CoastalResilience

Step 3: Acquire Land In Harm's Way

The state and federal governments should provide significant financial rewards to local governments that implement strong coastal programs to buy out willing coastal landowners who choose to proactively get out of harm's way. The objectives of such programs of voluntary land acquisition would be to protect human life and permit natural, sustaining processes -- including habitat migration -- to occur in the coastal zone. Land acquisition along the coast is often thought to be prohibitively expensive. However, a variety of tools are available to facilitate voluntary acquisition of vulnerable coastal property at less-than-fee-simple cost. The first is land exchanges allowing an agency to transfer property it owns for other property. In most situations, there is a direct exchange of one parcel or group of parcels for others at the same time. Depending upon the appraised values of the two properties, sometimes they are equalized with cash or a donation from the non-public landowner. Another approach is retained use and occupancy arrangements in which the property but remains in a private owner's possession for a period of time after a sale. The landowners are paid the full fair market value of the property minus a deduction based upon the number of years they will remain in possession. Periods of retained use can be established either based on a term of years of the lifetime of a living person. Typically, structures that are destroyed during the retained occupancy cannot be rebuilt. Finally, public entities can use purchase of development rights (PDR) and transfer of development rights (TDR) programs. Under a PDR program, a landowner voluntarily sells his/her rights to develop a parcel of land to a public agency or qualified conservation organization. The landowner retains all other ownership rights attached to the land, and a conservation easement is placed on the land and recorded on the title. TDR programs allow development rights to be directed away from one parcel of land – presumably not well suited for development – to another site more appropriate for growth.

Examples

Florida's Hillsborough County has a TDR ordinance intended to establish a market-based approach to the preservation of environmentally sensitive lands and resources. Noting that development of sensitive lands may be regulated by reasonable local restrictions, the ordinance states that the TDR process "provides a vehicle to enable the private market to allocate economic benefits to landowners in the restricted areas, thereby enhancing the viability of businesses in the sending areas and avoiding potential legal disputes between the private landowners and the County." The TDR ordinance authorizes the transfer of 100% of development rights in a sending area to eligible receiving areas identified in the county comprehensive plan or a community plan. Land in environmentally sensitive areas must be placed under a recorded permanent conservation easement running in favor of the county. Applicants for transfer must agree that they and their successors in interest will be bound "to maintain the pattern of development proposed in such a way that for the area of application as a whole there will be conformity with applicable zoning regulations," with enforcement running to the county.

In eastern Long Island, New York, a TDR program was created to protect the Central Pine Barrens, an environmentally fragile and resource-rich area encompassing over 100,000 acres. Faced by requests for over 220 development projects in the area and stymied by time-consuming and costly litigation over their environmental impacts, the towns, landowners, developers, citizens, and environmentalists joined together to develop a plan, including the use of TDR, to preserve a core area of about 55,000 acres.