WP: Land Trust Alliance Rewriting It's Ethical Standards

[CShine]

The nation's largest coalition of land preservationists is rewriting its ethical standards in response to recent reports of conflicts of interest and questionable land deals cut in the name of the environment.

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An alliance "strategic plan" distributed at the conference said: "The U.S. Senate has launched an investigation of land trust practices, and land trusts are receiving increased critical scrutiny from the national media. Sooner or later, the government will demand stricter standards and credentialing for land trusts. . . . The best solution is a single, national set of standards and a credentialing process that is designed and managed by the land trust community."

Ethics discussions dominated the conference, where 1,600 preservationists attended workshops with titles ranging from "Land Trusts Behaving Badly" to "Easements Today: The Good and the Not So Good." Speakers told how sellers had inflated land appraisals and how developers had used taxpayer-financed conservation projects to pepper landscapes with mansions.

Time and again, experts emphasized that preservationists need to be careful about passing along real estate and tax breaks to friends and colleagues. "For a long time now, the land trust movement in this country has been a cozy little field," conservation lawyer Stephen J. Small said. "Those days are over."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13899-2003Oct24.html