THE $1.78 BILLION environmental bond bill approved by the Legislature last week provides the state with $366 million to protect open space from the pressure of development over the next five years. But it also gives the state a new arrow in its conservation quiver: a state income tax credit to encourage landowners to donate property or to sell it for conservation at below assessed value. While the Patrick administration is understandably reluctant to approve anything that will reduce tax revenues, the negligible loss of the conservation credit would be more than offset by increased land gifts to municipalities, nonprofit land trusts, and the state.
The credit would be on 50 percent of the value of the donation and could not exceed $50,000, but could be extended over 10 years. According to the state, in its first year the credit would cost the state about $800,000 and in its fifth year $4 million. In North Carolina, a study of a similar tax credit showed the state was gaining $12 in the value of saved acreage for every $1 loss in revenues because of the credit.
A credit could be especially effective in Massachusetts, where so much undeveloped land is in relatively small parcels in private hands. More than 220,000 landowners own 78 percent of the state's forested land. According to a survey of the state's woodland owners by the US Forest Service, the majority are in the $50,000 to $99,000 annual income bracket and are likely to be attracted by the tax-credit option of preservation. Short of donating the land outright, an owner could take advantage of the tax credit by granting a land trust the development rights of the property.
The budget crisis earlier this decade put a damper on the state's open space acquisitions. Governor Patrick has been able to pick up the pace, but the conservation credit would also give a boost to the efforts of the state's towns and cities and nonprofit land trusts. To protect drinking water, provide recreation, preserve farmlands and forests, the state needs the extra incentive for conservation the tax credit would provide.
