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Date: 7/18/2023
SOUTHAMPTON — To protect and permanently conserve over 1,000 acres of primarily forested land around Pomeroy Mountain and the Tighe-Carmody Reservoir, Kestrel Land Trust applied for a $1.25 million Landscape Partnership Grant through the commonwealth. Almost a dozen hopeful landowners, parties to the application and members of Southampton’s Open Space Committee, will soon hear if the money came through.
Then the fundraising really begins. Kestrel and the town will have to match the grant.
Under the commonwealth’s LP grant program, properties a distance apart may be grouped together for an application. One purpose of the larger grants accessible under the program is to promote more coherence in land conservation in an entire area. Coherence in land conservation magnifies the impact of conservancy efforts and promotes better forest preservation and cleaner water.
“The forests surrounding Pomeroy Mountain are important just for themselves, in terms of wildlife connectivity and habitat, but they’re also a pretty big water source, a pretty big source of clean water,” said Mark Wamsley, conservation director for Kestrel Land Trust. “Those waters feed into Tighe-Carmody, providing the city of Holyoke with clean drinking water…and the safety and protection of the forest is key…for the whole process.”
Wamsley found Southampton impressively motivated, among both residents and town officials, to conserve and protect forested land. The Mountain Waters project is an outcome of work that began five years ago, according to Cindy Palmer, chair of the town’s Open Space Committee. The town attracted two neighborhood outreach grants that brought landowners together to discuss their options for creating a legacy of protected forests.
Some property owners said no thanks.
“Some of them want to be paid in fee,” Palmer said of landowners who will take a reduced price for their acres. “Some of them came to the meetings and that was the end of that. They didn’t want to proceed any further.”
Another option for participating landowners is to keep their land under private ownership. That option involves the sale of an easement rather than the land itself. Other residents may be concerned that land suitable for development and future growth will be forever unavailable under the grant. While a few of the properties have road frontage, most are landlocked, precluding development.
Members of the Open Space Committee, Palmer said, didn’t pressure landowners to conserve acreage. Rather, the 11 landowners, committing a total of about 1,027 acres, learned the Mountain Waters project was an opportunity to put real estate to a better use. The thousand acres lies in a preserved corridor that allows wildlife to travel north to Canada.
Many legal and real estate services will be necessary to complete a large conservancy project with multiple pieces. Title research and recording fees, appraisals and documentation, surveying boundaries and property reports are expenses allowed under the grant. Wamsley said in fee payments for land, at reduced rates, will count toward the grant match, though he doesn’t see bargain sales as a large piece.
He also doesn’t anticipate any outright land donations.
Mass Audubon, a partner in many conservancy efforts, may also be involved in the Mountain Waters project. Success with this project may then prompt another project in the future. According to Wamsley, the state program will fund additional conservancy packages after an initial success. Palmer suggested that other local landowners will also see the benefits of protecting their forested land.
“This is just phase one,” Palmer said. “There may be future phases of this project that will include more landowners.”
Wamsley sees the Mountain Waters project as a success story. He sees the protection of 1,000 acres of forest as a community learning to address its own needs in this time of great climate uncertainty.
“It’s a neat story, I have to admit,” Wamsley said. “It’s about people caring, about people figuring out how to get things done, partnerships, people talking to a lot of different people from a lot of different walks of life. We’re excited and hopeful, even though we’re in a bit of a holding pattern right now.”
Wamsley anticipates news on the Landscape Partnership Grant within a few weeks.