Skiff Mountain preservation plan is a template for future conservation

In a small tent on the campus of the Marvelwood School on Skiff Mountain in Kent on Saturday afternoon, government officials, landowners and environmentalists gathered to celebrate an accomplishment that, all agreed, will be talked about for years to come in Hartford, Washington, D.C., and, of course, the Northwest Corner.

It took six years and an untold number of meetings and phone calls for six landowners and the federal government to come to an agreement as to how best to preserve 705 forested acres that lie along Modley Road and Skiff Mountain Road, between the Marvelwood campus (formerly the homestead of the Skiff family) and the center of Kent village.

In a small, largely developed state such as Connecticut, it’s an accomplishment to protect, in perpetuity, 700 acres of open land from ever being developed, subdivided or built upon.

But those acres would not have been important enough to attract funding from the federal government if they weren’t part of a larger, more significant swath of land. The newly protected Skiff Mountain acres are linked to nearly 7,000 acres of protected lands that include Macedonia Brook State Park and the Appalachian Trail. They are part of the watershed of the Housatonic River. They abut 800 acres of land owned by Northeast Utilities, known as the Skiff Mountain Wildlife Management Area (home to Peck’s Pond). They are part of an intact forested area of about 30,000 acres that extends from Sharon into Kent and over into Dover Plains, N.Y. And they are part of the 3.5-million acre national Highlands Coalition, a massive stretch of intact forest that sprawls across the four states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

The newly protected Skiff Mountain parcels are like a large piece of an eastern conservation jigsaw puzzle. And they provide habitat for dozens of species of plants and animals, including some that are endangered, including the wood turtle, coopers hawk, American kestrel and Jefferson’s salamander.

The conservation easements were purchased by the U.S. Forestry Service’s Forest Legacy Program for $1.7 million — even though the appraised value of the easements is $8.5 million. Nearly all the speakers at Saturday’s ceremony commented on how difficult it is to hammer out a conservation easement agreement. State Rep. Roberta Willis (D-64) said she’s participated in countless negotiations of this type that have fallen apart at the last moment when family members couldn’t agree.

To have six separate families agree to the conditions of an easement is remarkable, the speakers all agreed. And to have all six be willing to take substantially less money for the easement than they could have asked for is, they said, astonishing.

Congressman Chris Murphy (D-5) attended the ceremony and said that "our efforts in Washington are made easier by what happened here" because the entire cost of the easements "was not on the back of the government. These landowners gave up a financial opportunity so they could protect this land."

The six property owners are, in Sharon, Howard Randall; and in Kent, Donald and Leslie Connery, Oscar and Annette de la Renta, Boone Moore, and members of the Skiff and Kane families, who own 318 of the 705 protected acres.

The Skiff family originally settled on the land in 1761, according to Katherine Skiff Kane, a member of the seventh generation of Skiffs to live on the mountain.At that time, she said, the land was still "considered a howling wilderness." But it’s always been a wonderful place to live, and her family has always made sacrifices to preserve and protect it.

She recounted the story of her grandmother, "who was in the position of stewardship of this land during the Great Depression. She lived on next to nothing, had next to nothing to eat, because she wanted to save this land."

Katherine Kane’s father, Walter Kane, and his wife, Margaret Skiff Kane, have been the stewards of much of the land in the past few decades. Katherine Kane joked that her father, who is a science teacher at Marvelwood, went out with the government surveyor "and taught him how surveying is really done, the old-fashioned way." She also noted that he is intimately acquainted with every square foot of the family’s acreage.

The six families came together initially at the suggestion of Moore, after more than 445 acres on Skiff Mountain were put into conservation easements in 2003.

The land had been put up for sale by the Kent School when it decided to close its girls campus at the top of Skiff Mountain (which is actually a plateau, not a mountain) and there was a possibility that as many as 350 housing units could be built there and that Skiff Mountain Road, which abuts the Appalachian Trail, would have to be widened and straightened.

The property was eventually sold to the Kent and Sharon land trusts for $3 million.

To protect the 705-acre parcel, Moore and his neighbors made the unusual decision to put them all together, rather than as separate parcels. This increased the complexity of the process but ultimately made the possibility of preserving them more attractive.

"This will or certainly should serve as a template for future land protection efforts that call for cooperation of neighboring landowners," Connery observed after the ceremony. "Surely every town in Connecticut can find ways to encourage owners of contiguous open spaces, woods and wetlands to work together to save far more of their natural surroundings than any of them could achieve alone."

The Trust for Public Land helped them throughout the process, working with them on the massive amounts of required paperwork, brokering deals with different branches of the government and making what were described as a legendary number of phone calls.

An important breakthrough was made recently when the Housatonic Valley Association’s Greenprint Project was able to provide maps and data that showed how these acres fit into the larger picture of protected lands and intact forests that surround them and made the Forest Legacy application more competitive.

Ultimately, the easements were purchased by the federal government’s Forest Legacy Program. They will be maintained and protected by the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The landowners retain a restricted title that specifies the parcels can never be subdivided or developed. The easements allow and even encourage active forestry.

"The Forest Service likes to see wise use of forests in the state," said Chris Martin, the DEP’s director of forestry, who attended Saturday’s ceremony. Each property owner has to now set up a forest management plan with a private forester. The state will have oversight of the plans. These can include uses such as limited timber harvesting and agricultural uses such as making maple syrup.

The property owners said that, for now at least, they have no plans to do any logging.

"Our forest management plan amounts to just leaving nature alone," Connery said.

The Forest Legacy Program does not require the property owners to open their land up for recreational uses such as hiking or cross-country skiing. However, one key incentive for preserving the Skiff Mountain properties is that they are part of the viewshed for the Appalachian Trail and the Housatonic River. With these lands permanently protected, hikers and paddlers will be able to imagine this part of the state as it looked in a near primitive state.

Also at Saturday’s ceremony and involved in the Skiff Mountain easement were state Sen. Andrew Roraback (R-30), who was cited as a tireless and essential advocate for this project; Kathy DeCoster, director of federal affairs for The Trust for Public Land; Lynn Werner from the Housatonic Valley Association; Kent First Selectman Ruth Epstein and Selectman Bruce Adams; many of the landowners involved in the deal; and representatives of the Sharon and Kent land trusts.