Group work together on environmental issues By Carter Thompson The Daily News Published September 29, 2002 BOLIVAR PENINSULA — It’s a group made up of interests that in the past might not have been on speaking terms. But developers, conservationists and biologists recently were touring pristine coastal prairie near a beachfront development on the peninsula. The tour of 366 acres of prairie and wetlands was the first of what will be annual inspections of the conservation easement that the developers of The Biscayne granted the Legacy Land Trust, a Houston-based, nonprofit conservation organization, last year. The reserve lies between state Highway 87 and The Biscayne, a gated subdivision that developers say will contain about 170 homes once completed. The easement amounts to a guarantee that the property that abuts the subdivision will never be developed. It’s a conservation tool that is taking root in Texas, a state with little publicly protected land, rapidly growing cities and conservationists alarmed at the pace natural spaces were being cleared, paved and topped with homes and shopping malls. “There hasn’t been a lot of common ground before,” said Jennifer Lorenz, executive director of the land trust, of the relationship between conservationist and developers. Now, with the easements, “they can do business and protect their land.” The return to landowners can be lower property taxes, lower federal estate taxes and the guarantee that future owners won’t carve up the land for development. For the partners of The Biscayne, the benefit was mitigation of the wetlands affected by the 130-acre development. Lorenz said wetland mitigation was the benefit sought by the owners of six of the eight tracts on which her organization had easements. The Felton Preserve, named after developer partner Thad Felton, is the second conservation easement Legacy Land Trust has acquired in Galveston County. It has held an easement on about 14 acres in Dickinson near Paul Hopkins Park. The tour on Tuesday afternoon was basically an inspection to make sure the landowner was living up to his obligation not to develop the 366-acre tract and keep the Chinese tallow trees in check. The tallow tree was introduced to Galveston County in the early 1900s by homesick Easterners who missed the color of leaves turning in the fall. The problem is that the tallow spreads and grows rapidly. John Jacob, an environmental quality specialist with Texas A&M at Galveston who also consults for the land trust, said more than 90 percent of Texas’ coastal prairies had been developed or choked with tallow. Had the developers chosen the usual route of mitigating the wetlands that will be lost to the development, they would have had to create 50 acres of wetlands elsewhere, Felton said. While the net amount of wetlands would increase if the mitigation was done off site, scientists say that the benefit may have been less. Slogging through a slough that rose to shallow wetlands and then uplands, Jacob said the ecosystem that had developed over thousands of years could not be reproduced with a bulldozer. “There’s no way you duplicate this complexity,” he said. Felton said he believed the conservation easement would increase the demand for the home sites. “I don’t really have a way to measure it, but everyone we talk to about this loved it — the quiet, the buffer from the highway, the fact it will never be developed,” he said. The Felton preserve abuts nearly 1,500 acres owned by the Audubon Society, which hopes to acquire about 500 additional acres in the near future, said Winnie Burkett, sanctuary manager for the society. Large areas of contiguous land provided better wildlife habitat than numerous islands of smaller tracts, she said. Developers hope to have the lots ready by the end of the year. They are now waiting on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to rule on their request for a permit for a package plant — a small wastewater treatment plant — instead of having separate septic systems for each home. The plant was environmentally preferable to the septic tanks, said Lorenz and others, and allows the developers to prepare smaller lots.