In Massachusetts, land preservation is a waiting game

Edith Wislocki points across hay and bright yellow flowers waving in the wind.

“This is the meadow that could be dramatically changed and this is the reason,” she said, pointing to a road along one edge of her land in Rehoboth, Massachusetts.

The road would give housing developers an easy way to build a cluster of homes here. Wislocki gets messages asking if she wants to sell at least weekly.

“It’s constant and it’s been constant for two years and I say no, no, no,” Wislocki said. “I keep wanting to say there’s a restriction, but there isn’t because it hasn’t happened yet.”

Wislocki is clear: She does not want to sell her property. It includes a therapeutic horse farm and more than 20 acres of trails through trees and over bridges above streams and swamps.

Wislocki started the paperwork to preserve her land more than three years ago. Now, she’s on a waiting list for a Conservation Land Tax Credit. It gives private landowners up to $75,000 to cover some of what their land would be worth to developers as well as the cost of appraisals, surveys and legal fees. In Massachusetts, the program is capped at $2 million per year. When the money runs out, Wislocki gets bumped to the next year — or maybe the next.

“About every six months I send a little text, ‘What’s going on?'” she said, “The answer comes back the same: ‘You’re in a queue.'”

Fourteen other states and Puerto Rico offer some kind of tax credit to encourage land conservation. These programs have become key pieces of climate change action plans and goals, as no state is expected to ever completely eliminate harmful emissions. As a result, Massachusetts and other states must offset emissions by storing carbon in trees and open land.

“All of their projections forward kind of fall apart if we don’t have that land base to continue to sequester and store carbon year after year,” said Laura Marx, a climate solutions scientist at The Nature Conservancy.

In fact, to meet the state’s climate goals, Massachusetts needs to double its pace of forest protection. Robb Johnson, director of the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition, said the state should make better use of the tax credit program which is already popular and effective.  

“The leverage is substantial,” Johnson said. “For every dollar invested in the tax credit, over four dollars in land value has been donated.”

While Wislocki has some patience left, other landowners are giving up and selling to developers. The wait for help with land conservation costs is so long, some landowners said they never consider the program. But Carol Williams, another Rehoboth resident, is determined to keep her nine acres along a gurgling stream wild.

“We need it just to replenish the earth,” Williams said. “We need green trees, we need good water. We need to save our resources to continue to live anywhere.”

Williams has wondered if it makes sense to start the process. She’s 81 and would not receive any money until at least 2027.

“Hope I’m going to live that long,” Williams said.