Banking on the land

Part 2

by Jason Gay

The state's first land bank was founded not on Martha's Vineyard but 20 nautical miles away, on its sister island, Nantucket. In the early 1980s, faced with a booming real-estate market and an eroding base of open land, a Nantucket planner named Bill Klein proposed a tax on real-estate sales for the purpose of acquiring open space. Klein had moved to the island from Pennsylvania, where he'd seen a similar, 1 percent tax used to fund conservation projects.

"We spent about a year and a half just talking to anyone we could," recalls Klein, now a research director at the American Planning Association in Chicago.

Klein tried to convince island residents that using transfer taxes to fund open-space purchases was a responsible, effective method of conserving Nantucket's landscape. This stockpiling of acreage, he argued, would not only preserve the island's rural character -- preventing further development and surburbanization in these locations -- but it also made good business sense. People came to Nantucket because it wasn't like anyplace else. Protecting that reputation was in the best interest of every environmentalist, real-estate agent, and laborer on the island.

The issue went to a town-meeting vote in 1983, where it sailed to approval, 406 votes to 1. (The sole objector was a "right wing" fisherman, Klein recalls.) But because it called for a new tax, Nantucket's land bank still needed legislative approval. In late December 1993, in the wee hours of the legislative session, the Nantucket land-bank bill passed.

Nearly 14 years later, Klein finds himself halfway across the country, but the Nantucket land bank is thriving, having preserved some 1600 acres with $45 million in transfer-tax revenue. On the Vineyard, which established its land bank in 1986, the accomplishments are similarly impressive. Though neither agency has entirely stopped the creep of development, both land banks have bought dozens of precious locations -- beachfront, pasture, forest -- and kept them unblemished and open to the public.

"What you end up preserving is access," says Vineyard land-bank director James Lengyel. "I don't think people want to be shut out of places they are used to enjoying and loving."

Despite the successes of the islands' land banks, however, no other Massachusetts community has won the right to tax real-estate transfers. It's not for lack of trying. In 1989, there was a State House bill that would have enabled every city and the town to use a 2 percent tax toward open-space acquisition; it lost in the House by five votes. Soon after, the economy and the real-estate market went south, and land banks fell off the state's political radar screen.

But with the return of economic prosperity in the mid- to late 1990s, transfer taxes have reemerged. Last year, voters in Cape Cod's 15 towns supported a land-bank ballot proposal by a margin of more than 10,000 votes; they now seek Beacon Hill's approval. Similar measures have come from 10 other cities and towns: Cambridge, Boxford, Dartmouth, Dover, Marion, Sudbury, Walpole, Wayland, Westford, and Westport. (Cambridge's tax revenue would go strictly toward affordable housing.)

Another bill up for legislative consideration would entitle every community in the state to raise transfer taxes. Known as the Community Preservation Act, the bill would allow cities and towns to impose an increase of up to 1 percent in the deeds excise fee on a real-estate purchase. The money raised must be put toward open space, affordable housing, historic preservation, septic-system improvements, or upgrades to environmentally damaged sites, a practice known as "brownfield redevelopment."

Backers of the Preservation Act like to point out that these proposals have worked not only on the Vineyard and Nantucket, but elsewhere around the country. There are existing community-preservation or transfer-tax programs in New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, Arkansas, and five other US states. Maryland has the nation's oldest program; since 1969, it has preserved more than 180,000 acres of open space with its real-estate transfer tax.

But with Massachusetts lagging behind, there is an added sense of urgency in the state's environmentalist community. Every year that passes without transfer taxes means the further disappearance of precious land, supporters say. One example: during the past 50 years, more than one million acres of Massachusetts farmland has been lost.

"Now is the time for this," says the Conservation Law Foundation's Menoyo. "We're at a critical window of opportunity . . . and [transfer taxes] are the biggest thing on the horizon."

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Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.