by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
As appearing in the Daily Sentinel
French novelist Emile Souvestre famously wrote in 1848 that “There is something more powerful than strength, than courage, than genius itself: it is the idea whose time has come.” It was later paraphrased by Victor Hugo, often quoted as, “More powerful than the tread of an army is an idea whose time has come.”
It is an uplifting thought for people with good ideas that nobody else seems to get. We wonder if the idea’s time is coming soon.
When I headed the Colorado Department of Natural Resources in 2003, we helped convince the Legislature to update conservation easement rules to allow easements not only on land, but also on water. A decade later no one had yet tried the novel idea, though Colorado was the first state legally to enable it. I wrote in 2013, “Several years later the idea is still considered experimental, and few people have tried to buy or sell such an easement — yet. It is an idea whose time is surely coming…”
I repeated the hope in one of my earliest Daily Sentinel columns in 2016, because I thought then, as now, that this idea is a potentially powerful tool for saving farms, ranches and open space against the thirst of growing cities. The concept is simple. Conservation easements are already common for saving land from future development. Landowners sell their “development rights” to a land trust or local government and their deed is then restricted against the ability to subdivide, build houses or change the essential character of farms and ranches. For the public, valued open space is preserved. For the landowner, the easement can infuse the operation with the one thing it needs most — cash — without having to sell out to developers. So why couldn’t the same tool preserve water rights on farms and ranches?
