Editor, The Spotlight;
The Conservation Easement Exemption Program is really nothing that will do a landowner any good. It is just another way that government will have to control your property, as if they don’t already have too much control on your property.
If your town property tax bill is $1,000, your minimum benefit would be $500. If you needed to sell after five years, you would pay back $500 for each of the five years, or $2,500, plus six percent interest compounded annually for the five years, or about $3,372, just to get permission to sell.
Reasons that may cause you to sell may be bankruptcy, illness or just the desire to leave the highest taxed state.
I have kept my land open for 50 years because I like it that way, and I have said many times that if it is at all possible, I intend to keep it that way.
I am not going to be suckered into this “tax benefit!”
Ronald Selkirk
Selkirk
Editor’s note: The incentive behind the Conservation Easement Exemption Program is to encourage larger land owners to maintain open space, while decreasing their tax burden as they do, so long as the landowner commits to keeping the land undeveloped for 15 years. Paying back taxes, as described above, would occur if the landowner develops on his land prior to that threshold.
