Federal Panel Proposes To Curb Conservation Easements
By Deborah Fitts
April 2005

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The viability of conservation easements, long an important tool in battlefield preservation, could be devastated if Congress follows a committee recommendation to do away with the income-tax breaks that easements provide to landowners.

"It certainly would hurt our efforts to preserve battlefield land if the value of easements is curbed significantly," said Jim Campi of the Civil War Preservation Trust. "Easements mean you can save a lot more land because you can stretch your dollar further."

Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation issued its recommendations Jan. 27. Among the measures is a call for tax deductions to be limited to no more than 33 percent of the easement's appraised value, instead of 100 percent under current tax law. Also, the easements would only qualify for an income-tax deduction if the owner could prove a benefit to a government conservation program.

The committee also proposed doing away entirely with income-tax breaks to homeowners who donate easements restricting changes to the facades of their homes and to surrounding land. The committee's report asserted that own-ers of historic homes typically have no intention of altering their facades anyway, and the tax break represents a "windfall."

The committee's recommendations followed a series of reports during the last two years in the Washington Post that detailed how the benefits of easement deductions often went to the wealthy or even to individual officials at the charitable organizations that were supposed to monitor the easement restrictions.

The committee cited "questionable or limited public benefits" from the easements. It also pointed out that elimi-nating easements could realize $1 billion for the U.S. Treasury.

Tanya Gossett of the American Battlefield Protection Program, an arm of the National Park Service, noted that easements are commonly used in protecting battlefield land. Reducing or eliminating tax breaks "could diminish an owner's interest in donating an easement," she said.

The nonprofit Land Trust Alliance is forming a coalition to counter the committee's work, which has been afoot for more than a year, Campi said. The Alliance is promoting a list of "standards and practices," which represent self-regulating guidelines for land trusts that will make any congressional legislation unnecessary, he said.

"The ultimate goal is an accreditation policy that you have to subscribe to," Campi explained.

The report was drafted at the request of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who is chairman of the joint committee as well as of the Senate Finance Committee, and the ranking Democrat of the Finance Committee, Max Baucus (Montana).