Ranch’s Easement Spawns Controversy

With a rugged grandeur that harks to the Old West, Las Tablas Ranch embraces more than 10 square miles of oak-draped hills and rolling pastures.

The cattle ranch is 20 miles west of here, near Lake Nacimiento, where vineyards and home construction have been consuming open space and oak woodlands.

So neighbors and local conservationists were much relieved when the owners, the family of rancher Mike Bonnheim, signed an agreement a few years ago to forever protect most of their land from development.

But soon they were startled and dismayed to hear the piercing whine of chain saws and see pallets of freshly cut and split oak trucked from the ranch, bound for firewood markets.

“It was hundreds of truckloads, easily,” said Ralph Ward, a neighbor who works as a carpenter. “I do not consider cutting live oaks conservation.... I am very sad.... I am not an extreme tree hugger.”

The cutting goes on, specifically allowed under a conservation easement that the owners signed with a local land trust in return for lucrative development credits granted by San Luis Obispo County.

Conservation easements are land-use agreements that usually provide financial incentives for keeping land primarily as open space. Some easements have become controversial, however, because they resemble tax shelters or don’t meet public expectations for conservation.

The Bonnheim ranch easement “was negotiated under the guise of halting development in rural areas,” said former county planning commissioner and environmental activist Pat Veesart. “How is timber [cutting] consistent with the purpose of a conservation easement?”

Veesart’s criticism is part of the nationwide debate over how best to structure and police conservation easements to ensure that natural resources are protected and that the public dollars that often help underwrite the easements are well spent.

The easements have become an important tool for preserving land and habitat while keeping it in private hands. But abuses and weaknesses, including spotty monitoring, have emerged with the rapid expansion of easements, which cover millions of acres across the country that are supposed to be supervised by thousands of private land trusts.

Typically, an owner who agrees to protect land from development can be eligible for tax breaks and other financial relief. That is the case with the Bonnheims’ ranch.

But the language of easements varies widely and can be vague. Some, like the Bonnheims’, allow hunting of wildlife and commercial logging. Others permit farmers and ranchers to continue to work the land, as the Bonnheims do. And like the Las Tablas Ranch easement, many do not require protection of all plants, animals and other natural resources.

In California, which has hundreds of easements, they are defined as agreements that retain “land predominantly in its natural, scenic, historical, agricultural, forested or open-space condition.”

Voter-approved bond measures to fund conservation of farmland, water, open space and wildlife have set aside almost $3 billion for land purchases or easements. And in response to reports of poor monitoring of easements, legislation has been proposed that would create a public registry of easements involving state funds.

“California needs to clean up conservation easements,” said Mary D. Nichols, resources secretary under former Gov. Gray Davis and now director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment.

“We have no specific requirement for what is in an easement,” she said, and that creates “weaknesses in enforcement, transparency and assurance that government money is being well spent.”

The controversy over easements extends well beyond California. A congressional committee recently proposed a crackdown on excessive tax deductions and the overvaluation of easements acquired by nonprofit land conservancies. The Land Trust Alliance in Washington, D.C., which represents 1,500 conservancies, is planning to create an accreditation system for such organizations.

The question, said Nancy A. McLaughlin, University of Utah law professor, is, “Should public funds, and a significant amount, when we have limited funding, be expended on an easement that prevents development without more significant protection of ecological values?”

“We should be demanding more strict conditions if we’re giving people millions of dollars,” added McLaughlin, who has studied problems with easements around the country.

For many farmers and ranchers, selling or developing their land has been the only way to raise revenue to pay property taxes or estate taxes.

For the Bonnheims, who have owned their ranch since 1919, a conservation easement was the ideal way to keep their 7,200-acre ranch in the family, providing it left them some leeway to make money from their land without developing it.

“There is no way on God’s green Earth ... that you could buy ag land and produce livestock and pencil a decent return,” said Bonnheim, 53, a burly college-educated, third-generation cattleman with two children.

Many years ago, the Bonnheims diversified their operation by starting a private sportsman’s club with a recreational vehicle park on the ranch. In return for an annual fee of about $3,500, the 30 members can ride horses, fish in stocked ponds and hunt deer, game birds and wild turkeys and pigs.

The hunting club has been making more money than the cattle operation, Bonnheim said.

But as Bonnheim’s parents aged, the family feared that estate taxes someday would require them to sell the ranch. So they explored conservation easements as a way of reducing future tax liability.

“The alternative for the next generation was to sell it or a piece of it,” said Bonnheim’s father, Donn. “The easement means we love the land and this type of living.”

The Bonnheims’ situation was particularly complex. Not only did the family want to continue grazing cattle, they wanted to maintain the hunting club. Mike Bonnheim also practiced a controversial way of managing his land in order to let in more light.

Primarily to improve habitat for game animals, Bonnheim said, he began seven years ago to crush the undergrowth with a bulldozer, then selectively remove oaks, creating savanna-like landscape. “I get back like an artist with a blank canvas and picture what I want a hill to look like,” he said.

Bonnheim said he pays a contractor $500 a month, plus bonuses, to cut trees into firewood. The cleared ground, he said, “looks worse before it scabs over. But, my God, the deer and quail love it -- and we’ve got guys with expensive bird dogs [who] go home with a smile on their face.”

But the oak tree is an icon, and Bonnheim was turned down the first time he sought a conservation easement, even though he applied to a group, the California Rangeland Trust, that was formed by cattlemen.

Steve Sinton, a founding director of the trust, anticipated funding problems for the easement because of the oak cutting.

“When you cut an oak tree, it ... may be 100 years old,” he said, “And you can’t say, ‘Well, it was a bad idea,’ and you can’t put it back.”

The Bonnheims next went to the Nature Conservancy, but the specter of felled oaks again killed any possibility of a deal.

Finally, the family reached an agreement in 2002 with the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County, a nonprofit organization formed in 1984. Records show that easements covering about 5,000 acres of the ranch prohibited development, a deal that a county official says is probably the largest in San Luis Obispo County other than a state-approved pact placing much of the Hearst Corp.’s San Simeon ranch in a land trust.

The Bonnheim easements specifically allow recreational uses and “timber management.”

Although a county report identified firewood cutting as a threat to oaks, Bonnheim was free to continue cutting them under the agreement. He estimates he has been thinning about 10 acres annually.

The Bonnheim easement created an awkward position for the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County, which says it is dedicated to protecting oak woodlands.

Brian Stark, the conservancy’s executive director, said Bonnheim is thoughtfully managing his oak woodlands.

“I think the easement over the Bonnheim ranch will protect more trees than are impacted,” he said.

In exchange for giving up development rights, the Bonnheims were awarded credits, which they are allowed to sell. To date, they have sold 119 credits for at least $10,000 each to developers who wanted to build houses elsewhere in the county. They have dozens more.

Some community activists and neighbors contend that the Bonnheims’ easements aren’t justified because they don’t provide a corresponding public benefit.

“You haven’t protected anything if you haven’t protected the ecology,” Jim Irving, a Realtor who owns a neighboring ranch, said in an interview.

Greg Giusti, a forest advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension, has not seen the ranch but questions Bonnheim’s rationale for taking out oaks and brush, saying it amounts to loss of habitat, not ecosystem restoration.

“Opening up [the landscape] does not make it more attractive in quail or deer terms,” Giusti said. “It makes it easier to see them and hunt them.”

But Rand Wentworth, president of the Land Trust Alliance, said there was public benefit in simply avoiding development and keeping working ranches in place. “I am a great believer in protecting natural habitat but do not think we should be such purists,” he said.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which is considering buying a grassland easement on other parts of the ranch, give high marks to Bonnheim’s land stewardship, although they are evaluating how much oak cutting to allow in the future.

“It beats a straight clear cut and a housing development,” said John Gustafson, the service’s range management specialist.