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February 1, 2002

Purchase of Development
Rights merits explored

By Mike Barnett
Editor

An interim study to take a look at the loss of farmland as it relates to urban sprawl will be a task of the Texas House Land Resource and Management Committee in 2002.

According to Julie Shackelford, Texas Regional Director of American Farmland Trust, former Texas governor George W. Bush put together a conservation task force to make recommendations for public and private land management before he left office.

"The number one recommendation of this group was a Purchase of Development Rights Program is the best way of protecting private land for the states," Shackelford recalled.

The interim study will look at the potential for such a program in Texas.

"We're excited about it," said Shackelford, whose organization's mission is to stop loss of productive farmland and to promote farming practices that lead to a healthy environment. "We think a Purchase of Development Rights Program could be a great helper to a landowner who wanted to keep land in their family, keep it in agriculture and pass it along to the next generation."

Purchase of Development Rights basically means the landowner sells the development rights to his or her property in the same way he or she can sell mineral or water rights. The landowner maintains private property ownership.

"It's one of the property rights the landowner can use and sell," Shackelford explained. "And so they get reimbursed for the development value of their property, which in some cases could be the majority of the value of it. And in exchange, what they're saying, is, `I'm going to keep this land available for agriculture forever in the future.' So they can still continue to farm and ranch the land and pass it on to their children. They can sell it. They just can't develop it in the future."

An example of Purchase of Development Rights can now be found in Texas on the Katy Prairie north of Houston. According to Shackelford, the farm bill has a program called the Farmland Protection Program which provides matching money to states to purchase development rights.

"So this farmer just sold development rights on 900 acres of his property in North Harris County," Shackelford said. "That farm will remain forever in agriculture. That allowed the farmer to make sure the son who was interested in farming could continue to operate and gave a source for the farmer now to help cover the estate issues of his other son, who wasn't interested in the property.

"And it really can be useful for anybody who is not interested in selling their property but lives in a urbanizing area, farming on the edge of development. The land prices are becoming much higher than they can really afford at that point. So that's where it would be the ideal scenario."

Dan Dierschke, who runs a ranching operation on the outskirts of Austin and is a TFB State board member, sees merit in the program for two reasons.

"One," he explained, "if I want to sell the development rights of property I own and continue to farm it, it can be economically feasible to do so. And second, on land we lease, people who might like to keep the family farmstead as a farm will be able to do so, and yet derive some value out of it to live on or invest elsewhere."

Dierschke, facing the ever-expanding pressures from an urban Austin population, thinks the Purchase of Development Rights Program is a concept that is ripe for Texas.

"I have a hope the interim committee will examine the issues that are involved, that they support the conc-ept and eventually perhaps be able to move to providing some kind of structure...that could go to fund these programs as it's happened in other states," he said.