About the Trust

Read the newspapers, listen to the radio, attend council meetings, or even get a cup of cappuccino these days and you’ll catch the worry—our desert is changing. More houses—fewer Joshua trees, fewer tortoises, fewer stars—nature’s richness is being simplified and we sense, so is the quality of our lives. As we cover our historic landscapes we feel our community identities blur and the foundation of our tourist economy shake. As cities and the county plan, more and more citizens are paying attention and speaking out. That’s a good thing. These are times of big change: we need to pay attention and have a full tool box to reach community goals.

One of the tools increasingly used across the country is the land trust. Land trusts are non-profit charitable organizations that have as part or all of their mission to conserve land through acquisition and stewardship. Land trusts do their work through outright purchases, conservation easements, consensual land use restrictions, and bequests. Independent and entrepreneurial, land trusts are flexible and able to work across political boundaries to meet the needs of land owners, public land agencies, municipalities, and developers to help shape the direction of growth and implement strategic plans on the landscape level. To do their work land trusts have to gather supporters and raise money, lots of it, to achieve their goals. Under certain conditions the government, acknowledging the public benefit, helps by offering income, estate, and property tax benefits to property owners who voluntarily relinquish certain uses of their land.

Nationally, the most widely recognized land trust is The Nature Conservancy. Regionally, The Wildlands Conservancy (TWC), headquartered in Oak Glen, manages 150,000 acres in California containing many miles of hiking trails and recreation roads. In our back yard they have acquired lands on the eastern edge of the San Bernardino Mountains that link through the National Forest to the desert, protecting important habitat and movement corridors for wildlife. You can view this project by visiting Pipes Canyon Preserve in Pioneertown and Mission Creek Preserve west of Hwy. 62. On a much grander scale, in 2001, TWC purchased over 650,000 acres of historic railroad lands checker boarded across the California desert and then gifted them to the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service for management. This was the largest private land acquisition in the Nation.

In 1950 there were only 53 land trusts operating in 26 states. Today there are over 1500 land trusts nationally; most of them are community-based and half are run solely by volunteers. What has contributed to this huge growth in numbers of land trusts? Basically, people are concerned about the accelerating loss of natural areas to subdivisions, often without sound planning to protect community resources. Today, the nation’s land trusts have protected more than 9.3 million acres.

How does this land conservation effect local economic development? Research shows that saving land from development can reduce government spending and avoid tax increases. The perception is that property taxes on new subdivisions brings in new revenue but the true cost of schools, roads, police, water, and storm water management shows that it costs between $1.04 to $2 for every tax dollar to provide services for a typical subdivision. At the same time, communities that conserve land are making an investment in their economic future. Many studies have shown that when land is protected, the adjacent land often increases in value, with homes selling for 10-20 percent more than comparable homes elsewhere—a true tax windfall for local government.