For Immediate Release

For More Information:
Rex Linville, Albemarle County Conservation Officer, Piedmont Environmental Council
(434) 977-2033

Nearly 6,900 Acres Conserved in Albemarle County in 2007
Over 73,000 Total Acres Protected

(Charlottesville, VA - January 30, 2008) The Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC) is pleased to announce that landowners in Albemarle County protected almost 6,900 acres of land in 2007, bringing the total amount of private conservation land in Albemarle to more than 73,000 acres or 15% of the county's total land.

"Albemarle County is one of the most successful places in the country when it comes to protecting farmland and natural resources through voluntary, private land conservation," says PEC Conservation Officer Rex Linville. "The people most to thank for this success are the individual landowners who have chosen to permanently protect their land so that it continues to provide public benefits like clean water, scenic views, productive farmland, wildlife habitat and a sense of history. At the same time, landowners rely on local conservation organizations and Albemarle County's conservation programs to let them know about their options and guide them through the process."

In the nine-county region that PEC serves, from Albemarle to Loudoun, nearly 300,000 acres have been protected with conservation easements-an area that is approximately one and a half times the size of Shenandoah National Park. PEC facilitates this extraordinary level of private land conservation by working with landowners on an individual basis, educating communities, building support for local initiatives like Albemarle's Acquisition of Conservation Easements (ACE) program, and advocating for strong state and federal conservation incentives.

Easements on about half of the nearly 6,900 acres protected in Albemarle last year are held by the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, a state agency entrusted with upholding the vast majority of easements in Virginia. Easements on more than 2,700 acres from 2007 are held by Albemarle County. These include over 1,300 acres protected through the ACE program, which helps to preserve working farms by paying landowners who voluntarily protect their land from development. The Nature Conservancy holds easements on the remaining 1,000 acres from last year.

Ken Boyd, the Chair of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors says, "Conservation easements are one of the most important and successful methods we have available to meet the rural protection goals of our Comprehensive Plan, and Albemarle County sincerely appreciates the generous stewardship of the donating landowners and the hard work of all the easement holding organizations who together have made this exciting total possible for 2007."

In Albemarle, conservation easements from 2007 alone protected an additional 26.6 miles of stream frontage, 2,569 acres of prime agricultural soils, 4,832 acres of forests, 82 acres of wetlands, and 2,094 acres within nationally registered historic districts.

A conservation easement is a voluntary agreement that permanently protects a property's natural and cultural resources, even as the land remains in private ownership. Because landowners who donate an easement are sacrificing value by limiting development rights, they are eligible for significant state and federal income tax benefits as well as estate tax benefits. In Virginia, conservation easements must fulfill public goals that are expressed through local Comprehensive Plans-ensuring that the actions of individual landowners result in real benefits to the community

"When private land conservation catches on like it has here, we start to realize its potential not just to preserve parks and patches of land for coming generations but to help sustain the character of the whole landscape," Linville says. "However, it's important to keep in mind that conservation alone can't fulfill our public goal of maintaining the rural land that makes Albemarle such a great place to live, work and visit. It's amazing that 15% of the land is now protected forever, but that's still a relatively small portion and when you look at the whole picture, a lot of rural land is being fragmented every year. Clearly, in Albemarle, we need to complement our conservation success with appropriate, fair local policies that also protect rural land. The Board of Supervisors has said that 2008 will be the Year of the Rural Area, so we're looking forward to being a part of that."

For information about land conservation in Albemarle you can contact Rex Linville at (434) 977-2033 or via email at rlinville@pecva.org