67. Vermont Land Trust
(Latest update 2001)
8 Bailey Ave.
Montpelier, VT 05602
(802) 223-5234
Key Personnel
Darby Bradley, President
Membership
(May not be a membership organization, is a publicly supported organization)
Finances (1997)
Income: $16,455,325 (included $3,629,226 in government grants)
Assets: $15,390,757
Files an IRS Form 990
Coalition Involvements (very incomplete list)
(The) Conservation Fund
State of Vermont
Organizational Description and Goals
“Who We Are: Vermont Land Trust was founded in 1977 to protect the productive, recreational, and scenic lands that help give Vermont and its communities their distinctive rural character.” -IRS statement
“Programs: Vermont is losing farm land at an alarming rate; 25% of family farms ceased operations in the past ten years. VLT provides for the acquisition of conservation easements on farm land and open space ($2,735,306). One of VLT’s recent accomplishments was the conservation of more than 80,000 acres for farming, forestry, and recreation, including 125 family farms.” -1998 IRS statement.
Board of Directors
Darby Bradley, President,
Jeffrey Roberts, VP-Ext. Affair
William Livingston, Vice President
Barbara Wagner, Vice President
Austin Cleaves
Charles Kireker
David Marvin
John Leehman
Lisa Lindahl
Robert Lawson
Sally Mole
Elizabeth McCrae
Jan Eastman
John Elder
Lee Krohn
Margaret Devlyn
Sabra Field
Susan Crampton
Comments
Champion International Sale
The Vermont Land Trust it is the third party intermediary in the Vermont portion of the 1998-1999 gigantic, complicated government acquisition of fee simple ownership and conservation easements in Champion International’s lands in New York and New England.
The speech by William Sayre of Associated Industries of Vermont at the Fourth Annual New York Conference on Private Property Rights (link) in April 1999 analyzed the conservation easement terminology in Vermont Land Trust’s model conservation easement for the State’s portion of the title to the “working forests” which would supposedly be allowed to continue and prosper.
Sayre warned that the acceptance of these easements would ultimately place forest land owners in the same vulnerable legal position ads timber harvesters in National Forests.
“Every page of the easement has verbal land mines, which
can explode years from now,” he said. If the landowner selects
the easement option to manage with working forests as the highest
priority, he will find that elsewhere in the eleven-page easement
that scenic values, recreation and wildlife have ascendance anyway.
“Forest easements pose a genuine threat to the future of
the working forests, to the communities who depend on these forests,
and to all of us who cherish the freedom to do the things we believe
in,” said Sayre.
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