Jonathan Weber, a colleague here in Missoula, has a New York Times Op-Ed on some of these interesting land use issues. Great column!
Link: A Class War Runs Through It - New York Times.
September 6, 2005A Class War Runs Through It
By JONATHAN WEBER
Missoula, MontanaJAMES COX KENNEDY, the head of Cox Enterprises, the Atlanta media company, was just doing what lots of modern media moguls do when he bought nearly 4,000 acres in Montana's Ruby Valley: transforming remote Western ranchland into a private hunting and fishing retreat, and doing some commendable habitat conservation and restoration work in the process.
Perhaps unwittingly, however, Mr. Kennedy has walked into the middle of two separate but closely related controversies, one having to do with Montana's stream-access laws - that one will be the subject of a mediation session next week - and the other relating to conservation easements.
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Montana's 20-year-old stream-access law, which declares that the state's rivers and streams are public property up to the high-water mark, provides a clear window into land-use battles. The law, among the strongest in the nation, has survived numerous legal challenges and become a source of pride for many Montanans (including Gov. Brian Schweitzer), though it's still fiercely opposed by property-rights advocates.
The law does not require property owners to provide entry to waterways through their own land, but it does permit access from any public property. As a result, among the most common access points are county bridges. That's where Mr. Kennedy has run into trouble: his ranch includes all or parts of two bridges that cross the Ruby River, and he has blocked access by reinforcing old fencing along those bridges. Stream-access advocates have sued the county for allowing the fences, setting the stage for a showdown on a controversy that has raged for almost a decade.
Mr. Kennedy claims that the bridges are neither safe nor legal river-access sites. More to the point, though, he says allowing public access would damage the riparian habitat and destroy a fragile fishery that he has spent a lot of time and money nursing back to health. That's a similar argument to one being made by the brokerage mogul Charles Schwab, the rock musician Huey Lewis and others who are fighting to keep the public off a waterway south of Missoula where they own property.
And that brings us to the second controversy. Much of Mr. Kennedy's Ruby Valley property is in a conservation easement, an arrangement under which property owners receive tax breaks for forgoing development on ecologically sensitive lands. Easements have been under fire in Congress in the wake of revelations that some developers were claiming conservation easements for golf courses (hey, it's open space, right?) and otherwise gaming the system.
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Easements have proved to be a very effective means of encouraging land conservation and habitat preservation. But there's something wrong when a billionaire buys a ranch, gets a tax break for an easement and then chases the locals off the river in the name of conservation.
Class, of course, is an issue here. Consider the people who are fighting for access to the river: retired miners and schoolteachers and other working folk, some of whom grew up fishing the local waters and some of whom couldn't give a hoot about fishing but hate seeing the landscape walled off. But there's also wider a social issue involved: if land and water conservation and wildlife protection come to be seen as things that only benefit the rich, it will reinforce the perception that conservation is a luxury of the elite rather than a universal concern.
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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, an online publication about the Rocky Mountain West.
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