Keeping Native lands in Native hands
The Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust closed a deal with Koliganek Natives LTD, an Alaska Native village corporation, through which a total of 570 acres will stay under Native ownership and be permanently protected from development.
In 2016, the Land Trust Alliance celebrated a victory two decades in the making: the passage of the permanent enhanced tax incentive for donations of conservation easements.
As landowners all over the country explore making a conservation donation — on all types of landscapes — the enhanced deduction for conservation easement donations can be the factor that moves them from thought to action. Below is one example from Alaska.
The Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust recently closed a deal with Koliganek Natives LTD, an Alaska Native village corporation, to put a large conservation easement in place at the confluence of Harris Creek and the Nushagak River in Southwest Alaska. A total of 570 acres will stay under Native ownership and be permanently protected from development.
An important component of this project was the incentive, which now specifically allows Alaska Native corporations established under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 to apply the full value of donated conservation easements against their federal corporate tax obligations.
The project involved two parcels, the first being a 40-acre Native allotment at the mouth of Harris Creek that came up for sale several years ago, which the land trust was able to purchase. The discussion point, according to Tim Troll, executive director of Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust, was how to return this allotment to Native ownership but leverage its value for a conservation deal on Koliganek Natives’ adjacent 530-acre tract that encompassed valuable salmon habitat.
“The land trust doesn’t seek to own property to protect it; rather, we just want to conserve it. We can do that through a conservation easement as easily as we can through ownership,” said Troll.
He explained that a secondary goal is to “retain Native ownership of property whenever possible. We talked about doing a deal where we would exchange the allotment we purchased with the Native corporation for a conservation easement on its larger parcel.”
To complete the deal, the land trust transferred ownership of its 40-acre tract to Koliganek Natives LTD but retained the easement. The difference in property values was made up with a $100,000 cash payment from The Conservation Fund (accredited) and a bargain sale donation from the Native corporation appraised at $60,000. In the first use of the new conservation incentive for Alaska Native Corporations, Koliganek Native LTD applied the bargain sale donation value to its 2016 corporate tax return.