00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cal's We Can Review with Ryan cal Callahan. Now here's Cal. All right. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: So a lot of folks don't know this, but my dad was a lawyer here in Montana, and if you are a practicing lawyer, and they do this for a lot of other professions. But it's like continued legal education is something that you need to need to do, stay up on your hours, what's new and stuff like that. So that's really the spirit of these additional drops here on Cal's Weekend Review. It would be like continued conservation education. It sucks that the legal crowd has something that you can actually say, like klee, which is a term you hear a lot. 00:00:58 Speaker 1: This is just. 00:01:00 Speaker 2: But you know it'll it'll catch on them, very confident. So on this week's special drop here we have the Montana Association of Land Trusts and we are going to learn about what the heck of land trust is. Lots of states have lots of land trusts and don't you want to know why? So that's what we're gonna attempt to do today. So we'll go clockwise and we'll end with the executive director of the Montana Association of Land Trust. But Chet, would you like to start us off? Just introduce yourself, what you do here in town and. 00:01:45 Speaker 1: Why you do it. Sure? Sure. My name is Chetwork. I'm the executive director of the Gallatin Valley Land Trust, which is the regional lan trust based here in Bozman. We cover Park County, Gallatin County, Madison County three, three counties on the north end of Yellstone National Park, and our mission is to conserve important agricultural lands and wildlife habitat. We also facilitate trails here in the Bozman area, over one hundred miles of trails or part of our purview in partnership with the City of Bozeman. But I came to this work probably like most people. I spent a lot of time hunting and fishing as a kid. I had a real appetite for being outdoors and wanted to find a career, maybe like you, in the outdoor industry, and so passion for wildlife. Went to graduate school and realized in sort of a spark moment that private lands were the key to habitat and to populations of wildlife. And we spent so much time and energy in this country focused on public lands, and I realized that private lands are often the best habitat. It took me about eighteen seconds of googling how do you save private lands to come up with the word land trust And that's twenty four years ago. I've had the great pleasure of working with four different lands trusts and conserving some really important private lands with probably the best landowners you can imagine. 00:03:07 Speaker 2: Awesome. Yeah, So if you're a local listener, I want to say, they're typically like light blue signs or they're faded. 00:03:15 Speaker 1: But GVLT is. 00:03:17 Speaker 2: The acronym you need to know their Gallatin Valley Land Trust. So plenty of yeah, hiker friendly trails and a little bit on the fishing side too, but we'll get more into that. 00:03:31 Speaker 1: And then Kendall Van Dyke, what do you do? 00:03:34 Speaker 2: Why are you here? 00:03:36 Speaker 3: Well, I'm here because Marcus told me to be. But I am a managing director of the Montana Land Alliance and so the Montana Land Alliance operates statewide. We have one point three million acres under conservation in Montana, so I think Glacier Park times another third, so pretty significant holding of easement. It's about a thousand different families we've partnered with in our forty plus years of doing business. I came to this work in kind of a similar fashionist chat. I actually grew up in the Gallatin Valley down on the Lower Madison in an agricultural family. Always had kind of a passion for the nexus between agriculture and wildlife habitat and how they can coexist, and so I come professionally more from the public lands space. My previous job was with Trout and Limited, and really coming to this job was fairly interesting and self serving. I served in the legislature and during one day, during a commit after a committee meeting, Trout and Limited's lobbyists came up to me and he said, have you are you familiar with the Montana Land Alliance And I said, yeah, they're the they're the cows, not condos, bumper sticker people, right, And he's yeah, And he said, well, you know, they're looking for someone to work in eastern Montana. And I lived in Billings at the time, and I said, you know, I'm pretty happy. And he said, well, you're going to fish more with that job than you do with this job. And I said, let's set up an interview. So I interviewed with my predecessor, and the rest was history. Started working in Billings and doing Eastern Montana landscapes, and then my wife and kids and I moved to Helena and over time became a managing director and it's starting to feel like a career now. 00:05:30 Speaker 2: And then Marcus strange Kel, what are you doing here? 00:05:34 Speaker 1: That's a good question. I asked myself that a lot. 00:05:37 Speaker 4: So I am the executive director of the Montana Association of Land Trusts, which is a fairly new role for me. Before this, much like chet and Kendall, I was working in the public land space. I was doing wildlife conservation work, and then this amazing opportunity came along to work with the state Association for the land trust So what basically what I do is support the good work that all the land trusts in the state are trying to do. There's twelve member organizations all across Montana that are doing various types of land trust related work. You know, everybody from folks like GVLT you know who are working in local communities up to you know, you know Nature Conservancy, who's working all across the state in a lot of different places. So we do policy work so work very closely with the legislature. It's been probably two or three days up at the Capital Complex every week, making sure that we have good policies that support the work that we're trying to do, and then just ensuring that we have strong funding through things like the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the NRCS programs, and then making sure that our communication is flowing both internally and externally, so we have a weekly newsletter that we put out and social media and all that stuff. And if it looks like somebody was doing it who has no idea what they're doing, that's because I'm doing it, and I have no idea what I'm doing. So yeah, and yeah, I just you know, I came to this work much like these fellows, because you know, I was working in the wildlife conservation space, very passionate about it, loved it, and I saw an opportunity to do more work with the private land side and to be able to really protect a lot of open space. Montana's losing open space at an alarming rate, much like a lot of the West. And as somebody that cares about wildlife, wildlife habitat, wildlife Migration Quarters, working with our friends in the private space is critical to protecting that because you know you're not gonna make more land, you got to protect the land you have. So I saw an opportunity to do that with the land Trust and it's been great. I've been almost a year and they haven't fired me yet, So I think I think we're doing okay. 00:07:56 Speaker 2: Yeah, the bos Angelus area here has got to be a case study for somebody as far as what once was viable agriculture ground ground that produces food for everybody, open space and watching how this this valley has been chopped up and continues to be is certainly something I spend probably a little bit too much time thinking about, uh, what type of path we're going down? So, okay, we gotta we gotta start laying the foundation here. What is a land trust? 00:08:36 Speaker 1: Tell me to take that? 00:08:37 Speaker 3: Yep? 00:08:37 Speaker 1: I think that a land trust is typically a nonprofit organization. It's usually founded by concerned citizens who aren't happy about the way that their community is growing and developing. Much like you just said, what they're choosing to do is to not create an advocacy organization that's going to march on on city hall or the county government and try and change the rules. A lantra is an organization that tries to work with landowners and tries to help those landowners conserve their own land. I like to say that it's not regulatory conservation, it's not changing the rules. It's incentive conservation. Can we find landowners who want to protect their land, and can we help them give them the services they need to protect their land on their own? So I like to think that a land trust is much like any other conservation organization, except that the tactics that we use are collaborative instead of adversarial. 00:09:34 Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a great definition. I think, you know, one of the really fun things about this job is is the voluntary nature of the conservation work that we do. You know, I can sit around somebody's table and Forsyth or Jordan or somewhere, and we may have very different philosophies and how we look at the world generally, but we're able to sort of rally around the importance of family, agriculture, wildlife, habitat and and you know, it's a true meeting of the minds, and it enables you to do some pretty neat, permanent, impactful things. 00:10:12 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:10:12 Speaker 4: I like to when legislators asked me, you know, who are the folks that I represent and what do they do? I say, we're in the business of keeping Montana Montana. You know, if you care about open spaces, if you care about wildlife habitat, if you are like me and you like coming around the corner on a dirt road and seeing, you know, a farmer or rancher pushing cows down that dirt road, and you like taking that twelve minutes to just kind of mosey along with them, you know, that's what we're doing. We're keeping that traditional Montana the way that it was well also being progressive in the way that we think about protecting it. You know, like Chet said, it's a set of tools, and you know, we want to make sure this place is you know, the things that we all love about it for generations to come. 00:10:55 Speaker 2: And what's the need for an association of land trusts? Like is there a governing body here or a grand architecture that is trying to be mapped out for the state. 00:11:09 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:11:09 Speaker 4: I mean these guys have been member of Lantrust for quite a long time, so they can give you a little the historical context from my perspective. The need that I see is, you know, we're all busy, you know, we being the land trust community, we're all working on different things, and so at the State Association we try to take some of that burden off in terms of if each of them had to be sending somebody to Helena during the legislature, that would just be you know, chaos. It'd be a lot of staff time taken away. So having one organizing body that keeps everybody organized, that is the unifying voice, you know, whether it's in d C or in Helena, you know, keeping everybody in the loop in terms of you know, different workshops or funding and opportunities. Just like any state association. We do that organizing effort for these guys. But you know, both of you your organizations were founding members. I mean, do you guys see it differently than I do? Not? 00:12:03 Speaker 3: So not differently. I would say, you know, since the State Association are our world like many is full of acronyms. And when we say that's the Montana Associational address, really the fundamental, the fundamental function of the executive director at MALT has been a bill killer once every other year. The great minds of the fourteenth century assemble in Helena and bring their great ideas to light, and sometimes there's work to be done to educate the implications of those ideas from legislators on their constituents and the people who want to do this and want to exercise this property right, which is an exercise of that right to preserve that property. And so you know, we've been proactive. 00:12:53 Speaker 2: It's a great segue on how we can push back on chats not adversarial. 00:13:02 Speaker 3: So playing defense in the legislature has been a big part of what we do well. While we always are trying to advance our mission and what we what we're trying to accomplish, we're in a pretty good bipartisan space and we're really spend a lot of time trying to guard on territory. 00:13:19 Speaker 2: So like, for instance, right would be we talk about ease months a lot on on this show, which I imagine in the land trust business, Uh, you're also in the easement business as well. Would probably be a great time to define an easement, which is kind of like defining a national monument, right, Like it's got one title, but there's a lot of things that can differ from monument to monument monument, just like easement to ease month. So would anybody like to I mean, you guys are the pros. Would anybody like to define an ease month in a general sense? 00:13:58 Speaker 3: Of course? Well, I think you know for starters. Whoever came up with the bright idea to call these conservation easements easements ought to have bad things done to them because when you typically when you think about an easement, you think of a road right of way or access or those sorts of things. But in the context of where we work, a conservation easement is an exercise of a private property right to give up certain rights, namely subdivision and residential development to an extent into perpetuity. We these lantrusts. In Montana, we work in perpetuity. We don't do term easements. We all work a little bit different. But it is a exercise of a private property right to protect open space. 00:14:48 Speaker 1: In my mind, it's a it's a it's a contract between a willing landowner and a lantrust that permanently restricts the type and amount of development that can occur on the property. And and trusts come with an interest in ensuring that agriculture can take place and that habitat can be preserved and the scenic open space can be preserved. Landowners are often coming just trying to get their their farm or their ranch to the next generation. They're they're coming with an interest obviously in those ecological things, but also in the preservation of their business, and the easement's a tool that they can exercise. And I like to think that land trusts provide a service much like an appraiser or a herbicide dealer, or like or anyone else that a farmer or rancher might reach out to. We provide a service that they can engage in. And like Kendall said, they're exercising a right that they have on the property, which is they could develop the property and they can save the property. That's a right that they have and they're seeking our assistance in doing that. 00:15:50 Speaker 2: And what so the incentives as a landowner, as you know, for for instants, like you said, you're preserving your business model if you're in the agriculture game, right by ensuring the fact that that land that you need to harvest or graze or preserve for timber sales down the road gets to stay that way. I guess what are you giving up because we do need to hit on that. So if you want to keep it in agriculture, obviously you need the open space that has great habitat benefits as well. But in order to ensure that you can do that, you're giving up the right, the private property right or private ownership right to develop that at some point. And so again to bring up the Bozeman Gallatin Valley here, there's a lot of great examples on my late arrival today, cutting through Love Lane, that area of town where you can see, you know, agri culture, butting right up to subdivision that was probably agriculture within the last five years. So how does that negotiation get laid out? When you kin to Like when you go and talk to someone who's interested in this, you kind of lay all your cards on the table and say, Okay, this is the potential gain from developing, this is what you can do through preservation. 00:17:32 Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you know, much like any legal contract, this stuff is complex. There's a variety of different incentives, and originally, in the early days of land trust work, it was quite simply you give up these rights. There's a value established for those rights you're giving up, and you can take a tax deduction on the value of those rights. That works for some of the people who have moved here in the last you know, several years. They're high income earners, you know, all that kind of stuff, and they're they're doing something that creates a public benefit. That doesn't work for everybody. You know, if you're relying on selling calves in the fall for a living, you've got more tax deductions around your place, and you know what to do with You've got to cash infusion problems. So you know, in the last twenty twenty five years, there's been various programs that have been created through the Farm Bill. Is a big one that we all use called the Agricultural Lands Easement program. That can fund a percentage of that value of the easement for your more traditional egg producers. In certain areas like where Chat operates, there's local bonds that kind of stuff that can match that. So you sometimes blend funding when you need to, but you know, to not to put too fine of a point on it. For the For the wealthier landowners who have done this, it's mostly you know, think of the flying d ranch. That's a tax deduction right the preservation on some of those landscapes have been purely donated, and the tax deduction scheme are they're treated better tax wise than say a donation to Montana Landrolines for example. You're right, Meacheck. You can use that against your income in that year when that large value is established for what you've given up, you have the year of the gift plus fifteen years to soak up that tax deduction. So you know, if you have the income to offset or you have a tax event. For those folks, donating an easement can be a really valuable tool. For the rest of the folks, we really look to try to put some cash in their pocket. 00:19:48 Speaker 2: Yeah, any anything you want to jump in on there. 00:19:51 Speaker 1: No, I think I think Kendall handled the incentives well. I think every now and then you see a landowner who's trying to trying to plan for the future with regards to a state planning, and they're seeing that their property values are getting pretty high. When you do a conservation easement, you lower your property value. You may be compensated, as Kendall said, by a federal tax deduction, or you may be compensated by cash. But I think for a lot of these families, especially in a place like the Gallatin Valley where where you're seeing acreage prices at one hundred thousand bucks an acre for developable property. A lot of these agricultural families having a state tax problem in trying to get that property to the next generation. Easements can help with that. 00:20:33 Speaker 2: Even if the place is free and clear, the transfer of that ownership creates a huge You're putting the family place right back into debt by trying to keep it in the family. 00:20:48 Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, I mean, oftentimes some of these properties, these big ranches are so valuable that you know, if you know, if they're five million dollars more than the estate tax benefit, where your kid's going to come up with with the amount of money they got to spend two and a half million dollars to pay the estate tax, They're going to have to sell the ranch to do so, and that's a real hindrance. So you can for certain properties, this can be really beneficial to get it down below those estate tax liabilities. I think that's an incentive that that oftentimes landowners don't understand, and we can help them. That's our that's our role in providing the services to inform them of the opportunities. 00:21:28 Speaker 2: That's great, And how to folks be made aware of land trusts or this option, this tool in the toolkit like traditionally are do you have people lining up and knocking on your door or are you out doing the door knocking. 00:21:48 Speaker 1: I think it's a little of each and I think, to be honest with you, I don't think Kendall will disagree with this. The best advertising comes from within their communities. And I like to say that the gvlt Gauton Valley Land Trust, if we were a public company and we had stock for sale, our stock is bought and sold at the corner market and the church parking lot on a Saturday morning, and we're not even there to advocate for ourselves. So if we've done well by by a landowner, a farmer, ranchers, neighbor, they're going to hear about it. And likewise, if we've not done well by them, they're going to hear about it. And so we take a lot of time and energy to make sure that we're communicating clearly and honestly and with as much integrity as we can with each of these landowners. Because we know that the best best way of a of our word getting out is neighbored and neighbor You know. 00:22:41 Speaker 3: If you look at it historically, you know we've we've been sort of living in this COVID post COVID boom. But this isn't the first time. You know, we joke at the land reliance. We we call it the movie that came out in the nineties. We don't give it a name, we shall not be named. But when that movie came out and there was a lot of migration out west and buying ranches in Montana, particularly for my organization, we really tried to set the tone through peer to peer networking that if you're gonna come by these places in Montiana, you should really consider having an obligation to protect it forever. And so you know, when some of these really wealthy folks start coming out in that migration, that sentiment really existed this time, maybe not so much because it's so fast, so furious. So there's that piece of it, and then Chet's exactly right. One example that we've been living through here lately is in Broadwater County, which has per capital of the highest growth in the state. Now for someone who lives in Bozeman, you're saying, well, it's because nobody lives there, but it's got the Bozeman overflow right. And so around Canyon Fairy Lake there's been this perfect storm of a huge subdivision that got proposed and was denied in court, and then really one or two sort of lynch pin families that everyone looked at and they go, Chet's family can do this, my family can do this, right, And so that really has cascaded into the phone ringing off the hook, and we've done some outreach, but it's really elevated the level of interest to a point where we really don't even have. 00:24:31 Speaker 2: To It is odd to think about right, like nineteen ninety five, the pace of communication is so much we're obviously living in the future then, but it's so much different now. Like the ability to purchase real estate without ever having an interaction if you want to, right just really didn't exist to the level that it's I don't know, like a real time time frame now versus in ninety five when we see recreational booms influxes, and you know, at that point, more so than now, you're getting people with much different perspectives on the value of land than a traditional operator agriculture operator here in the state had right when we made that shift from Okay, well, the value of that property is based off of the income that we can get off of it through agriculture, and that's it versus Now, there's a one hundred different ways that you can assign value to property, all of which greatly outweigh the animal unit months right, I mean. 00:25:54 Speaker 3: We all heard the stories right after COVID which were real cash buyer's sight unseen right buying these properties. And unfortunately some of that has seemed to have subsided. But it's not based on commodity prices anymore. 00:26:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, bring all these things bring up the opportunity though, when you can interact with these people, you can have that conversation of like, you know, the value of your your property is tied to the open space, the recreation. You should go ahead and preserve that or start looking at the best trust model easement model that would work for you right now. The scary part though, is it can be seen as a limitation on the value of that property. Right, a pre existing easement could remove a buyer from the slice of the pie potentially correct. 00:26:54 Speaker 1: For sure, obviously the developer gets removed from that that slice. Potential buyers when you have the easement on the property. But I think that if you look at the moment that an easeman is consummated with a landowner, they're made whole at that moment, and so they may have realized a tax benefit or a cash benefit at that moment. They won't realize it again later when when a developer buys their property to subdivide it and put in a golf course. They've given that one up. But they're made whole as much as possible at the moment the Eastman is consummated. I think the one thing I wanted to add to Kendall is I would really love it if we could reward the multi generational families that have stewarded these farms and ranches for generations, rather than wait for the newcomer to buy it and quote unquote do the right thing in this new community that they've joined. And so I know the Kendall's organization and with the support of Marcus and the Montana Associational Intrust, we've been trying to find funds, federal funds to compensate these longtime landowners. And I can think of nothing better than to keep some of these multigener national families in control of their properties in these valleys really hard when you think that, you know, I don't know, Kendall. Do you call it the show, the new movie? The movie was in the nineties. 00:28:10 Speaker 3: It show. 00:28:13 Speaker 1: We talk about the Paradise Valley and you see it in that in that in the Yellowstone Show, and it is or it's portrayed in the show. There are properties now in Montana that are selling for forty fifty million dollars that have been legacy family ranches and farms forever. How do you work with those families to try and compensate them enough to keep it in their family hands when it's got that kind of a price tag. It's really hard. But I can think of nothing better for a legacy for my work than to keep as many of those families in control of their properties as possible. So that's why we're trying to utilize as much cash as we can to compensate them and keep it in their hands. They can sell it, but at least it got protected by them and they didn't. And we don't have to and we don't have to wait for the transition to either a conservation minded wealthy individual who's coming in from outside or the other side is the developer. 00:29:06 Speaker 3: That's a really good point, and I think, you know, when we're working with these multi generational families and we do, you know, say we find some federal funding and we were, It's been my experience and maybe chets organization as well. By the time that deal is done, the person that's actually fixing the fence and moving the cows and stuff like that on the ranch typically doesn't walk away with a red penny. He or she has bought off a cousin or you know, done the things that they need to do to keep their family on the ranch, which is a big reason why they called GVLT or MLR in the first place. 00:29:44 Speaker 2: And to circle back to the funding side of things, is that largely weighing on how much cash gets authorized for the Farm bill every year? Is that like the biggest piece of funding for land trause I guess specifically here in Montana those is the federal part of the breakdown, the largest side of funding. 00:30:09 Speaker 4: You two both play in slightly similar but also different spaces, so fill in the gaps here, But yes, farm Bill is a huge piece of the funding that we get a lot of our land trusts in the state work with a state or sorry, a federal agency called the NRCS. The NRCS has for many years been an incredible partner to the land trust in Montana and fund a large part of the work that we do. So, you know, the work on the ground is being done in the state, but a lot of the background work is being done in DC. And so our folks not only have to be you know, good community members and showing up and knocking on doors and having coffee table conversations with folks, but they also have to be keeping their eye on what's going on, you know, thousands of miles across the country to make sure they're works get done. So when you see a land tress and it looks like the duck swimming on top of the water, the feed are really moving underneath to make sure that that money's coming in. But you know, you guys, like I said, you both represent really unique spaces. Do you want to kind of touch on from your perspective how you go about funding your work? 00:31:18 Speaker 1: I guess I would say, you know, I know your audience is national and we've been hitting Montana pretty hard, but I like to think of land trust employees as experts at being able to get out on a piece of property and to look at it pretty quickly and see funding sources. Landowners don't know what's out there, and so this is that service that we provide. And we'll walk onto a piece of property and we'll see some really interesting timber. Okay, there's some funding sources around conserving timber. We might see a creek, Okay, what kind of fish are in that creek? What kind of amphibians are around that creek? Okay, we're in this kind of a grassland, there's funding for that. Oh my gosh, I saw sage grouse go by. There's a huge pot of funding for sage gross conservation. We can look at this ranch, say a thousand acre somewhere in Montana, but it could be anywhere and quickly say, okay, here's four or five potential funding sources around important species, important habitats, geography of where you are, and we can move a lot faster on behalf of that landowner than they could on their own, or than the agencies have the capacity to do and bring those funding sources together. So State of California a lots more than a billion dollars a year for conservation. That's probably more than the rest of the nation. But Pennsylvania's using oil and gas money, Colorado is using lottery money. Wyoming set aside oil and gas money long ago and continues to use that. Each state has their own sources, and I think in general it's probably a little bit too much to say every land trust is expert. But for the most part, we've proved ourselves to be really talented at finding what those local funding sources are and being able to assist landowners in applying for them and bring them to bear on these conservation acquisitions that benefit the community, that benefit the public. 00:33:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, there's it's really interesting. I've been trying to get the heck out of Gallaton Valley for a long time, and you know, not having the multi generational family wealth to pick and choose. I when I look at chunks of ground, I'm really using a lot of resources in the conservation community to try to do that right and be like this is historic wetland, Like how much could I get for that? This? You know, this is native prairie? Is there something in it for that? CRP is a is something we could do, but it's going to take five years to get it into CRP. Yeah, right, and try and connect all these dots to try to make it just silly stupid enough to be a good idea, right. And so yeah, if you're your local trust is the brain trust that can connect all those dots for you. It's a heck of a resource for sure. 00:34:09 Speaker 1: Somewhere between twelve hundred and thirteen hundred land trusts across the country, and some of them are protecting one parcel and some of them, like Kendall and the Montana Land Reliance, are focused on an entire state. The geographies vary, but I've found these to be some of the most dedicated and conscientious folks that are just out there trying to help landowners the best they can. 00:34:34 Speaker 3: I think one thing too that is important, particularly for your listeners, is you know, for every we pride ourselves in having a tool for every landowner and their desires to conserve their property. So if it's in the case of MLR and they want to, you know, use this federal program or do it donated, is what we help with that. You know. Sometimes folks are so you know, their longtime participants in the Block Management Program, which is something that's near and dear to all of us. They've enjoyed that history and that legacy of public access. They you know, at least technically are supposed to be able to work with Fish Wildlife and Parks, and Fish wild Life and Parks has an easement program that does enable that level of access into perpetuity, and so you know that's a non starter for some people, and for others it's part of their family legacy and really important. And so well, Fish Wildlife and Parks has its own barrel of politics around it, you know, as we know, those options are available to folks who want to go that route. 00:35:42 Speaker 4: And maybe just to put a bow on kind of this funding conversation, something I think about a lot for a member of land trust is, you know, we've been talking a lot about you know, wildlife habitat and open space and you know, keeping ag and production. But a lot of our land trusts are giving you know, they're giving back trails to the communities, doing parks, they're doing education, and so a lot of a lot of our member land trusts derive a lot of support from community members. You know, somebody giving them twenty bucks once a year. Yeah, that's not going to fund everything, but that's that's critical, and I think the community support aspect is one thing that makes land Trust really strong and very unique. 00:36:22 Speaker 1: You know, whenever you. 00:36:23 Speaker 4: Go to a GVLT event, or you go to a Prickly Pair land Trust event, or you go to a Five Valleys event, the turnout from the local communities is unlike anything I've ever seen. I mean, a lot of your members are familiar with Rocky Mount Oak Foundation. They're a member land Trust of ours, They're they're working in the space obviously incredibly member driven, members supported, and so I just I think it's really important that yes, farm bill is huge, lw SEF funding is huge for the work that we're doing, but also the community support is critical and all of us could not do what we do if it weren't for you know, the members, you know, our friends and our neighbors who see the value in what we're bringing, whether that's a trail or a view shed. They're driving some benefit from the work of land Trust and they contribute to that, and so I think that's really important, and sometimes we forget to talk about that. But you know, we're very community supported in the state. In fact, when I talk to other associations across the state. They ask me all the time, like how do we do what you guys are doing in Montana? 00:37:25 Speaker 1: Like how do you. 00:37:26 Speaker 4: Get that level of support and buy in? And I think it's a unique part of our state. I think it's hard to replicate just because of the culture and the tradition that Montana's have for showing up well for each other. That translates into the work that land trusts do. 00:37:40 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a really interesting thing in GVLT. Like here in Bosmane, I'm sure is not like the best buddy of a lot of developers, but if you look at the benefit of the trail systems to the development groups, I mean, the proximity to public space is a huge multiplier in land value in that condo house townhouse value is proximity to these green belts and open space and they're heavily used here in the Gallatin Valley And so hopefully folks are paying attention to the signage. 00:38:29 Speaker 1: We'd always love more people, right. I think recognizing for your listeners, recognizing those organizations that are contributing to their quality of life and supporting them is a critical thing wherever you are and we're sometimes amazed. We have about two thousand people here in the Bozeman area that support us. A community of about one hundred thousand people in this county. I can guarantee that ninety five thousand people in this community utilize the trail system that we've helped to catalyze and create with our partners. It would be great if we had ninety five thousand members, we could do a lot more. So you know, I don't know we need toll booth or something on one of the trails, but. 00:39:10 Speaker 2: Just a couple of pop up shots it just says, hey, yeah, we try and do our best. 00:39:16 Speaker 1: But I would just encourage everybody to think about what organizations it's oftentimes not your city or your county or your municipality, that are that are contributing to the quality of life, whether that's hunting or fishing, or recreation or something like that. Seek out those organizations and find out what they need. Because we're seeing this community explode. Like a lot of amenity communities around the country, we know what's attracting people. I have personally been blamed that the trails around Bozeman are driving a lot of the growth and development that we have so much great recreation don't come here. And it's also one of those things that that we all love. I don't want to have bad trails in the place where I live. So our goal is to is to try and keep up and continue to expand conservation and recreation in the face of this growth, and do the best we can to maintain a quality of life. And I think that's I think that's what land trust's across the country are trying to do. 00:40:16 Speaker 2: We need to wrap this up. It's a ton of ton of good info, but I want to tackle just one more thing that we're kind of like circling back to earlier part of this conversation. But you know, certainly one of the things that I have heard over and over again in opposition to land trusts ease months, permanent ease months, that was a big buzzword last year, is well, you're removing that land from the maximum potential tax revenue in in any county. But that becomes more of a conversation in these counties that you know, maybe or now a spit over type of county, but for a long time was just not There wasn't much of a population there to tax, So what is the response when you hear that, Oh, you know, if you can serve that, then we're not going to have the cash for the snow applows or the county maintenance that we need to do. 00:41:26 Speaker 1: My first response would be, there's probably some validity to that if the land trust were just willy nilly picking properties that are in the center of town. And in our community, like many's, there's still some agricultural properties that are kind of weirdly inside the urban growth boundary. Those are not properties that a wise land trust would be seeking to conserve. That's not where agricultural habitat is going to have a long life. Those properties should be developed. I'd love to say that that land trusts are anti sprawl. We're not anti growth. So if we can keep bit tight, we can have plenty of people in this community. Our goal at the Gallatin Valley Land Trust is to seek out those properties that are most valuable for recreation, for habitat, that are on the margins of town, that are up against the Forest Service, that are up against the public lands, and we're going to work from those protected areas towards town. At the same time the developers are working out from town maybe someday down the line we'll meet in the middle. But it's been proven over and over again that to subdivide a property way out from town, the services to provide for those neighborhoods that are created out in the middle of an egg community are much more expensive than they would be if you were in town. And we're not being efficient if we allow subdivisions way outside of town, because getting trash and plows and road services out there just costs more and more. Those communities that are being allowed to be built out there are taxing the system much more high density residential area close to town, and so in some ways, we're only working with the landowners. We're not trying to change the rules and make a regulatory mechanism. But we think that where we are conserving land on the margins of our community are actually helping to make a more efficient, tax, tax effective community than if we let those landowners subdivide and build large subdivisions on the margins of town. 00:43:28 Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think some of these decisions need to be made locally. You hear that stuff coming out of Helena, you know, And for one thing, you know, as far as the immediate tax implication. It does not change a conserved area, does not change the property taxes assessed the same. I hear what you're saying, though long term you have more you know, residential, more tax revenue of that kind of stuff. But you know, these communities, many of them care deeply about their agricultural heritage and that is the identity. And so not only economically, as Chet said, do those sort of rural subdivisions tax the system, but by and large they're not what people want. They communities have a tendency to rally against some of these real subdivisions, and they do have meaningful impact on water supply, whether it's groundwater or surface water, and so there are real impacts that affect neighbors. And you know, the tax discussion is a very complex one. But I think it's incumbent upon us to communicate with county commissioners and the like on what our conservation priorities are going to be and where they're going to be. And there is a venue in statute for County commission two or county planners to review every easement before it closes, and so it's important, it's an important discussion to have with them and understand where those growth patterns are, and to be smart as a l interest, we have take that obligation seriously. 00:45:04 Speaker 2: What would be the the number one concern from a county commissioner seat when evaluating an ease month. 00:45:13 Speaker 3: Well, one that we hear a lot is, uh, you know, gravel is a tricky thing in easements, especially if a tax deduction that they're you know, getting a scoop of gravel is technically surface minding, which technically isn't allowed in a conservation isment. And so one of the comments that we get a lot, particularly in real rural areas, is there's only so many places we can get gravel, and first they try to get it for free, and then they try to pay land owners a teeny teeny tiny bit for gravel, and so they're concerned with all that kind of stuff. But the biggest concern that we have h is gravel. And then there's some you know, some sort of hocus pocus concerns that you know, we could we could go down that rabbel hole for a while that that are aren't real or meaningful. But that's the one. I think the growth pattern impact to emergency services infrastructure if it is on the edge of town, so to speak, and then just access to continued road maintenance. 00:46:08 Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess I'll just add I think you guys covered the technical part of this pretty well, so I'll just kind of add my stereid dreamer perspective here. You know, we can always find ways to make more money, Like man kind of shown that they will find a way to make money if there's a way to be made money. What we can't make more of is we can't make more l cabitat. We can't make more you know, farm land. We can't find more places to put quality trails. You know, those things are limited. And so when we get into this conversation of you know, you know, is there going to be a negative impact to taxes or you know, you know, municipal structures whatnot, I think it really comes down to what do we want those communities to look like. We can find a way to get more revenue, for sure, But if you care about these things, then you've got to make some hard choices and you've got to decide what's more important is you know, is having a few more dollars coming in more important, or is having the things that we all love about these communities protected forever important And you know that's a hard conversation that we're going to have to have because there's not there's not more land, but there's a lot more people coming in the state every day, and so I think your your question is a really critical one that we're going to continue to wrestle with for a while. But I think it really just comes down to why DoD you move here? 00:47:23 Speaker 1: And what do you want? 00:47:25 Speaker 2: I think that's awesome? Yeah, well, put, well, put, Yeah. We know that living in the beautiful place is a double edged sword, right, I. 00:47:35 Speaker 3: Would say, just an understanding, particularly thinking of the demographic that tends to be your your listener, you know, challenge people to think. You know, we all love our public lands and we all feel very passionate about those. But you know, as you're you know, when you put the rifle back away and you're thinking about ice fishing or whatever it is for the long winter months, you know, think about where a lot of that winter range is and think about who's providing the forage for those animals that you love, love to chase all falls. So you know, we might not be there protecting that national force that you care about, but we're there. You know, year round helping protect that habitat. And you know, if you want to drive to your spot and drive through a subdivision like Colorado Springs, great if you want to, you know, enjoy your road beer out on the open gravel road. Not that I would condone such. 00:48:34 Speaker 2: An old Montana Yeah, old old. 00:48:38 Speaker 3: But but there's forces there that you don't know about or see that are helping protect some of those landscapes. 00:48:46 Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll just jump in here and make a plug. You know, a lot of my work is advocacy and policy work, and so I mean, obviously the folks that listen to this are are very well versed in getting involved in advocacy. But we need it for our issues, just like any other issues. 00:49:03 Speaker 1: You know. 00:49:04 Speaker 4: I think the legislators here in Montana by and large are some of the best people you could you know, possibly work with on policy work. You know, they care deeply about their communities, being a citizen legislature. They live, you know, in our towns, they their kids go to our schools. You know, their grandkids go to our schools, you know, whatever it might be. And so frequently we just need help, you know, getting them up to speed on conservation issues and once they're once they're informed, they're they're you know, whole hog bought in. Frequently, our issues get caught up kind of by accident, right, you know, somebody's trying to do a good thing and they just don't know, you know, the side effects of what they're proposing. And so I would just encourage people to get involved. You know, take your local legislator out for a coffee and tell them about the things you care about. They will go with you, I promise you. They love coffee, Buy them a beer, Tell them why you care about public lands, conservation, all those things. I think we need more of that in Montana is a really lucky place where you can still do that kind of stuff. 00:50:14 Speaker 1: So that would be my plug. 00:50:16 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's super important for everyone listening. 00:50:21 Speaker 3: To this show to. 00:50:24 Speaker 2: You know, we all get focused on our thing, but as we point out weekly here, it's never just one thing. It's always a bunch of pieces of a puzzle have to come together to get anything done. When you think about your yearly excursions hunting and angling, you know that just the fact life is, it is a complex web of public and private, and we just know that animals have no clue of what happens on either side of the three strand Barboyer fence, and we need to look at this thing holistically if we want to preserve huntable populations, fishable populations, and access to them for the long haul. So thanks a bunch for coming in. Guys, Where do we find GVLT. If folks are interested in learning more. 00:51:24 Speaker 1: Gallatin Valley Lanterrust GVLT dot org, you can look us up Instagram, Facebook, everything like that. We'd love to love to hear from more people who are interested in conservation here in southwest Montana and locally. 00:51:37 Speaker 2: You always have a big barbecue over the summer too, right fundraiser. 00:51:40 Speaker 1: We've got big fundraisers and we have a trails event that happens all during June, and our website will have a series of events the community can join lots of volunteering around maintaining trails, et cetera. 00:51:54 Speaker 2: Awesome and Kendall. 00:51:57 Speaker 3: Mt Land Reliance dot org. Same thing. Give us a follow on the social media. We're trying to keep the public up on the good work that we do. We're trying to highlight landowner stories and the contributions that they're making. And yeah, you know, as you said, bone up on these issues, knowing that it is a complex web. It's super important and when it's gone, man, it's gone. 00:52:21 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:52:21 Speaker 4: And then you can find the Montana Association of land Trust MALT at Montana land Trust dot org. And then we're our empty malt across the social media platforms. 00:52:32 Speaker 1: So yeah, give us a follow. 00:52:33 Speaker 4: We put out a lot of information, mostly elevating the member land trust, but we do during the legislature we'll have a lot more information about bills that affect the work that land trusts do and private land conservation. So it's a good way to stay involved. If you're new to this or just need a like a clearing house for all the issues. 00:52:53 Speaker 2: Great. And if you know you're listening and you want to write into ask c a l ask how at the meteater dot com with any questions that you have regarding land trust I can always reach back out to these fellas and we can knock that out on a segment on the on the regular show. So right in. Uh and uh, you know, as we always say, if you don't weigh in, you don't wrestle. So uh, if you got a question to ask, that's it. Even even if it's for a family member, we'd appreciate it. So thank you very much and we'll talk to you again next week. 00:53:32 Speaker 1: Thank you. 00:53:33 Speaker 3: Thanks,

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