News

LIGHTNING EDITORIAL: Conservancy gets important win

By Bill Moss, Published: August 2, 2015

A horse farm owner and the Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy wisely settled a bitter two-year-old fight in a way that satisfies both sides and preserves the land conservancy’s power to enforce conservation easements.

The land conservancy gave just enough to bring the lawsuit to an end. The 60-acre farm, owned by California businessman Hugh R. Cassar, will be allowed to keep the riding ring area that it had created by shaving off a hill. It will have to cover the bare ground with grass and remove two roadbeds it had cut for construction. Cassar also agree to pay $37,500 in legal fees, an outcome that must have been greeted with satisfaction in the law offices of Prince, Youngblood and Massagee and at the Terrafirma Risk Retention Group, which had underwritten the cost of the lawsuit.
The conservancy’s concessions to resolve this unpleasant fight were minor compared to the downside risk of an adverse outcome. A loss for the Hendersonville-based land conservancy could have created harmful ripples for land preservation agencies across the country. At stake was nothing less than the conservancy’s authority to enforce IRS-recognized conservation easements, which protect land from development in perpetuity in exchange for tax breaks. All the conservancy did, as framed by the lawsuit and plaintiff’s attorney Sharon Alexander in her prosecution of the complaint, was to carefully monitor the condition of the land and enforce the agreement.
The outcome of the CMLC’s lawsuit “says the conservancy takes seriously the promises we make to the landowner and to the public when we accept a conservation easement and that promise is we will work forever to uphold the terms of the easement and safeguard the benefit to the public,” said Kieran Roe, the conservancy's executive director.
Not everyone viewed the CMLC’s case as clearcut.
Hidden Valley farm was a horse farm before it ever went into a conservation agreement, and a riding ring was hardly the sort of thing that would shock the sensibilities of Greenville Highway motorists accustomed to the pastoral view. It’s not as if the “violation” was high-rise condominiums. Part of the problem, from the conservancy’s point of view, was that Cassar or his employees cut roads, bulldozed a bank and graded a pasture without bothering to check with the conservancy on what was allowed and what wasn’t. At the heart of the dispute was a failure to communicate and that was followed by the stubbornness of both parties.
Alexander’s aggressive and thorough prosecution of the CMLC’s complaint in court brought Cassar to the table and led to the settlement. Hidden Valley Farm has to correct damage to the land but gets to keep the riding ring as long as it’s grass covered. The Carolina Mountain Land Conservancy and the land preservation movement in general are the bigger winners here. The local nonprofit, which has protected 27,000 acres from development in Henderson and Transylvania counties, can continue its valuable work and landowners can be confident that the conservancy will continue to enforce the letter and the spirit of conservation easements forever.