Beebe Rocks, Rome Township, Athens County, Ohio
Athens Conservancy
Landowner Management Options
Conservation Easements
What is a conservation easement? Think of land ownership as a bundle of sticks. Each stick is a particular right to that land. One stick may be logging rights. One may be development rights. One may be access rights. One may be mineral rights. Each of these may be separated from the bundle. In fact, each of these named may be subdivided in various ways.
The effect of a conservation easement is to permanently separate one or more of these rights from the bundle, to assure continued conservation of the land. Most commonly, conservation easements will remove logging and development rights, but this is flexible when being originally negotiated. You, as the landowner, get to choose what will be included in that conservation easement. But the easement is a legally recorded, legally binding document. The beauty of it is that, no matter how committed you are to protecting your land, you have no control over what happens when you're gone. If, however, a conservation easement has been recorded in favor of an organization such as the Athens Conservancy, then we can continue to monitor the property to ensure that the easement is observed in the future.
Conservation easements are not free. There are not only initial legal costs to doing this, but some form of endowment is needed to ensure that the organization has the financial means to monitor the property and to legally defend the easement in the future. Depending on the property, its location, its size, and the nature of the easement, an initial endowment of one to three thousand dollars is suggested.