch of landscape known as the Gaviota Coast.

Local and regional land trusts are the heart and soul of community conservation. Typically, they raise funds and may purchase or accept donations of land or easements. One of their ongoing responsibilities is to monitor easements, legal agreements that prevent development or stipulate land use, being sure that subsequent landowners honor them over time.

So, in general, it is very bad news when a local land trust goes out of business. But the Goleta Valley Land Trust was not your typical land trust. According to the Independent‘s story, the trust was set up specifically to disburse funds generated by a public interest lawsuit against a local resort.

The money was the result of a hard-won 1997 settlement between the Bacara and the Citizens for Goleta Valley, which sued the resort for not including a parking lot and access to Haskell’s Beach. The court-ordered mediation talks were notoriously tense, with one attorney literally grabbing another by the lapels at one point, but the citizens eventually won out, getting the parking lot, public access, and cash.

Armed with $5.5 million the land trust set out to support land conservation in its community. Among it many grants, the trust gave funds to support two TPL projects, including a million dollars toward the successful $20.4 million of protection of Ellwood Mesa, home of the seasonal butterfly community pictured above.

Now the money is almost gone, and soon the land trust will be as well.

The trust’s happy ending . . . was always in the plans, said co-founder Harriet Phillips, who both spearheaded the Bacara suit and then managed the funds with the trust’s board. “We had no fundraisers,” she explained. “We didn’t want to compete with anyone. We did not want to build a bureaucracy. We just wanted to do the best to save whatever land we could save.”

The paper speculates that whatever funds remain after the land trust dissolves could go to the Santa Barbara County Land Trust, a traditional land trust working in the area.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead’s dictum on the importance of an engaged citizenry is so familiar these days that it is losing a little of its punch. But in this instance, I’m going to risk floating it once more: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

More information on local land trusts can be found on the website of the Land Trust Alliance, a land trust umbrella organization that TPL helped to start in the 1980s.

TPL president Will Rogers' office, July 15, 2010 - Photo: William Poole

As I may have mentioned, we’re moving. After 24 years in our current digs, TPL’s National and California state offices are packing up and relocating to the 9th, 10th, and 11th floors of a 28-story building on the other side of Market Street here in San Francisco.

Last week, our offices began to fill up with orange-colored crates. Everyone is packing madly following a month of document purging in preparation for the move. At close of business Wednesday, we are all banned from the office for four days while the movers wheel out the crates and dismantle the furniture.

For that period we will be officeless, and for part of the time we also will be without email and phone mail. (So be patient if you’re trying to reach us.) On Monday, we will be reunited with our crates at the new offices—and, theoretically, everything will begin getting back to normal.

TPL's first office, 1980s - Photo: Daniel Hoffman

TPL’s  first office opened in 1973 above a Remington shaver-and-knife store at 82 Second Street in San Francisco. Appropriate to the spirit of the decade, the building was decorated with a mural of a tree, its trunk embracing the street-level TPL office door, its branches reaching among the building’s second-story windows. That year, TPL fielded a staff of 12 and completed 6 projects.

By 1987, TPL had completed projects in 29 states and seeded regional and local offices across the nation. In San Francisco, the Second Street office was bulging at the seams, so TPL moved a block to Rialto Building at 116 New Montgomery Street—the only TPL offices that most current San Francisco-based staff have ever known.

The Rialto is by any measure a grand and graceful building. With a soaring lobby, marble staircases and hallways, and huge windows, it has been a home to brag about. The building survived two major earthquakes, the disastrous one of 1906 and the destructive one of 1989.  Last year, the management redecorated the lobby and hung a huge photo of the building after the ’06 temblor: an interesting and sobering image.

116 New Montgomery lobby - Photo: William Poole

In an earlier time of stricter dress codes, some of us used to characterize TPL project managers as wearing business suits with hiking boots. The phrase was meant to capture the unique nature of a staff that carried a love of the land in their hearts but whose heads were filled with the business, financial, and legal skills needed to conserve land in the marketplace.

It’s hard not to think of the move to a new building as shifting us, if only slightly, toward the organization’s business side. According to Wikipedia, 101 Montgomery Street, in the heart of the financial district, is currently tied for being the 42nd tallest building in San Francisco. The 404-foot building was built in 1984, its lower floors grafted onto the 1910 California Pacific Building to preserve that historic structure. For years, 101′s anchor tenant was the Charles Schwab investment services company. TPL is moving into three floors of the former Schwab space—how business is that?

101 Montgomery, incorporating the 1910 California Pacific Building - Photo: William Poole

Outside our current building, New Montgomery Street is alive with young dot-commers and creatively dressed students from a nearby art school. The new location, while only three blocks away, feels much more buttoned-down, and the streets are darkened by looming skyscrapers.

But TPL’s space, nine floors off the street,  is lined with windows and full of light—especially where it meets a soaring two-story atrium at the top of the building’s historic section.  And, of course, we are taking all our people with us, so it won’t be long before the place feels like home.  I’ll try to post some photos to the blog after we get the pictures hung and the files put away.

So, no new posts on LandNotes for a few days. We’ll be back next week after the rendezvous with our orange-colored crates.